The Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Jonathan Murray

The sixtieth Thessaloniki International Film Festival took place between October 31 and November 10 2019. This latest edition of the festival built its showpiece International Competition around space philosopher Frank White’s theory of the “Overview Effect.” The latter refers to the cognitive and epistemological transformations that potentially take place when one reconsiders any large and seemingly familiar phenomenon by (re)viewing it through a deliberately widened aperture. But White’s idea is equally applicable to Thessaloniki’s curatorial remit and activities more generally: this festival has long offered a vital vantage point from which to perceive, and participate within, key ongoing and emergent developments within global film culture.

As in years past, the 2019 program was varied and extensive in equal measure. Twelve central programming strands (several of which contained dedicated substrands in turn) were accompanied by six major retrospectives. The latter included career-spanning tributes to filmmakers as diverse as Robert Beavers, Joanna Hogg, Dušan Makavejev, Gregory Markopoulos, and Albert Serra. While attempting to sample as many of the 2019 strands as possible, Cineaste concentrated its attention on the International Competition, the Greek Film Festival, and Open Horizons’ Main Program and Another Take sub-strands.

The 2019 International Competition’s Golden Alexander Award for Best Feature and the Best Actor Award went to Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come and that film’s lead performer, Amador Arias. Like several other entries within this year’s Competition, Laxe’s feature develops an intimate, yet scrupulously inquisitive, study of alienated middle-aged masculinity. The central protagonist (also named Amador) has recently done prison time for a large-scale act of arson within the forests of his native Galicia; when another major blaze occurs not long after his release, fingers are unsurprisingly pointed. Strikingly, however, Fire Will Come invests far more in themes (and beautifully composed images) of reflection rather than detection. Amador’s guilt remains a moot point—the interior effects of his hardscrabble rural way of life fascinate Laxe’s film far more.

In these respects, Fire Will Come feels closely related to two other International Competition major award winners. Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever won the Silver Alexander Special Jury Award, while Melina León’s Song without a Name took the Special Jury Award for Best Director and a Special Mention in the Mermaid Award for Best LGBTQI-themed Film. Like Fire Will Come, The Fever’s central protagonist is a middle-aged male from an impoverished rural background. Justino (Regis Myrupu), an indigenous Brazilian security guard, succumbs to the film’s mysterious titular malady. While the latter’s explicit cause and cure are left unspecified, Da-Rin posits that the collective experience of displaced indigenous communities within a rapidly urbanizing, but enduringly unequal, major South American society is an intrinsically hallucinatory one.

Song without a Name also explores a form of masculine alienation that potentially separates its sufferer from himself as well as from the society he inhabits: Pedro (Tommy Párraga) is a semicloseted investigative journalist repulsed when he discovers a flourishing infant-trafficking network in 1980s Peru. Unlike the films discussed above, however, Melina León infuses her film with a compelling investigative bent. While sensitively depicting the emotional consequences of such a heinous crime, her work is never distracted from the parallel task of tracing of its economic and political root causes and enabling mechanism. The sociopolitical possibilities associated with procedural narrative modes and structures also inform another impressive International Competition prize winner: Dag Johan Haugerud’s Beware of Children, which won the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film in the International Competition and the Hellenic Parliament’s Human Values Award. Over an extended (but essential) three-hour running time, Haugerud’s film painstakingly traces a complex web of interpersonal and legal consequences and nexuses that stem from a child’s accidental death on a Norwegian school’s premises.

The films discussed above offered compelling viewing experiences in their own right. But they also collectively constituted a helpful roadmap to certain key themes and preoccupations that surfaced across the International Competition more generally. Like The Fever and Fire Will Come, Alejandro Landes’ Monos depicts at length the complex relationship between central protagonists and the natural landscapes (often inhospitable ones) that surround and define those people. Recalling instead other key elements of those award-winning films, Peter Mackie Burns’s Rialto tells the painful story of Colm (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), a middle-aged man who becomes progressively more distanced from his immediate family. The unspoken reason for such alienation (a man’s struggle to accept the nonheterosexual aspects of his identity) also links Rialto to Song without a Name. Finally, like The Fever, Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s Swallow chooses to externalize and crystallize the repressive aspects of a particular cultural milieu (in this case, East Coast American high society) via the narrative device of an unexplained medical condition that afflicts the film’s central protagonist.

