Viva Italia!

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) has become the first Italian film in over two decades to carry the Golden Bear, top prize of the Berlin Film Festival. In last night’s award ceremony, the eight-member international jury, headed by British-director Mike Leigh and featuring actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, awarded the Taviani’s docudrama the statuette.

The last Italian film to receive this distinction was Marco Ferreri’s The House of Smiles in 1991. The Tavianis, best known for the films Padre Padrone, Kaos and Night of the Shooting Stars, are now in their 80s, making them likely the oldest directors to receive the award. They join the ranks of Pasolini, Antonioni and De Sica, other past Italian auteurs to receive the Golden Bear.

Cesare deve morire, about a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar staged in a high security prison in Rome, was one of the stronger competition entries, but divided the critics, who rallied around the Portuguese-director Miguel Gomes’ fable Tabu which won the International Critic’s Prize (FIPRESCI) for best film.

Italy has not participated in the competition since Nanni Moretti’s tepidly received an award for The Mass is Over in 1986.

The latest pictorial from Berlin (Javier Bardem, Madds Mikkelsen and festival director Dieter Kosslick)

Birgit Minichmayr, Gnade press conference

Javier Bardem (Hijos de las nubes, la última colonia) and festival director Dieter Kosslick

Actress Huo Siyan at the Gropius Mirror restaurant

Huo Siyan at Gropius restaurant

Doze Niu Chen-Zer, Mark Chao (Panorama, Love)

Mark Chao (Panorama / Love press conference)

Mads Mikkelsen, En Kongelig Affære press conference

Alicia Vikander, En Kongelig Affære press conference

D.Y.I. culture is strong amid the independent filmmaker set. There are numerous tools and outlets out there that allow cinematographers and editors to workshop their latest project and get feedback. The next stage on the long and arduous road to getting your film made, and then seen and talked-about, is the web-based showcase. Community-driven sites like Vimeo have led the way, and other internet addresses have appeared recently, offering some viable alternatives.

Michael Fishman, a New York-based film professional and cinephile (he previously managed the graduate program at Columbia University) who co-programs the Hamptons Film Festival and was previously with the Tribeca Film Institute, recently launched Independent Film Now, a launchpad for indie filmmakers to reveal their latest project. Fishman curates content posted by filmmakers, produces interviews and reviews films.

So what to make of yet another web-based moviemaker workshop? Savvy movie-lovers and industry followers would do well to follow Mr. Fishman’s endeavors. Content is programmed assiduously, attention being given to American films (independent mostly but the occasional big-budget fare is also covered) as well as foreign ones. Independent Film Now caters to one’s sense of curiosity: plenty of video materials and shop-talk with filmmakers is there for the taking. We asked Mr. Fishman a few questions:

Screen Comment – Why Independent Film Now?
Michael Fishman – I’d been doing transcribed interviews with independent filmmakers for the past few years and wanted to develop a web site that would feature short video interviews where filmmakers could show a teaser or trailer and discuss the making of their film. I thought it could go hand in hand with creating a space for filmmakers to promote their work and themselves, posting a synopsis of their film(s), still images, and all their web links such as Facebook, websites, crowd-funding sites, etc. in one or two comprehensive paragraphs. Such listings are posted in the Filmmaker Profiles section.

Fishman interviewing filmmaker Kim Cummings

Are you offering something different or better from the few other existing sites that also cater to the indie filmmaker?
I think the comprehensive and flexible nature of the postings in the Filmmaker Profiles section is unique; they can include YouTube videos, links to reviews, information about upcoming screenings, links to purchase films through Amazon or personal websites, and just about anything to help promote a filmmaker who is working on a film or has a finished film to promote. And it’s international in scope; anyone, anywhere can send me information to post and promote their film or films.

Are you alone or will you partner up with other writers?
I plan to focus on the posting of information in the Filmmaker Profiles section. I am looking for people to write reviews, short essays, etc. on film for the Film Reviews section. You and your fellow writers do a fantastic job of that at Screen Comment. I’m hoping there are other writers out there who are looking for a place to start or would be excited about this new venture.

How often will you add new content?
I’ll post information in the Filmmaker Profiles section on a regular on-going basis. The site was launched at the end of January and within two weeks was already promoting four filmmakers. The reaction at this very early stage has been extremely positive and I expect to be posting in “Filmmaker Profiles” several times a week.

I will also feature short video interviews with featured filmmakers on the front page on a regular basis, allowing them to remain posted long enough for the filmmaker to share and promote themselves as fully as possible. Video interviews are more of a challenge, of course, since they have to be scheduled, shot and edited, but as our first Featured Filmmaker Kim Cummings (writer/director of the new feature film In Montauk) would undoubtedly attest to, filmmakers have to do whatever they can to promote their films to build their audience.

This, in a nutshell, is what I hope Independent Film Now will do: help independent filmmakers build their audience. There are a lot of very deserving films out there that don’t find their audience, due to so many factors; my goal and interest is in helping them find that audience (visit INDEPENDENT FILM NOW).

