NisiMazine Cannes

THURSDAY 14 MAY 2009

A Magazine Published By NISI MASA, European Network Of Young Cinema

Huacho Naomi Kawase

Vera Egito

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NISIMAZINE CANNEs

Thursday 14 May 2009 / #1A magazine published by the NISI MASA

with the support of

the ‘Youth in Action’ programme of the EU

EDITORIAL STAFF

Director of Publication Matthieu Darras Editors-in-Chief Maartje Alders

Jude ListerLayout Maartje Alders

Contributors to this issue

Natalia Ames , Eftihia Chatzistefanidi Luuk van Huët, Zsuzsanna Kiràly

Jude Lister, Agustín Mango Luis Sens , Thiago Stivaletti

Enrique Vivar

Coordinators Joanna Gallardo, Maximilien van Aertryck, Gulçin Sahin

NISI MASA 10 rue de l’Echiquier,

75010, Paris, France.

+ 33 (0)6 32 61 70 26

europe@nisimasa.com

www.nisimasa.com

editorial As the Cannes festival

reaches the grand and rather respectable age of 62, you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s become a little set in its ways. At first glance, the official selection reads like a roll call of peren-nial favourites (AlmodÓvar: check, Loach: check, von Trier: check…)

Meanwhile, our daily is di-ving into its own favourite territory: with our usual fo-cus on the upcoming talents, first and second features, and short films present this year. We’ll also be giving ample space to the rich diversity to be found in the parallel sections of the festival. All

this not through any impe-tuous ‘anti-establishment’ or subversive intent mind, but because looking towards the future of cinema is our very raison d’être.

Actually, even behind the big names, you can reliably ex-pect at least a few surprises - the latest Pixar animated feature UP, although suitably commercial, was certainly not a choice of opening film that I personally would have predicted.

If there’s something this young upstart publication can learn here, perhaps it’s that elements of innovation within a tried and tested

format more often than not prove to be worth the risk. This year, the 4th edition of Nisimazine Cannes fea-tures several: not only are we expanding our horizons by welcoming young Latin American journalists to join our traditionally European-composed team, but also rea-ching out to wider interna-tional audiences with a new online version accompanied by video blog coverage (all updated daily on www.nisimazine.eu).

But don’t hold your breath for Nisimazine 3D in 2010 just yet…

by Jude Lister

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picture of the dayPablo Lamar (director of the short Noche Adentro (SIC) in preparation for the red carpet

Marco Borsato is a famous sin-ger (in the Netherlands and in Belgium) of mostly upbeat, me-lodramatic songs, often Dutch versions of Italian songs. He is also an ambassador to War Child, a foundation that strives to give aid and comfort to traumatized children from war zones. This combination has led to a curious marriage of commercialism and idealism in The Silent Army, a film in which Borsato makes his acting debut as a widowed chef who takes on a ruthless rebel leader to rescue a child soldier.

The budget was a staggering 7 million Euros which translates to an unDutchlike amount of explosions, stunts involving he-licopters and beautiful shots of the African wilderness. Howe-ver, all the money in the world can’t elevate Borsato’s wooden acting and lethargic responses to the carnage that surrounds him. They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Well, I wouldn’t go that far just yet, but I’d say the road to Heaven might not be littered with films in which a white

dude unconvincingly takes on an army of evil black guys for the sake of the suffering little children. Especially when your

film, soundtrack, concert and DVD-registration bring in the big bucks.

Huacho is a corporal experience, a sensorial delight, pure cinema energy

that shakes the spine and instantly connected me to my own ground, with the dusty earth that gave me life and the grave which will embrace my bones. I felt it through my senses, just like the mighty sun that holds my awakenings, and in the beautiful language I speak: Español. But above all this film is the place where I belong: Latinoamérica. It tells the simplest story and the oldest one: to wake up, to earn a living, to rest a moment and finally return home and wait for the next day. The main character is a family: two grandparents, a single mother and a son. They are farmers, working-class people living in this century but at the same time in the past.

