The Festival International du Documentaire, set in the legendary Th tre de La Cri e on the Vieux Port, has always been open to all winds and inspirations. On the festival s 18th anniversary the notion of the documentary as a respectable genre that evokes some yawns was simply blown away: a few feature films were tossed into the competition. Jean-Pierre Rehm, the festival s general delegate, has always said that, for him, the documentary is not a separate species: all cinema, he believes, is in the eyes of the creator.
"The filmmaker when he places his camera and chooses the lighting and angle, gives reality a shape, many different shapes, and if he doesn t, the film - documentary or fiction - fails," he said. Rehm proposed the notion of introducing fiction, just the way other festivals see fit to include documentaries. "We ll see what happens - I expect some flak," he said.
And so, the festival opened with "Love Conquers All" by a 28-year-old Malaysian, Tan Chui Mui, a story more bitter than sweet shot on digital video for 10,000, or about $13,700. It was an adventure for Tan, who was aided by the Rotterdam Festival s Hubert Bals Fund. As it turned out, the prizes went to familiar figures on the scene.
The Grand Prix was awarded to Jean-Claude Rousseau s "De Son Appartement," (literally, From His Apartment) an ambitious work that mixes ancient drama in an everyday setting, as the filmmaker putters about his apartment, reciting Racine. Wang Bing s marathon "Fengming: A Chinese Memoir" won the Prix Georges Beauregard. It is a haunting portrait of a woman who calmly recalls the trials of her youth in the 1950s - a punishing age of political humiliation, work camps and deprivation.
A film from the Filipino director Raya Martin, "Autohystoria," awarded Special Mention, is a radical approach to a story of two boys, arrested and taken to the jungle to be executed. Today in Culture Fiction joins the documentaries at Marseille Water for Elephants : Sara Gruen s hit summer paperback Book review: The Mother Garden and Famous Fathers Other Stories The jury was presided over by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a prize-winning Thai director of crisscrossed genres who has taken us deep into his own mysterious jungles. Rehm found an apt guest of honor in the Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an artist as independent as they come, a rare figure whose work, forever rooted in the lower depths of Lisbon, has swerved between documentary and feature.
"Pedro is a perfect example of what this festival is about," Rehm said, "His early films look like fiction, but as he went along, he became more experimental." Costa was also given carte blanche to show some of his personal favorites, including films by Andy Warhol and Preston Sturges, as well as "Unknown Charlie Chaplin" (1983) by Kevin Brownlaw and David Gill, and 15 minutes of Billie Holiday singing "Fine and Mellow." The Chaplin documentary shows the mad inventiveness that led him to hours of rehearsal before he got the comic touch that suited him, and months of "sick leave" when he was out of ideas.
"I told Jean-Pierre that we needed a touch of folly at this festival - these documentaries can be heavy going," Costa said during a break between screenings at the caf in the Th tre de La Cri e. Costa had just returned from Washington where he showed "Juventude Em Marcha" (Colossal Youth, 2006) his latest film, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. In August, he will have a retrospective at the Film Anthology in New York, and "Colossal Youth" will be released Aug.
3 in New York and Los Angeles. "In Washington, the audience seemed to catch on to my film," Costa said. "I think they like movies about families, and this is a bit about a family.
I felt that it touched something at the root of American life, it touched them." He appears brooding and remote, but gradually, talking about how he found his individual approach to filmmaking, the humanity that is in his films emerges. "I work in my own small kitchen, as it were, with the same people, a little the way Chaplin worked in his own studio," Costa said.
"It s good because it s far from the classic circuit of filmmaking with producers and all the clap-trap around shooting - chauffeurs and such." His first, "O Sangue" (The Blood, 1989), in black, white and shades of gray, is on a family that seems to go up in smoke in a succession of mysterious disasters: the father dies or is murdered, a child is adopted or kidnapped, lovers meet and clash in the night. The Festival International du Documentaire, set in the legendary Th tre de La Cri e on the Vieux Port, has always been open to all winds and inspirations.
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