We won't really know whether this beleaguered festival has saved itself until all the beans have been counted and the allies tallied. And that's at least a few months off.
From the perspective of your average festivalgoer, things must have seemed considerably muted this year. Whether it was just too many films spreading the crowds thin or an actual decrease in the number of bodies willing to cue up, attendance did not appear to match that of years past. That's one guy's visual measurement, mind you, and shouldn't be taken as any definitive sign of the FFM's fate. Theatres screened films, seats were filled and people got what they came for - a taste of world cinema.
Judging whether the festival met its burden of being a representative cross-section of cinema from around the globe, the FFM continues to hold its own. Did the festival screen the very best of international cinema? Who can tell? There were certainly a good many films of worth and, in my viewing, none so flawed as to be loathsome.
But what makes a successful film fest? Even as a veteran of many festivals, I'm not sure I could define those qualities satisfactorily: Stripped of all the glam and sparkle, all the parties and festing, there's not much more
Whether you're getting an advance viewing of something that will be at your local rep cinema in a few months, like Jutta Brückner's angular story of love and creative jealousy Hitler Kantate, or the obscure gem that will sink into the celluloid swamp, like Hannes Stöhr's comedic ensemble piece One Day in Europe, the true worth of a festival is gauged in the electricity between your seat and the 25 frames snapping past it every second.
Films like Dutch filmmaker Pieter Kuijpers' Off Screen, which won the FFM Grand Prix of the Americas for best film, is exactly the kind of film that is going to find its way onto art house screens, maybe even mainstream ones. This tense drama about a man taking people hostage to draw attention to the hidden messages in television transmissions has all the markers of a Eurofilm classic. The treatment is distinctly un-American and the production is solid and superbly understated. From direction to acting (Jan Decleir of Karacter fame stars and won the FFM Best Actor award), Off Screen is a no-brainer.
But films that on the surface may seem more attainable, like American newcomer Hunter Richards' London, which won the bronze for Best First Fiction Feature, could easily drift from the festival screen to the video store shelf without anything in between. This distinctly American set piece exists in some nether region between indie film and mainstream - and that may screw it for mass distribution. The cast is all high-key Hollywood (Jason Statham, Chris Evans and Jessica Biel) but here they play characters escaped in the low-key world of a Bret Easton Ellis novel stripped of its sociopathy and heartlessness. What's left, you might ask? Surprisingly, a pretty engaging story and the realization that even people you don't like (they're spoiled rich kids) can feel the way you do, their concerns and woes no more disposable than our own.
So was the FFM a success? Yes. Unwaveringly yes. Will that be enough to breathe life into the years to come? Who knows. Maybe not. And that is the sad truth.
FFM
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