ANIMATION

6th Motovun Film Festival

Motovun, July 23rd-30th 2004

This year’s Motovun festival competed with Pula in quality of documentaries, although, as opposed to Pula, in Motovun the feature-length documentaries were shown in the main program, competing for the awards. The audience and the critics alike were attracted by The Story of The Crying Camel (nomadic shepherds help camels to have young), as well as a charming Bulgarian documentary Whose song is this? Ulrich Seidl, whose feature film Dogs’ days was shown in 2002, investigates meaning of God in life of people of different ages and having different faith in his impressive documentary Jesus, you know, while Morgan Spurlock in the film Super Size Me, the most notorious film in Motovun’s documentary program, insists on anti-corporative position in Michael Moore’s style. As opposed to them, excellent American documentarist Errol Morris in The Fog of War skillfully avoids ideological orientation.
Although in the past years The Propeller of Motovun was not usually awarded to films dominant in quality, this year it was rightfully awarded to Loach’s drama One Dear Kiss, which talks about a forbidden love between a Pakistani and a white woman through emotionally engaged and stylistically refined methods. Other awards were not so well allotted. Lars Von Trier won FIPRESCI award for a pretentious conceptual work The Five Obstructions, and Serbian director Radivoje Andrić won ’From A to A’ award (regional program) for a stereotype comedy When I Grow Up I’ll be A Kangaroo. This year’s Motovun Festival seriously shook the impression of recent Serbian cinematography’s superiority over Croatian cinematography. Serbian veterans Goran Marković (Cordon) and Srđan Karanović (Sparkle in the Eyes) did not make a stronger impression than Ostojić’s first feature-length film A Wonderful Night in Split, and reputation of Croatian cinematography was defended by Damir Lukačević, a young director who was born in Zagreb, but lives and works in Germany, who effectively describes problems of an emigrant family Kolarić in his film Home coming. Although this year’s festival did not see any star directors (except maybe Loach and Von Trier with a feeble film), festival audience could consume a decent number of superior feature films which cannot be seen in a regular distribution (The Saddest Music in the World, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring, Schizo, The Station Agent, Cold light, Niceland), as was the case ion previous years. Along with the text there is a list of awards and filmography of films shown at the festival.

Elvis Lenić