WHO NEEDS HOLLYWOOD? NOT CAIRO FILM FESTIVAL INSH’ALLAH

Cairo International Film Festival is the kind of film festival that I like, the kind where you can watch a lot of cutting-edge films- cheap. While many other film festivals concentrate on traipsing in some Holly Woodstars for a photo-op, while sending you to one end of town for this film, another side of town for that, Cairo concentrates its films on just three central venues running simultaneously and continuously, some films playing at multiple venues at different times, so you don’t miss much unless you want to. I’m good for two feature films a day- and that’s what they are, the idea of ‘art film’ or anything less than ninety minutes relegated to the catch-all ‘experimental’ dust-bin somewhere else, as if God invented moving pictures to go on big-ass spools or nothing at all. Tell it to YouTube. Most Indian films don’t even run over two hours anymore, so pervasive is the Hollywood format, India being the country most represented here, in addition to the Arab countries combined. Except for ‘Amelia’ and ‘The Soloist’ Hollywood is not represented at all, and ‘Amelia’ is Indian-born Mira Nair’s film. Jim Jarmush’s latest film ‘The Limits of Control’ is here, but he’s hardly Hollywood. The only thing missing is festivity (‘festival’ right?), which only comes from large crowds in a centralized location… but good price will suffice. Literature is sparse, so I have no idea who won what.

Okay, in Hollywood fashion, I’ll cut to the chase scene- expect more ‘Slumdogs,’ and expect them to be made by real live Indians, not British interpreters. They’re prolific, and they’re good. Some are regional, but most come from the Bollywood system, which itself is in a process of change. The ubiquitous song-and-dance number is rapidly becoming an MTV-style number to the point that the whole film almost becomes an extension of that. Thus it’s as if in Hollywood, instead of MTV becoming advertising trailers for feature films, feature films themselves are becoming collections of MTV-style dance numbers. Some films overdo this dangerously, such as ‘Summer 2007’, a film with an important message that almost gets lost in all the glitz and glissade. That message is about the serial suicides of farmers, particularly in Maharashtra state of India, coincidentally (or not?) the state of which Mumbai (Bombay) itself is the capital. It’s a problem elsewhere in India also, and is a phenomenon without precedent in my study of world history. These deaths occur as a result of the crushing poverty and debt of the rural agricultural population, a kind of slavery to which there is only one way out apparently.

‘Summer 2007’ could be considered a ‘masala’ film I suppose, and you gotta’ love any film that opens with a dealer-like joint-smoking scene, then follows the rich-kid medical students to their classroom, where our hero immediately shows off his Alpha-male behavior and ‘party hearty’ attitude toward life. ‘Easy Rider’ does ‘Scrubs’ maybe, or ‘Animal House’? That and more as the hero ruffles political feathers by running for class president as a joke, then volunteers (with his friends) for rural service to escape the political problems and to get a posting close to the resorts of Goa. Instead they land in a whirl of rural politics and almost get killed in the process, instead finding that their own inherited wealth comes from the same degenerate system of corruption and exploitation as the disgusting one they’ve stumbled upon, one that leads to land expropriation and worse, mass suicides. The film ultimately fails by trying to accomplish too much, running almost two and a half hours and interrupting the narrative flow with repeated MTV-style filler. Re-edit the film and you’ve got a powerful film and Hollywood contender there. ‘The Damned Rain’ deals with the same problem more directly and from the farmer’s point of view, the endlessly downward spiral of poverty and debt from which there is no escape except death.

Many of the Indian films deal with these and other social problems, including the Muslim/Hindu social divide of ‘Gulabi Talkies’, a nice film that plods along a little too slow for its own good. ‘The Man beyond the Bridge’ tells a touching tale of unlikely love and social rejection when a man falls in love with a mentally challenged woman, good story. ‘Haat the Weekly Bazaar’ deals with polygamy and the local Rajasthani practice of parading a woman through town naked if she cannot afford to pay compensation to her husband for a divorce of her choosing, though nothing is expected of the husband, even when he has multiple wives. There are more fundamental issues at stake here, also. The line that “the only independent woman is a prostitute” in Indian society says more than many tome-length treatises on either side of the political fence ever could. You can’t help but cheer at the end when all the town’s women strip down to bras to show solidarity with their beleaguered colleague. Lord help us males when women finally realize it only takes one male to fertilize a hundred females, and that the rest of us are little more than dead weight, our legendary muscles useless in a high-tech society. The Dash Riprock-style penniless consort of our heroine is great comic relief here, too. But all these movies deal with the psychological suffocation and economic exploitation of village society, particularly in India, but it could apply elsewhere, also. Unfortunately very few of these movies show that city life is hardly the easy solution.

