Nisimazine Venice 28th August- 7th September 2013
Miss Violence Class Enemy Rok Bicek
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picture of the day
Editorial Fernando Vasquez (Portugal)
70 editions is much more then a groundbreaking accomplishment for the Venice Film Festival. No other festival in the world could possibly claim to be as resilient and as much of a survivor as the one event that, for 70 long years, has gathered constellations of film stars in the City of Water. How an event manages to maintain its worldwide influence for so long is beyond me, to be honest. The history, or better, the different political contexts it had to co-exist with throughout its seven decades of existence are no less intriguing. The clips of old footage screened at the beginning of each session are a great and sometimes shocking reminder that in order to survive you must adapt, in the name of the all mighty gods of cinema. Fortunately, the event managed to do so, and in 2013 it is still here, astonishing the thousands of believers that flocked to the island of Lido in the last few days. At 70 Venice may be old but its youthful spirit lives on, with an ever increasing will to renew itself. Needless to say that this spirit is alive and kicking at the Nisimazine Film Criticism workshop, where once again a group of young writers and photographers from around Europe has gathered to dig deep into the universe of the new and innovative filmmakers of the Orizzonti competition and beyond. So it is with great pride and joy we bring you a first glimpse of what is coming in the next few days, in this first newsletter. Enjoy and rejoice with a fresh look at Greek cinema’s latest coup and signs of something brewing in Slovenia.
NISIMAZINE VENICE
28th August- 7th September 2013 /# 1 A magazine published by NISI MASA in the framework of a film journalism workshop for young Europeans.
EDITORIAL STAFF
Director Fernando Vasquez Coordinator Mirona Nicola Layout Lucía Ros Photography Marta Lučić
CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
Fernando Vasquez, Raluca Petre, Ionana Mischie
NISI MASA
99, rue du Faubourg Saint-Dénis 75010, Paris, France Phone: +33 (0)1 48 01 65 31 europe@nisimasa.com www.nisimasa.com
reviews Miss Violence
Alexandros Avranas (Greece) – Official Competition
Miss Violence is a story of devouring complexity, a fairytale skilfully melted into a progressive diary of paedophilia, secrecy, routine and escape. Alexandros Avranas second film starts with a «fade in» of someone opening a door and symmetrically ends with a thoroughly closed door. Everything happens behind the locked doors. This is also highlighted by the sarcasm of the grandfather when he says: «in this house we have nothing to hide». The dramatic journey is in fact a thought-provoking shift from nothingness to everythingness. Angelikis celebrates her 11-years-old birthday with her family, sharing a birthday cake while listening to Leonard Cohen. Right after dancing with her grandfather, she commits suicide. The thelos of the film is to recompose the trajectory of her inner background. The apparently perfect family hides a well-kept secret. What seems at first an ensemble of charming innocence and shyness is slowly but surely replaced with a non-infantile drama at its best. The suicide generates interrogations and a visit by welfare workers, determined to accuse Eleni, the mother, of child neglect, due to the unknown paternity of the children. The first half of the film has a slow-paced rhythm, making the characters look rather like taciturn hyperrealist sculptures than as vivid homo valens. Wordlessness becomes a language in itself. The actions of the characters are driven by inexplicable absurd until we slowly start to understand every single gesture, every single bruise, every single silence. One of the hallmarks of the film is the recurrent family dinner sequences. These moments becomes highly significant, when we realize that every symbol of their wealth is, in fact, financially guaranteed by exploitative prostitution. The friendly, warm and caring grandfather concerned about the school marks of his grandchildren turns to be, in fact, a hybrid between a depraved father, an alienated husband and a pervert pimp for the girls and women in the family.
