From the 2 to the 14 of July of 2009
Edition 7

Between July 2 and 14, fifteen Parisian theaters opened their doors to film lovers, to introduce them to new talent thanks to the International Short and Feature Film Competition, the latest productions by already established directors that the festival is exhibiting in a preview in the presence of the film crews, the masterpieces of cinema history, the guests of honour, the tributes, the special cycles for the youngest and the country chosen each year to highlight its filmography.
In this 7th edition, 12 feature films from countries as diverse as Kazakhstan, Chile, Italy, the Netherlands and South Korea were presented in competition, as well as 17 short films from Malaysia, Poland, Taiwan, Mexico and Argentina, among others.
Tribute was paid to the Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, the French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud and the director Tsaï Ming-Liang, through retrospectives (the full one in the case of the Taiwanese director).
After the Philippines, this year Turkey has been honored through a panorama of some 30 films and multiple meetings with new talents from that country.
Among the films in competition we highlight The Other Bank by George Ovashvili (Kazakstan, 2009), Calimucho by Eugenie Jansen (The Netherlands, 2008) and Puccini et la fanciulla (Italy, 2008).
Chronicle of a conflict

After the fall of the Soviet Union, an unresolved conflict broke out in 1988 between Russia and Georgia over the province of Abkhazia. The greatest tragedy of this conflict is that the Georgians and the Abkhazians have the same roots, but hatred has turned them into bitter enemies. The story of The Other Bank ("The other bank") takes place a decade later, towards the end of the '90s, under the gaze of Tedo, a child who was born with the conflict and who is part of what the director Ovashvili calls "the children of war", a generation that lost everything, their family, their land, their future, living adrift in a constant state of defenselessness. In this sense, the dream told by Tedo's friend (and which is updated in images towards the end) about a jungle landscape in which zebras and giraffes are at the mercy of lions, and the duckling of plastic that the little boy recovers from the rubble into which he turned his old house. The broken toy is a metaphor for lost childhood, and the jungle, without law or any protection from the State, is a no man's land where only the strongest survive.

An epic and tragic poem at the same time, in which the hero is a twelve-year-old boy through whose eyes we see to what extreme of dehumanization the banality of violence and the rooting of hatred can lead.
Far from the wars, but close to more intimate conflicts, is Calimucho, a kind of "behind the scenes" of the traveling circus Harlekino, the revelation of the face hidden behind the mask of the always smiling clown. The circus is shown as a marginal world of nomadic beings, uprooted, who are unable to establish lasting ties neither with the land they live in nor with their closest beings.
Although the Harlekino company exists and works in the Netherlands (the film is set on the border between the Netherlands and Germany), and the script is based on the notes of a months-long trip that a journalist made with them, the story itself itself is not real. To achieve maximum naturalness, director Jansen has given the actors a great deal of freedom, leaving unedited spontaneous situations not foreseen in the script, such as that of the llama listening attentively to the prayers of the seasonal employees from the Maghreb. In some aspects, it was worked like a documentary, it was filmed with a single camera without repeating shots, then the editing was done to eliminate the superfluous or that which did not fit the plot.
The actors are not professionals, they are part of the circus staff who have been trained to play the role of themselves in circumstances different from their real lives.
"The circus is a microcosm where the whole of Europe is represented according to its social structure," said Jansen in his talk with the audience after the screening. Indeed, the owners of the circus are Dutch, but a group of Germans who refuse to help Dick are also part of the company, when his partner Willy returns drunk in the middle of the performance. Towards the end, these same Germans lead the line of caravans heading elsewhere.
We also find the aforementioned North Africans like Tarek, whom Dick, the owner's daughter, constantly asks for the papers that enable him to work and who finally leaves the circus because he feels mistreated by his bosses. But we also find that Willy's mother, a French-speaking Belgian woman, arrives at the place only in order to install discord in the couple, alleging that her grandson Timo is not leading a normal life for a child his age, after which Dick he accuses Willy of being weak for blindly obeying his mother. In this way, the domestic conflicts in Calimucho acquire political significance at a continental level.