The film ‘New York’ follows the Indian diaspora overseas, and attempts to tackle the terrorism issue. It tells the tale of an all-American Indian Muslim who is mistakenly jailed after 9-11, and who subsequently becomes a terrorist as a result. As realistic as that part of the premiss is, the part where the FBI frames his long-lost best friend in order to enlist him to spy on the suspected terrorist is pushing it. And while anti-terrorist actions and rhetoric have certainly unwittingly created many terrorists in the process- a worthy message btw- to reduce our villain’s actions to one of revenge on the FBI to restore his dignity is a bit of an over-simplification of a complex issue. Dignity is certainly an issue I’m sure, but I imagine most ‘terrorists’ think a whole lot more about Israel than they do the FBI. Thus for all its pretensions and Hollywood-style savvy, its high concept fails by the very flaws in that concept.

The film that scores big on my list, though, is a non-Bollywood-style film called ‘Kanchivaram’, a ‘Communist film’ in which a silk-weaver is persecuted for trying to better living conditions for his fellow weavers at the same time that he himself is resorting to thievery to keep a boastful promise that he never should have made in the first place. Director S. Priyadarshan creates moody Bunuelian images that manage to be both lush and stark at the same time, all in a context that conjures up the best of Italian neo-realism, a tale of remembrance, as the main character returns home on parole to deal with his daughter’s sudden paralysis. I couldn’t give away the ending if I wanted to. You wouldn’t ‘get it.’ The one musical number in the film hypnotically re-inforces, rather than distracts from, the narrative flow. Catch it if you can.

Cairo International Film Festival had more than Indian films of course, but those were what caught my attention the most, as remaining faithful to their native realities while striving for universality in their narratives. The Arab films I saw were of mixed quality, ‘Pomegranates and Myrrh’ maybe the best, a very realistic ‘terrorism’ film about Palestinians whose land is in the process of being expropriated for new settlements by Israelis, and whose heir apparent is jailed for assault in the process. But the secondary theme is one of my favorites, i.e. love in the ruins. ‘Season of the Machouichi’ is a period piece about wrestlers fighting for the hand of a woman, the style going back even further than the 1900’s setting, exaggerated and stagey. ‘Casanegra’ goes into the dark seamy underbelly of Casablanca, but almost goes too far, depicting a place far more sinister than anything I can remember, almost ‘Mean Streets’ in its rudeness and barbarity, but significant shock value for an Arab Muslim film about an Arab Muslim place to an Arab Muslim audience, more like a Mexico to Europe’s US than a member of the Islamic Brotherhood.

Beside the Arab and Indian films, there were an assortment of other nationalities, particularly East European and East Asian. The one that stands out to me is ‘Twilight Dancing’ by Joshua Tong, a film with absolutely no dialogue that attempts to tell a story, through pictures, of an old man and a young attractive deaf girl with a problematic life. Parallels to ‘The Bow’ are obvious and likewise the meaning is as elusive as the images are attractive. Whether he succeeds or not is an open question, but the movie is certainly worth watching. Considering that Tong’s own written explanations reveal things that I couldn’t surmise visually, I’d say let’s keep language for the time being, uh huh.

It’s a whole new world out there, cinematically speaking. The golden age of Hollywood indie films has been supplanted by indie films from the rest of the world. Hollywood is left with its action movies, high-tech thrillers, and high-budget epics. Unfortunately these aren’t always the best movies. But it’ll survive. Meanwhile let’s feast on what the rest of the world has to offer. It’s a big world out there. Go see it.

ANDEAN MUSIC, ANDEAN FILM… SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

I finally get back down to La Serena and it’s just that- serene, and dirt cheap too, unlike certain other touristy locations. I even find something there I haven’t seen much of on this trip, Andean music, complete with dances, the kind of thing you might expect to find in Bolivia, but not here. I like it, the clogging and tapping, the singing and rapping. It reminds me I’m in South America. It reminds me I’m alive. To be sure the dances and costumes are derived from the Bolivian standard, regardless of to what degree any of them might still exist in Chile. Andean music itself is becoming increasingly interbred, and increasingly with jazz. I like it. A good example of this is the Chilean group Entrama I saw earlier in Valdivia. All Andean groups incorporate a great deal of Spanish folk music of course. This could help revive the genre. Andean music was one of the first types of ‘world music’ on the scene, long before ‘Afro-Beat’. Why has it faded? Is it too simplistic, too folksy? Have we simply outgrown it? Certainly the fact that many of its proponents are playing for tips on street corners and in subways doesn’t help, making it seem too common. Dressing up in American Indian costume like I saw in Barcelona and even in Buenos Aires doesn’t help much either. Those Otavalenos don’t miss a trick. The verdict is still out. Many of its problems are problems of ‘world music’ in general of course. But more of that later, I’ve got a film festival to attend in Vina del Mar.

