FESTIVALS AND EVENTS
Postfestum 52nd Cannes
The 52nd film festival in Cannes bid farewell
to the nineties in the best way. Less interested in outer
splendour and more concentrated on searching for real values,
the selector Gilles Jacobi chose for this year’s program
the filmmakers who had in certain way marked the previous
festival decade. In this way Cannes definitely set apart
from the industry of Hollywood blockbusters, preferring
the films which reflect strong authors’ personalities.
This is also confirmed by including older American authors
(David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Spike Lee), as
well as younger authors who had won recognition at the
Sundance (Alex Winter, Kanađanin Jeremy Podeswa, Kevin
Smith) in the program of the festival. The greatest surprise
in the Sundance generation were American followers of the
Danish Dogmatists Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez with
their artistic film The Blair Witch Project and
the experiment-prone British cameraman Christopher Doyle
with Away With Words.
The effects of the Dogma Manifesto
could be noticed in the work of Michael Winterbottom (Wonderland)
and Jacquesa Maillota (Our Happy Lives). Cannes
paid attention to Eastern Asian authors again this year.
Among them, the director Yu Lik Wai from Hong Kong (Love
will Tear us Apart), Takeshi Kitano (Kikujiro)
and a débutante, the Tibetan lama Khyentse Norbu (The
Cup) distinguished themselves. European program was
dominated by French film (Emilie Deleuze, Bruno Dumont),
but also by a British auctorial team, especially by Damien
O’Donnell (East is East), while pretentious Peter
Greenaway (8 1/2 Women) and his theatrical homage
to Fellini disappointed many people. British team was strengthened
by a foreign acquisition Jasmin Dizdar (Beautiful People),
who shot an impressive fresco about tragic-comic destinies
of Bosnian refugees in London produced by a British television.
However, »the rest of Europe« would be considerably weakened
without unsurpassable Pedro Almodovar, who dedicated his
melodrama Everything about My Mother shown at this
festival to all actresses and women.
Dragan Rubeša |