Although there are plenty of themes around Huacho, I will choose two: the first being its

Neorealist heritage, the urgency to continue thinking about cinema as an ethical attitude to life, a compromise with your own time, with your own community. A political way of perceiving filmmaking, that links this film with the ones of visionaries such as Roberto Rossellini, Ken Loach, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Guediguian and Abdellatif Kechiche. Artists who are capable of explaining to us that the world can be united with similar concerns, avoiding exclusion or rejection.

The second, and perhaps more meaningful to me (because of its relevance to the way cinema displays images of present-day life) is the subject of labour. “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food… ”, seems to echo from the distance of ancient times on every frame of the film. This is life in one sentence (for most of us). And to remind us of this significant statement is one of the

HuachoAlejandro Fernández Almendras (Chile, France, Germany) SIC

major (and more audacious) comments of the film: to experience the act of work. Are we prepared to be privileged witnesses of real labour? Above all, when it is presented as painful and noble as it is? No cover up, just hard work on beaten hands? This is cinema confronting life, thus the beginning of truth.

Huacho (which means to be an orphan of your own country), presents the complexity of the everyday lives of humble people in a remote region, who fight for a living with courage, because it is needed in order to survive. It’s a brave attitude to produce a film which rescues this way of living, totally different from that of a country whose face to the world is the success of capitalism. We must be the centre of our own peripheries, and from that point we can re-define history.

by Luuk van Huët

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film of the day

review The Silent ArmyJean van de Velde (The Netherlands) UCR

by Enrique Vivar

picture of the day

Some sentences at the be-ginning of My Neighbour,

My Killer tell us that during the civil conflict in Rwanda, three quarters of the popu-lation were killed. Never-theless, this documentary does not cover the conflict itself, but the moment when the “gacacas” (community courts) take place. This hap-pens more than 10 years after

the killings, but the wounds are still open.

A country like Rwanda, fa-cing many problems such as poverty and overcrowded prisons, has to take action against impunity in a creative way. The idea of the govern-ment is to face (confront) the victims’ relatives and the killers in the gacacas, where

emotions are mixed with blurry, conflictive memories, provoking controversy.

What happened to this country was so horrible, that even the solutions for issues like impunity are difficult to handle. My Neighbour, My Killer is a film that focuses on its characters, their per-sonal stories, their feelings

years after the killings, their wishes for justice and their still present suffering. This movie not only de-picts Rwanda’s situation in a mature, intelligent and well-narrated way, but it also shows possible solutions to deal with past conflicts and their consequences.

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Natalia Ames

review My Neighbour, My KillerAnne Aghion (US) OC

Eftihia Chatzistefanidi

critics’ week shorts

There are films that prefer to insinuate rather than declare. Together is the ‘introverted type’. It is a short observational story about a rela-tionship between father and son, estranged due to a family loss. German/British director Eicke Bettinga is not using any unknown tech-niques to capture the presence of the deceased brother. It is more about the actors’ ability to assimilate this experience in the cinematic space with candidness and simplicity. In itself, the bleached photography provides a strong visual tool that tranquilly promotes the sor-rowfulness of the circumstances.

The question is, what can be said during a visit of the remaining son to his family’s house a year after the incident? As a matter of fact, not much. Together focuses the narrative on an emotional build-up rather than on mo-mentous explanations and futile dialogue. Gazes, pauses, and gestures reveal more about the relationships than words could suggest. In this respect, the film’s core is essentially the encounter between a father and son, who wrestle, both physically and emotionally, in an attempt to confront their fears.

Together is the film you wish could divulge more. However the minimalism in its means of depicting grief proposes a kind of lightness worth embracing. And life goes on.

TogetherEicke Bettinga (UK), SIC

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Competition for short fi lm scripts

T A B O O8th European script contest

Theme for 2009 is:

12 winners will participate in “European Short Pitch”, a script development training followed by a pitching session with European producers.