I had a choice of which film festival to attend, the Mar del Plata ‘grade-A’ event or its much lesser known minor cousin, the Vina del Mar event. Vina (sorry no ‘enye’ on this keyboard) fit my schedule better and Chile satisfies my belly and my pocketbook better, so that’s where I showed up. If you’re hard-core of course you could do both in succession, but who’s so hard core when you could just sit home and watch cable instead? Still, there’s something nice about a good festival, mostly the opportunity to see a lot of good independent films and the festive atmosphere itself. For better or worse film festivals in recent years have increasingly become the farm system for Hollywood, a place for films to find distributors and audiences, the same films showing up all over the ‘circuit’, about as spontaneous as an alarm clock. On the plus side, Hollywood is making some of its best films ever with directors from all over the world, including del Toro, Cuaron, and Inarritu from Mexico.

Vina hasn’t reached that level yet, being more a venue for student films and the Spanish-language market for independent features and documentaries. The student films were fairly predictable dissertations on the status of the human condition, and the ease of changing all that if only society weren’t so corrupt. As Gertrude Stein once said, “students they are merciful, and recognized they chew something.” I wish I had said that, but I catch flack for my flights of fancy writing. Write vertically just once instead of the usual horizontal missionary position, and I’m sure to hear about it from hacks with axes. Sure as shit some redneck cop with bad teeth is gonna’ stop me and ask to see my poetic license. It never fails. Film is no different. It long ago surrendered to its to its most mundane role as a popular literary medium, its qualities of light color sound and celluloid reduced to subordinate roles. Such things are relegated to ‘experimental films’ and their festivals, increasingly hard to find. Money wins. YouTube and its surfing dogs don’t help much either, such is the tyranny of democracy, but they DO have stuff by Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage and all the other early innovators, if anybody still cares.

The documentaries at Vina were a disappointment, more talking heads (a technical term) than telling pictures, moral platitudes from southern latitudes, predictable at best. Boring film is failed film. The Mexican ones from the Churubusco studios were best, not surprisingly. This is a film tradition the qualitative equal of Hollywood, commercial cradle of Bunuel, and fountain of creativity. Their stuff always looks good. The fiction fared better than the documentaries. Though it’s hard to see them all when they’re playing simultaneously on different screens, the ones I saw were good, particularly an Argentine offering called ‘Soledad’, a play on terms, being the name of a new-born child and the theme of the film, solitude. The story manages to weave through social classes and their distinctions without falling into clichés, just confusion. Such is life, a comedy of airs and errors. The Chango Spasiuk-infused soundtrack was perfect.

The Vina festival had its moments but largely failed from an outsider’s point of view. First and foremost a festival should be festive. I suppose it was if you knew where the parties were, but such are superfluous considerations for an aficionado of film. The buzz was at the O’Higgins hotel where I got wi-fi, not at the theatres, waiting with baited breath to see the next cinematic jewel to melt in your mind. One problem was that venues were scattered around town; at least Vina is not so big, so doable. Try that in Bangkok. They did once and it was the worst film festival I’ve ever attended. The ‘festival’ consisted of a sign under which volunteers would steer you to the theater that had the film you wanted to see (in a city of ten million!) and before which trucked-in Hollywood celebrities would gather for publicity photos, a purely media event organized by government functionaries. The same event when organized by and for film-lovers is one of the best I’ve ever attended, scads of films in one central location, both ‘circuit’ films and regional delicacies, robustly attended by local Thais always looking for an excuse to party.

Vina started off with one strike against it, fallen ill to the Latin American disease, labor strikes. From what I gather this one is by municipal workers, looking for cures to the ‘crisis’. This is not surprising in the typical Latin American bureaucratic state, but Chile is the least of those. Old habits die hard. This shut one of the main venues down, the Municipal Theatre and its retinue of selections and competition entries, though somehow it managed to open for the evening’s high-profile gala events. Shit’s relative. The main problem was with the organization itself. Information was not clear about times locations and costs, so some perseverance was necessary. That’s doable and probably excusable. Not excusable was the unprofessional attitude of much of the volunteers themselves, presumably film students, entering theatres mid-screening en masse laughing and cutting up, even talking on cell phones. *^%$(&^%!!! Hardly anybody stayed for credits and sometimes they were cut out completely!? There is no substitute for professionalism. Still, Vina’s got potential. But me, I get on the bus again a day early and head for the hills. After three weeks in Chile it’s time to head back to Argentina. It’s time to head home, wherever that is.