'If the Seed Doesn't Die'
When writing a film festival report, the tendency is to focus on the films that have won awards: this was true of my own reports on the Cinema City IFF for the Little White Lies blog and FEDEORA (the Federation of Film Critics of Europe and the Mediterranean). Yet the films that don’t win any awards are still worth discussing: in order to have been selected for the festival in the first place, a film must have some merits. And of course, a flawed film often provokes more interesting discussions than a near-perfect one.
As mentioned in my blogs from the festival, Cinema City has three competitive categories. As a member of FEDEORA’s jury, I saw all 10 films in the ‘National Class’ category, which is devoted to Serbian cinema. Although Cinema City reserves 10 of its Ibis awards for films in this category, 5 of the National Class films took all 10 awards. Clearly, there were enough awards to go around, so it seems reasonable to assume that the 5 winners were outstanding, or else the 5 wallflowers must have been quite poor. Neither assumption is entirely fair. The winners were typically more ambitious, more original, and above all achieved their goals more consistently. The directors who were snubbed by the jury may have been equally ambitious, but achieved uneven results, or else succeeded in making a film that was more conventional. All of the films in the National Class were enjoyable, however, and every film in the National Class, even if it left Cinema City without an Ibis, made a commendable contribution to Serbian cinema.
Oktobar (October, 2010) is an omnibus feature composed of shorts by seven young directors. Although it did not win an Ibis, the film was given a special award by the jury, who wanted to recognise the ‘promising’ work of these new directors. The film’s seven segments are linked by their date: all are set on the 5th of October, 2010, the 10th anniversary of Serbia’s democratic revolution. The significance of the date is virtually ignored in most of the films, however, which focus instead on individual dramas.
The most memorable sections of Oktobar are those with the clearest and most surprising storylines, which also tended to have the most distinctive visual aesthetic. ‘Rođendan’ (‘Birthday’) turns its deceptively soft focus on the celebrations of one spoiled little girl, and the terrible secret she discovers about her older sister. ‘Priče iz groba’ (‘Graveyard Stories’) also centres on a little girl, this time the daughter of a modest graveyard attendant. When a shady land developer threatens to evict the pair from their cottage, a gangster’s ghost trains the girl to stand up for herself (in a manner reminiscent of Hit Girl in Kick Ass (Matthew Vaughn, 2010)). Oktobar‘s closing short, ‘Revolucija jede svoju decu’ (‘The Revolution Eats Its Own Children’) deals most explicitly, if absurdly, with the film’s reference to Serbia’s revolution, following a group of workers who break their hunger strike in a particularly gruesome way.
Mladen Matičević’s Zajedno (Together, 2011) was the National Class’s guiltiest pleasure. Like a TV-movie in its image quality, bland sets, stereotyped characters and overacting, the film concludes with a shamelessly sentimental ending that does nothing to endear it to critics. These reservations aside, Zajedno is a highly engaging domestic thriller. It concerns Uroš, a struggling novelist who discovers that his wife Marija is having an affair with a steel magnate. During the ensuing argument, Marija calls her lover to rescue her. It seems a foregone conclusion that the scruffy writer will lose his wife and son to the handsome, assertive businessman—which is why it is so enjoyable to see Uroš fight spectacularly for his family. To its credit, the narrative does not proceed immediately to a happy ending: Uroš and Marija’s evening of marital trauma leads plausibly to a period of separation, on which the film ought to have closed.
In contrast with Zajedno‘s popular impulse, Siniša Dragin’s Ako zrno ne umre (If the Seed Doesn’t Die, 2010) is an overly ambitious film. Its two principal narrative strands form a chiasmus: a Serbian father must retrieve his son’s body from Romania, while a Romanian father’s search for his missing daughter leads him to Kosovo. What would have been an elegant pattern is muddled by the introduction of additional characters and storylines. The strongest element of this film, by far, was its re-enactment of an ancient tale of Romanian peasants who attempted to drag their Orthodox church to a new location: these are images of such lyrical, mystical beauty that they could to be gathered together in a short film worthy of artist Marina Abramović.
The Box (Andrijana Stojković, 2011) was a film based on an original concept which didn’t quite pan out. It takes as its subject an unusual combination of place, time and people: Belgrade 1992, where a trio of moving men are packing up the house contents of the German Ambassador, who is to join the wave of diplomats leaving Serbia. The premise is seemingly better suited to documentary than dramatic comedy, and the film does go on to develop an ambiguous relationship with reality. It breaks up obviously fictional sequences with interview footage, where individuals identified as ambassadors or their family members are asked about their personal experience of moving. The appearance of the interviewees, as well as the relative banality of their stories, suggest that the interviews are genuine.
The Box adopts a striking visual aesthetic: shot entirely in black-and-white, sequences showing the movers at work are composed with unpretentious elegance, while interviews are shot against a stark white background, echoing the motif of the plain white moving box. The notion of the box also carries a symbolic power: while boxes are packed in order to leave Serbia, those left behind would have felt that they were being figuratively shut inside a box as the country’s borders closed. The feasibility of sealing off the borders of an entire country is the subject of one of the movers’ many blackly humorous jokes.
Films often have a better chance of being screened at festivals in their country of origin. Some of these festivals also give domestic directors a better chance of winning awards by offering a generous award-to-film ratio: in the case of Cinema City, one award for every film in the National Class. It would be overly optimistic to assume that the films which do well in such a privileged environment will necessarily make it to international distribution. So what about films which failed to attract any awards at all even in such advantageous circumstances? It’s important to remember that some of the National Class films are still at the beginning of their festival careers: The Box and October actually made their world premieres at Cinema City. There is still a good chance that Cinema City’s wallflowers might make it to a festival, or at least a DVD, near you.