For people aged 18-28Deadline : 31st of July 2009

More info:

www.nisimasa-scriptcontest.eu

Congratulations for your in-vitation to the “Atelier”. What kind of possibilities do you think will result from this participation for Red Cross?We have a German-Portuguese coproduction with funds from Berlin-Brandenburg, the Por-tuguese and Turin film funds. This is a stable funding, which can be extended. In Cannes we will be searching for partners, who want to be involved wi-thout considerably changing the structure of the coproduc-tion model. The main idea is to be present at the “Atelier”, find partners and make the project visible at an early stage.

Which challenges do you see in Red Cross?This is a project which works for me on an emotional level. I am interested in the main character; I want to know what drives this person and get to know him on a very open level without prejudices. I met Hugo and realised that he wants to challenge himself with this film - he is up for

a tightrope walk on virgin cinematographic soil, which convinced me.

Based on which factors do you chose new projects?It’s different from project to project. We try to find films that are special. Hundreds of films are screened in cinemas every year - you have to pro-duce films that stand out. The goal has to be to produce films which are inventive, tell the viewers something they ha-ven’t seen this way before and are entertaining at the same time. But entertainment is a flexible term. From my point of view entertaining films can be challenging, animating and inspiring films. We try to find projects that can be both entertaining and intellectually inspiring.

The consequences of the financial crisis on the film industry are not negligible. What are your strategies as a producer?You have to find films for an

explicitly definable public. You have to be able to address parts of the public that have been neglected. As e.g. has happened with Wolke Neun or the Korean documentary Old Partner, which started with seven copies and has gained 14 Million Dollars in the Box Of-fice so far. This is the kind of movie nobody is counting on, which is difficult to plan and to sell. But it shows evidently, that there is an audience that wants to be found. The more focused a film is on addressing its audience, the higher the possibility to be seen in the cinema.

What is your evaluation of the recent developments in digital production and dis-tribution?Internet piracy used to harm the majors more than the in-dependent companies. But this is going to change as digital distribution is becoming more important for independent films. The advantage of digi-tal distribution is that small interest groups can be reached more effectively. The disad-vantage however is the possi-bility to copy and spread the films, which is going to affect the independent companies as well. But I can’t tell yet if this is going to affect Flying Moon existentially – from my pers-

pective right now I wouldn’t say so. I support the French model, which unites produ-cers to assume control over the digital film rights. The web is the key to the target audien-ces, thus the branding of inde-pendent companies is critical. There are no models yet that are marketable. And as long as the situation in Germany is vague, we wait and see.

In your opinion, is there a “European cinema”, aside from cultural and national specifici-ties?It’s difficult to identify a Eu-ropean cinema per se. I think there are French, English and German Cinemas that have a “national handwriting”. The individual characteristics of films which are the results of coproductions have more interesting aspects, in my opi-nion. I think that films such as Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, Billy Elliot, East is East and Amélie are successful in Germany, even though they don’t have a German background, because they tell stories that are un-derstood - which also reflects the wishes of German audien-ces. You can’t give considera-tion to a film and its creators if you classify it by its national aspects.

Helge Albers of Flying Moon Filmproduktion has been successfully producing feature and documentary

films for ten years. His newest project Red Cross, by Hugo Vieira da Silva, has been invited to the “Atelier” by the Cinéfondation. The German producer talked to us about his plans for Cannes and recent developments in the film market.

by Zsuzsanna Kiràly

My Neighbour, My KillerAnne Aghion (US) OC

Producer at Flying MoonHelge Albers

Eftihia Chatzistefanidi

interview

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“Rien ne s’efface” (Nothing vanishes)

Naomi Kawase

by Agustín Mango

How to portray Naomi Kawase? Well, first of all, as a natural born filmmaker. Or in other words, as someone who appears to have been placed on this Earth with the specific purpose of making films in such a genius way that they remind us and connect us most effectively with essential things in life such as love and pain. And there is one place in life where we will most easily find these issues blooming and spreading: family.