For the film Puccini et la fanciulla, Paolo Benvenuti and Paola Baroni base themselves on a series of recently discovered letters and on a silent, sepia-colored short film dating from 1915, where Giacomo Puccini is recorded in his Torre del Lago mansion.
The bucolic beauty of the landscape inspires the master in the composition of his opera "La Fanciulla del West", but this stillness is disturbed by a dark episode: one of his domestic servants, Doria Manfredi, commits suicide after being accused by Elvira, the woman of the composer, to maintain a secret relationship with him.
The film is very far from the realistic aesthetic choices so dear to the biographical and documentary genre. There is an aesthetic position here that places special emphasis on the visual and sound aspects, highlighting them, embellishing them, poetizing them. There is no dialogue, everything is played out through noises and music, while the card reading was recorded entirely off-screen. To a large extent it is a tribute to silent cinema but it was also thought of as a form of experimentation on operatic language.
Paola Baroni recalls that the natural sounds of the lake were recorded from various angles to give them a greater depth that would allow the viewer to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the Tuscany region. For his part, Paolo Benvenuti highlighted, in dialogue with the public, that for photography he was inspired by the macchiaioli (stainers), a pictorial movement that developed in Florence in the second half of the XNUMXth century, and that, like the French Impressionism, associated the representation of nature with spots of light and color, always developing his work in rural areas.

Previews and closing film

Singularities of a blonde girl by Manoel de Oliveira (France, Spain, Portugal, 2009).

Narrated in the first person through successive flashbacks, this film adaptation of the work of the same name written by the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queirós is a subtle and intimate oil painting of the XNUMXth-century Lusitanian bourgeois families, transferred by the magic of cinema to contemporary society.
Macario, both protagonist and intradiegetic narrator, works as an accountant in the company that his uncle owns in Lisbon. Every day he looks through the window at his attractive neighbor, a twentysomething with long blonde hair named Luisa Vilaça, who lives with her mother in the building across the street. After a while, Macario falls madly in love with her.
What at first seems like a simple romantic story ends up becoming a succession of tricks and scams that drive Macario to take a long vacation in the Algarve.
Eça de Queirós was one of the most important Portuguese novelists of the XNUMXth century. Adversary of Romanticism, he introduced in Portugal the realist movement that by then was already developing in France. In fact, many present him as the Balzac or the Portuguese Flaubert.
Ideologically close to anarchism, Eça de Queirós portrayed with extreme irony the vices and hypocrisy of the Portuguese petty bourgeoisie, his character being Macario, the naïve romantic who became an easy prey for fraudsters and careerists.
Although the novel is set in the 1811th century, Oliveira has transferred the staging to contemporary Lisbon, thus updating the conflict. The light, the colors, some planes, however, are inspired by romantic and realistic painting, especially in the Majas on the Balcony (1869) by Francisco de Goya and in The Balcony (1) by Édouard Manet, a great admirer of the Spanish artist. Subject matter aside, both paintings resemble one another in the strong lighting contrast between foreground and background, the latter being a hidden, murky, shadowy aspect of the former. In Oliveira's film, Luisa is shown leaning on the window railing in the foreground. Her white face and blonde hair appear well lit, and her game of seduction translates into a game of hiding and revealing her face using a Chinese fan in which, conspicuously, we can see the stamped image of a dragon (XNUMX). Luisa's mother, a more mature woman with dark hair, passes like a shadow in the background of the scene in the manner of a puppeteer manipulating the strings of her marionette.

Liverpool by Lisandro Alonso (France, Argentina, Netherlands, 2008)

A sailor for 20 years, Farrel asks the captain of the freighter he works for permission to go ashore and visit his terminally ill mother. Arriving in his town, he discovers that his family has a new member whom he did not know.
As in all of Lisandro Alonso's films (La libertad, 2001; Los muertos, 2004; Fantasma, 2006), long sequence shots prevail with contemplative rather than narrative purposes. Hence, his language is remarkably close to that of the post-war avant-gardes, as is the case of Italian neorealism.