Thessaloniki’s International Competition always constitutes one of the event’s unique high points. So, too, however, does the festival’s annual focus on Greek cinema: in 2019, no fewer than twenty-seven Greek features and sixteen shorts graced the main program. As in editions past, new Greek work’s presence within the International Competition brought the nation’s cinema into dialogue with international crosscurrents while affording overseas visitors a gateway into the festival’s extensive local offering. Three Greek features took part within both the International Competition and Greek Film Festival strands. Rinio Dragasaki’s Cosmic Candy shared the Greek Film Centre Award for Best Greek Debut with Costas Athousakis’s Persephone. Cosmic Candy recalled its International Competition counterpart Swallow in several regards. Tonally speaking, both films are marked by a deliberate, blackly comic flirtation with elements of borderline surrealism deployed within an overarching realist narrative setting. The central characters of both are unhappy young women who struggle with a compulsion to ingest certain fetishistically selected physical objects (Swallow) or highly processed foodstuffs (Cosmic Candy). While neither protagonists’ dietetic habits are ones to emulate, their respective stories provide much food for thought.

The other two features present in both the International Competition and Greek Film Festival also had much to recommend them. Zacharias Mavroeidis’s Defunct won both the Fischer Audience Award for Best Film in the International Competition and the Youth Jury Award for Best Feature. Defunct illustrated a characteristic that—for the present correspondent at least—has defined much new Greek work that Thessaloniki has premiered in recent years. This shared characteristic involves local filmmakers’ imaginative and enterprising development of stories and narrative models that allow for sustained investigation of Greece’s complex twentieth-century history within a wide range of commercial genre formats. In Defunct’s case, elements of slacker and odd couple comic models are employed within a likeable allegorical story about problematic elements of both Greece’s present (socioeconomic disenfranchisement of large swathes of the country’s youth) and past (the stubborn scars left by the post-WWII civil war). The specific nature of Defunct’s awards haul testifies to the film’s successful lightness of touch in tackling contentious and controversial political subject matter in accessible ways.

Finally, Vardis Marinakis’s Zizotek illustrated contemporary Greek cinema’s diversity via that film’s clear difference from its local counterparts discussed above. Although set in the present, Zizotek wholeheartedly embraces fairy tale elements and ambience: an abandoned child strikes up an unlikely bond with a mute adult whom the boy encounters living alone in a forest’s heart. In this, Marinakis’s feature pointed toward wider stylistic and thematic threads running through the 2019 festival’s Greek offering (and, arguably, through much contemporary Greek cinema more generally), namely, a deliberate cross-pollination of cinematic narrative forms and traditions with much older antecedents. Also largely set within uninhabited woodland, for example, Minos Nikolakakis’s Entwined offers an atmospheric, utterly sincere transposition of ancient dryad mythology to present-day rural Greece. Costas Athousakis’s Persephone performs a not dissimilar move in choosing to play out a venerable Greek myth within a contemporary setting.