Indeed, throughout her films, both documentaries and fic-tions, family is a big thing in Kawase’s world. A declared fan of Victor Erice, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Dardenne Brothers, Kawase was born in 1969 in Nara, Japan. She was left by her divorced parents to be raised by her great uncles, a scar that would become a primal drive in her later work. Her loving but hard re-lationship with her great aunt (“grandma”) and the moving search for her absent father were some of the main themes in early documentaries such as Embracing, Katatsumori, and Kya ka ra ba a. Her latest one, Tarachime, is “exhibit A” for the argument made before about her natural pre-disposition for filmmaking. Tarachime is an essay on motherhood in which we witness the birth of Kawase’s son Mitsuki. The instant after she gives birth to him, her first reflex is to grab her video ca-

mera and turn that unique and transcendental moment of her life into cinema. In that precise moment, the relation between herself and her camera, which she holds while observing her baby, is a tight and profound bond, as natural as the umbi-lical chord still connecting her to her newborn. And so, as they are bound together, Nao-mi (pardon, but it’s impossible not to use her first name after sharing such intimacy), her son Mitsuki, and the camera, all become one: a beautiful and breathtaking work of art. It’s of the most marvelous simplicity: in Kawase’s films cinema is life, and life is cinema.

A long time ago, Samuel Fuller appeared in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and defined cinema in one word: emotions. In their most natural and pure state, human emotions are what make us feel alive, and there’s no life without emotions. Just as her documentaries work on her own personal issues and become marvelous takes on universal feelings, in Kawase’s fictions feelings emerge from deep-rooted places and are slowly and calmly unfolded until they become transparent. Her love for hand-held came-ras and thorough acting direc-tion are some of the means in which she very assuredly peels away her stories and charac-ters until there’s nothing left but the naked core of human emotions. Those are sublime

by Natalia Ames

in focus

How did you become interested in Kawase’s work?I first saw Naomi Kawa-se’s work in Nyon (Swit-zerland) in 2000. I made an interview with her but, I don’t know how, an evil genius erased the tape on which I recorded it. So, my movie was a way to repair that irony of fate by proposing to Naomi Kawase a new conversa-tion. But this time, the new meeting would be a documentary.

What is the reason why your film covers only Kawase’s work in docu-mentaries?Actually it does refer to three of her fictions: Shara, Firefly and The Mourning Forest but it is true that I have a preference for her do-cumentaries, because I think Naomi Kawase is the filmmaker of what Japanese people call the nichijô: she loves to celebrate the beauty of everyday life.

Is there a connection between Kawase’s work in documentary and her fiction films?Of course! In my docu-mentary she explains that she doesn’t like to write detailed scripts because she trusts more the actors’ im-provisation. She likes the unexpected side of the shootings. If she would plan too strictly her movies ahead of time, she would get bored. It would be like trying to command the wind to blow.

moments, and they’re precisely what makes Naomi Kawase’s films so unique and wonderful: whether it is an overwhelming street parade on a rainy Nara summer afternoon (as the one featured in Shara, pro-bably one of the greatest and most breathtaking scenes in recent ci-nema), or a phone call to a long lost father (Embracing), or even an old man and a girl enjoying a waterme-lon (The Mourning Forest), Naomi

Kawase’s films heal and sweep us away with comfort. They go to cathartic extremes, but they are nevertheless soothing and eased by a sweet and calm feel of tranquility, making us feel – as we watched people struggling with the purest of hardships - that everything is still going to be ok.

interview: Laetitia Mikles©

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In Rien ne s’efface (Nothing vanishes), Laetitia Mikles explores the art of Kawase.