It’s commonly accepted among the film literate that this is the year of living in the past.

What else could it be? The frontrunner for a Best Picture Oscar is a silent movie for crying out loud (or not crying out loud, as the case may be). Can flagpole-sitting and the Charleston be far behind?

While the conventional wisdom has reached this conclusion, it hasn’t established what the wisdom of eating a bowl of sugary yesteryear for breakfast every morning might be. Is this a healthy revisitation of tradition, or a cowardly retreat into the soft womb of the past?

I tend toward the old-fashioned. It took me forever to get a cell phone. I don’t have a tablet. While I’m a defender of well-made chaos cinema, when it comes to animation I have recently stated my orientation toward things past. And I think I found an answer to the previously stated question while watching the often brilliant The Secret World of Arrietty. Revisiting the past is most worthwhile when recovering lost values that deserve an awakening.

Written and supervised by the Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki (based on Mary Norton’s children’s stories The Borrowers), Arrietty is practically made of watercolors in an age of computer generation. The figures are well drawn, but the film doesn’t shy away from asking you to use your imagination to complete the picture. And there are no overcaffeinated pet raccoons to entertain us every time the beat slows down.
So much of animation today resembles loud action movie principles: overtaking, breakneck pace, exaggeratedly intense motion. It’s also geared toward creating an environment that blurs the line between fiction and reality. The gentle human scale of Arrietty, a spirited teenage girl the size of a blade of grass who lives underneath a house, reinvigorates the values of older generation’s of animation–imagination, humanity, and the art of the paper and pen.

The genius of Arrietty is that by shrinking its heroine to the size of a finger, it turns the familiarity of a common home into a landscape of danger and adventure. Rats and insects become predators. A common cat becomes an alien. And moving around a kitchen has the impact of landing on the moon. Arriety takes common things and rediscovers them as immense. And so are the first hints of romantic feeling as Arriety forms a friendship with a sickly boy who moves into the house above.

So remember, every once in a while, Hollywood does make movies for the little people.

Inspired by the 2001 Dos Palmas kidnapping of foreign tourists and missionaries by the Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Philipino director Brillante Mendoza (Kinatay, Serbis) Captive excruciatingly follows the twenty hostages as they are dragged at gunpoint from their hotel, spirited onto a fishing boat and led through various towns and jungles for over a year. Isabelle Huppert, the film’s only recognizable star, headed the Cannes Film Festival Jury that awarded Mendoza best director for Kinatay in 2009. She is the closest thing that the film has to a center of consciousness, insisting to stop and bury a Filipino missionary who has died in the jungle, befriending an angry and wounded twelve year-old kidnapper and repeatedly standing up to the captors’ revolting behavior towards the nurses they have snatched from a village hospital after a shoot-out with the military.

Mendoza made the film without a fixed screenplay, preferring instead to work day-to-day, improvising in the jungle with his dedicated actors and crew. Watching the 122-minute-long film, one wishes he had not been so opposed to using a script. The hostage-taking, the very first scene, is superbly shot and edited and grabs you immediately. Mendoza, alas, quickly loses his grip on his material (and his audience) as his film devolves into an overly long ordeal of trudging through the endless wild. Mendoza is fond of mixing in footage of nature at its most beautiful and at its cruelest. The camera lingers unnecessarily on a bird that is eaten by a snake. Huppert look up to see a brilliantly-colored bird flapping its majestic wings, just shortly before her rescue. There are many creeping and crawling things in the jungle–leeches, scorpions, hornets–and Mendoza labors unsuccessfully to achieve a balance between the “Heart of Darkness” and Dog Day Afternoon motifs at play. For all its raw energy and determined gaze, Captive is less than captivating.

In Berlin for a while, everyone talked about Caesar must die, a historical and literary reenactment filmed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani in superb documentary style–but it’s a feature film documenting a jail bound theater production.

The Tavianis (Padre Padrone, Kaos), who are now in their eighties, entered a high-security prison near Rome to film a production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” Mixing footage of the final production with audition reels and quasi-staged rehearsals in various prison locales, the Tavianis have found an intimate, elegant and profoundly moving way to reinterpret Shakespeare’s political tragedy. The production the prisoner-actors take part in is translated into various Italian dialects, but the best subtitle choice seem to be modern English, which doesn’t detract significantly from the play’s power. The audition and rehearsal scenes are rendered in luminous black and white, an artistic choice suited both to the sparse interiors and to the incredibly expressive faces of the prisoners, some of whom are serving for Mafia-related crimes, a few with life sentences. At the press conference, the directors explained that the inmates all gave their real names and addresses (a formality that is shown in the audition reel), despite knowing the film was going to be seen by the public.

I called the film quasi-documentary because the Tavianis have cheated just a little bit. The film’s Brutus is Salvatore Striano, an ex-con who returned to prison to play this role. Not that the audience feels this lack of authenticity. If anything, Striano contributes much of the fury, passion and pain that make Caesar Must Die so compelling.