| FESTIVAL AWARD WINNERS |
REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS AWARD
SARI'S MOTHER
JAMES LONGLEY, SEATTLE WA
Filmed in Iraq over the period of a year, the film explains nothing about the conflict between and Iraqi "freedom fighters" and American soldiers. And yet, it explains everything by listening to the courageous mother of the ten-year-old boy Sari. The boy, we learn, was infected with HIV in a hospital by a contagious transfusion of blood and plasma. Whose blood? Iraqi blood? American blood? Is the war responsible for Sari's suffering or for the lack of treatment for immune system disorders? The film gives no answers. "We live in a country under occupation," Sari's mother says, "we are lost between them and them. We no longer know how to distinguish between friends and enemies." James Longley simply believes in the power of documentation, but the film's images of compassion are not at all simple: at the end of the film we see children sitting in the sand in front of Sari's hut, playing at bombing people. Bombing them. Bombing Americans. If no one feels responsible, people create images.
MOST MEMORABLE
PATTERNS
JAMIE TRAVIS, VANCOUVER
BC
Jamie Travis´ PATTERNS Trilogy is the strangest work in this year's festival-and the most daring. Somewhere between Roman Polanski's REPULSION and the mind blowing creations of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, the "plot" deals with the tragic love story of Michael and Pauline. When PATTERNS 1 (shown last year) starts, their relationship is already history. It was a study about love and failing to fulfill the merciless stereotypes of happiness promoted by mainstream cinema. PATTERNS 2 and 3, both delightfully over the top in playing with color schemes, surreal costumes and black humored horror-film quotations, escalate the impossible love of the lonely protagonists into a fairy tale about modern desire: The more they long for the image of each other, the more they fear the challenge of reality. The objects that inhabit their worlds-mirrors which reflect nothing, tea cups which develop a bizarre life of their own-come to symbolize the patterns of their psychological hauntings. At once playful and grim, Travis' trilogy sets a standard in overcoming patterns by creating the patterns of contradiction.
LIFE IS MORE SUBTLE THAN WE THINK AWARD
CREAMERY BIRDS
BRIAN LIBBY, PORTLAND OR
Watching CREAMERY BIRDS one can see that birds are punctuation marks on a sky which is a palimpsest written with the ink of clouds and chemical pollution. The birds fly into these pictures of surprising beauty to end the sentences of huge chimneys, whispering about the chimneys' ancient relatives, the totem poles of North America. Brian Libby's film is a silent study of industrial architecture, transferring concrete into concrete poetry.
CHALLENGING HOLLYWOOD AWARD
BY MODERN MEASURE
MATTHEW LESSNER, NEHALEM OR
Love stories are unique, thrilling and romantic. Aren't they? Choosing the form of a black and white road movie, Matthew Lessner caricatures the banality of fiction films that sell the illusion of love as a mixture of destiny and entertaining dialogues. As in Richard Linklater's BEFORE SUNSET, a boy and girl meet by coincidence and spend a day together. Since they are both Americans falling in love in front of an American Taco store, they are not threatened by the foreseeable separation of Linklater's protagonists, who share only one day in Vienna before they must continue on journeys with different destinations. So, what could prevent the couple from staying together? Perhaps indifference, boredom and the fact that they both suffer from skewed perceptions, fed by the odds and ends of internet information and the omnipresent imagery of advertisements and interchangeable action films. A highly entertaining criticism of a visual and emotional conformism, the film is vital proof of an innovative art, that claims America back from the producers of American stereotypes.
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JUDGE'S STATEMENT
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes about the counterproductive effort of overwhelming people by using the imagery of war as “shock therapy.” But even if pictures refrain from a manipulative aesthetic, which sells blood for consumer´s tears, very often there is no community, no “we,” as Sontag says, to share compassion for the victims. ”Photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.” Regarding consensus as a value, if it comes to condemning war and massacres, Sontag busies herself with Virginia Woolf’s writings, especially with Three Guineas, published in 1938, in which she says, “in a very tardy reply to a letter from an eminent lawyer in London who asked, ‘How in your opinion are we to prevent war?’” Assuming there is no “we,” since the abyss of class and ethnic preconceptions cannot be bridged by naive benevolence, Woolf underlines the necessity of an education devoted to the making and reading of the aesthetic subtexts of imagery. Sontag describes her understanding of Woolf’s approach: “Not to be pained by these pictures. . . would be the reaction of a moral monster. And, she is saying, we are not monsters, we members of the educated class. Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.”
How can we hold reality in our mind? What do we need to translate two-dimensional pictures into breathing, vital creations? Hunting the conditions of visual art that allow and support the impression to live literally in an image, I decided to concentrate on details. If people are not moved by the general view of war and manslaughter, perhaps they can be captured by the confluence of daily life details, reaching from a foreign image to the core of their existence. This is why I selected James Longley’s short-film SARI´S MOTHER
I am searching for images that neither confirm prejudices nor ideologies—neither asks too much. Indeed, there isn’t such a thing as an image asking too much. If we think we cannot endure looking at blood spilled in war or in the multifold rituals of hatred, we should keep in mind that looking at the cruelty and the heartbreaking that prove mankind’s insanity is nothing compared to suffering from it. If we want to prevent future racism, we need to look at its shapes. Understanding cinematographic language is not a burden but a chance. The masters of cinema, ever since the invention of cinema, have reflected upon the invisible challenges of the visual. Luckily, this is not only true within the framework of defeating propaganda material—from which war and which country so ever. It is also true if we search the imagery of metaphysics and spirituality— or the pleasure of visual sophistication as in Jamie Travis film trilogy PATTERNS.
JUDGE'S BIO
Heike Kuehn is a writer and film critic based in Frankfurt, Germany. A contributor to Die Zeit, Berliner Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Die Welt, and the film magazine epd-film she is a member of the collective that runs the annual film seminar Arnoldshainer Filmgespräche. She has served on numerous juries of the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique (FIPRESCI), including the Locarno International Film Festival, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Duisberg International Documentary Film Festival, Crakovia Short Film Festival, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (for which she also served as president) and, most recently, the Montreal Film Festival. |