Emotional Rescue ase’s perspective

Naomi Kawase

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One day, a friend of Vera’s told her that, as a teenager, she used to smoke almost naked in the stairway of her building, so that her parents wouldn’t find it out by the smell on her clothes. The cinema student had this idea in mind for days, until she decided it would be the starting point for her short film at the University of São Paulo.

In Espalhadas pelo Ar (Spread through the Air), the destiny of a 14-year-old girl experiencing her first love crosses that of a 30-year-old woman on the verge of ending her marriage. They meet each other on the stairway and become friends, helping each other without noticing it. The film took part in ten festi-vals and won the French Critic’s Discovery award in the School Cinema Festival of Poitiers – not bad for a 24-year-old student’s first short-film made without pretension. But the best was still to come: with Spread, Vera received a first-time double in-vitation for the Critics’ Week in Cannes this year. While Spread will close the event, her new short, Elo (Bond), will be scree-ned for the opening of one of the

most prestigious parallel events in Cannes.

In Bond, Vera shows another fe-minine fate-crossing: at the begin-ning of the 80s, a girl meets with her first romantic disappointment on the same day that her mother learns the death of her favorite Brazilian singer, Elis Regina.

Her taste for “small stories” is not casual. “I learned from my father, an advertising photographer, to see the world in small rectangles, select what we really want to see. (Ar-gentinean poet Jorge Luís) Borges once said: if you understand a rose, you will understand the whole world”, she says.

Intelligent and expressive, Vera goes against the tide when the subject is her work. With all these female characters, does she de-fend a “feminine cinema”? “I can discuss the concept, but I can’t help doubting it. A man, Fellini, created Cabiria, a woman who learns to forgive herself, in the most feminine trajectory in cinema”, she strikes.

Are there many prejudices against female directors? “I see a problem: when a man director is rough on the set, he’s seen as a competent

moviemaker. When a woman is rigid in the set, she’s seen as hys-terical. We are raised to be sweet and tender, but a girl should never be ashamed of commanding her team. Mostly, the set is a moment of war for any director”, Vera is not afraid to say.

Oddly, for a girl with films in Can-nes, Vera does not raise the flag of art movies. “We have to learn how to make commercial cinema. There has got to be something spe-cial in a film that is liked both by a grandma and her grandson”, she defends. Another surprise: she’s not a big fan of Brazilian cinema - not a single Brazilian director co-mes to her mind as an influence. When asked for her favorites, she mentions Sofia Coppola, Michael Mann, Wong Kar-Wai (“especially My Blueberry Nights, which critics love to hate”) and Argentinean Lucrecia Martel.

For the future, Vera is already post-producing her third short, 25. Unlike her former films, this one por-trays a boy, the son of a Chine-se-immigrant family in São Paulo whose fa-ther sells illegal

DVDs in the street 25 de Março, the temple of illegal commerce in the city. She claims she is not anxious about shooting her first long-feature film. “But it’s like moving out to live with your boy-friend: I’m feeling a lot of pressure to know when the baby is gonna come”, she jokes.

In a way, however, Vera will also be in Cannes with a long-feature film: she has collaborated on the screenplay of À Deriva (Adrift), directed by her boyfriend Heitor Dhalia, which is selected for Un Certain Regard. “I’m very anxious about Cannes. Showing your film to an audience is like being naked in front of dressed people. And ob-viously, there’s always a certain fear that your films may be ran over by the festival’s rush. But I couldn’t feel happier right now”. For a girl used to seeing the world in small rectangles, at the moment Vera’s focus couldn’t be more enlarged.

portrait

by Thiago Stivaletti

in focus

Vera Egito

The world in small pieces

from Elo (2008)

Telling small stories with big themes, Brazilian Vera Egito will be the first director to open and close the Critics’ Week at Cannes.

NISI MASA SCREENING of CINETRAIN 48th CRITICS’ WEEK

Thursday, 21st of May11 A.M.

ESPACE MIRAMAR35 RUE PASTEUR tel: +33 6 32 61 70 26

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