The diegesis might seem forced only in the very last minutes, when it becomes slightly endangered by predictability, however, the final twist is long-waited. The visual concept of the film, signed by Olympia Mytilinaiou, is conceived as a collection of clean cuts, often delineating only fragments of silhouettes - legs, chests, necks, giving much physical appeal to the storytelling. The characters sometimes look directly into the camera, as if they would like to confess something or as if they are captive in a hermetic world, in search of an indelible escape. Almost oxymoronic, Miss Violence beautifully blends appearance with essence, tending to culminate thematically-wise with an honest discourse for freedom of choice. The film recreates a carefully driven micro-society with suspense, sarcasm and dark humour, remaining an outstanding oeuvre of recent European cinema.
by Ioana Mischie (Romania)
Shot in a minimalist observational style, the film builds a quiet sense of tension as the measures taken by the students against their teacher become increasingly provocative and the relationships within the student group begin to crumble. While minimalist approaches have been criticized for alienating audiences, this is not the case with Class Enemy. The absence of non-diegetic music makes the ordinary sounds of the classroom, chairs drawing back and chalk on the blackboard, all the more present, drawing us into this microcosm.
Class Enemy
Rok Bicek (Slovenia) - Critics’ Week A film that promises to put Slovenian cinema on the world cinema map, Class Enemy masterfully uses the microcosm of a high school classroom to raise questions about group mentalities, resistance and our impulses to see things in absolutist terms. Rok Bicek’s debut feature is based on a case that he witnessed as a teenager, where a girl’s suicide led her classmates to ally against a new teacher who is trying to help them cope with the situation.
Bicek’s approach to his characters is highly sensitive. He does not encourage us to take sides, but rather allows us to weigh the arguments of each character, to see how their emotions influence their actions. The actors, all non-professionals who were found by Bicek in high schools, provide outstanding performances that offer the film great intensity and authenticity. The only down-side is the film’s ending, which aims to portray the transformation of the students, but feels slightly out of tune with the rest of the film in its execution; the girl who committed suicide is shown to roam around her classmates on their end-of-year trip to a sentimental effect that is absent in the rest of the film. Class enemy is groundbreaking in its fresh, sociologically infused approach to the coming of age theme, a must-see.
by Raluca Petre (Romania)
interview not really in the same class but in the same generation. He’s really good at writing dialogues and I asked him if he could help me with this because in two lines he can express more then I can in a few pages. In Slovenia journalists have been talking about a new wave for a year and a half now and because we are from the same town, they call it the Nova Mesto new wave. There are two other directors who are quite known in Slovenia, so there are four of us from the same generation. Nothing of the sort had happened before in Slovenia so the journalists are asking how this happened. But yeah, we are working together and I hope that in a couple of years we could talk about a new generation of film-makers, like in the 90s there was one in Denmark, and a few years ago in Romania. Minimalism seems to be the preferred form of the new European filmmakers. Did you choose it solely for artistic reasons or was it also a result of financial constraints?
Rok Bicek
Director of Class Enemy (Slovenia) - Critics’ Week Slovenian director Rok Bicek’s debut feature Class Enemy has been tipped for success at this year’s Venice Critics’ Week. We caught up with him to find out what’s behind this groundbreaking drama and the new emerging scene in his country. You said that the film was inspired by your experience from when you were young. Do you think your point of view changed with time? Yes. 10 years ago I was more on the side of the students, now I’m more in between. As you see in the movie, you can never choose one side because it’s up to you which side you want to take, if you do want to take one. I think that nothing is black and white.
The co-writer of the film is Nejc Gazvoda, the director of A Trip. Could you tell us more about the film community in Slovenia, do you guys work together by necessity or is it because you share common interests and visions? We are a small country; there are only 2 million of us. So in the film community we know each other quite well. Nejc was my classmate,
From the early beginning I knew that if we were going to get some funds, it would be a very small amount. So I wanted to make a movie that took place in only one location due to financial constraints, but also because the classroom can be seen as a group protagonist, because when they are outside of the classroom they do not work together. All of my three films were shot in the same way, in a minimalist style. I don’t like to use music in an American way, when music tells me when I have to feel something. If you are incapable to feel emotions out of actors without this then it’s better not to shoot it.
Interview by Raluca Petre (Romania)