Cineaste also delved deep into the Main Programme and Another Take substrands of the Open Horizons section, Thessaloniki’s annual survey of the best new cinema from all parts of the globe. Katrin Gebbe’s Pelican Blood was one highlight, due to a superb lead performance by Nina Hoss. Hoss plays an adoptive mother whose concern regarding her new daughter’s antisocial behavior drives her, quietly but incessantly, toward utter irrationality. Elsewhere, Oliver Hermanus’s Moffie won the Festival’s Mermaid Award for Best LGBTQI-Themed Film. Hermanus’s feature is a moving account of a young man’s tentative coming out within an unimaginably repressive set of historical circumstances. Conscripted into the South African Army to perform two years of military service during the early 1980s, teenage Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer) swiftly learns that his own society poses a clear threat to personal and social security, rather than the diffuse, racialized Other with which a bigoted authoritarian regime spooks its citizens. Despite possessing a very different historical and geographical setting and aesthetic form, Zabou Breitman and Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec’s The Swallows of Kabul, which won the Fischer Audience Award for Best Open Horizons Film, provided a thought-provoking companion piece to Moffie. Like the latter, this animated feature used the motif of forbidden love: on this occasion, involving a young heterosexual Afghani couple who chafe under Taliban rule. Both movies use this archetypal device as a symbolic vehicle through which to underscore the lesson that any supremacist ruling clique’s desire to control its subjects’ lives is an unbendingly absolutist one.

Associative pairing of Moffie and The Swallows of Kabul also opens up wider perspectives on both the 2019 Open Horizons section specifically and Thessaloniki’s distinctive curatorial approach more generally. The festival’s long-term commitment to a holistic embrace and exploration of cultural diversity (reflected this year in its decision to use Frank White’s Overview Effect theory as a prism through which to present the International Competition) also finds direct articulation within Open Horizons. This is so not simply in terms of that section’s avowedly cosmopolitan remit to survey the best contemporary cinema from around the world. The same inclusive philosophy is also repeatedly visible within many of the selected features themselves.

For that reason, Moffie and The Swallows of Kabul were far from the only 2019 Open Horizons entries to foreground nationally specific struggles for the expression of diverse identities and exercise of fundamental human rights. Mounia Meddour’s Papicha was one of the entire festival’s most emotionally involving and expertly told selections—the story of a fearless young woman who pursues personal and professional freedom (she wishes to become a fashion designer) within the increasingly hostile (because nonsecular) sociopolitical climate of late-1990s Algeria. Shola Amoo’s The Last Tree is a ground-breaking cinematic exploration of British-Nigerian identity and experience. Despite this notable representational burden, Amoo’s film is brave and intelligent in depicting multiple forms of racial prejudice—whether those that are imposed on British BAME communities or those which grow from within those groupings. Like The Last Tree, Jorunn Myklebust Syversen’s Disco centers its attention on a teenage protagonist whose struggle to attain a stable and authentic sense of selfhood is complicated by her suspension between comparably compromised biological and adoptive family structures and wider formations of identity (in this case, associated with competing Scandinavian evangelical Christian sects).

With a festival as ambitious, cosmopolitan, and extensive as Thessaloniki, it’s impossible to see everything one might wish to—and equally difficult to do the experience full justice in a necessarily selective short review of any given festival edition’s contents. Cineaste took in forty features during our November 2019 visit, not all of them contained within the strands reported on above. Our other highlights from across the 2019 program included (in the Out of Competition section) David Zonana’s Workforce. Zonana’s feature brought to mind the best recent work of Ken Loach (and, setting- and subject-wise, Loach’s Bread and Roses [2000] most of all). This is so in terms of the unforced realism of Workforce’s ensemble performances, the film’s ability to incorporate significant elements of humor and emotional warmth within an inexorably naturalistic plot arc, and its outrage at socioeconomic deprivation and inequality’s persistence within an advanced modern society. Meanwhile, the festival’s Balkan Section demonstrated once again that Thessaloniki is an essential destination for anyone interested in Eastern and Southern European cinemas. Vinko Brešan’s What a Country! won the Fischer Audience Award for Best Film in this program strand. This unsparing satire on the brutalities of Croatian history during and after the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s unfolds via an inventive and unapologetic mode of absurdist deadpan, but is never frivolous in its historiographical intent or analysis.

Finally, Thessaloniki’s retrospective tribute to Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra was headed by one of the 2019 festival’s most intensely debated selections, the director’s latest feature, Liberté. Set mostly over the course of a single night in 1774, the film depicts, in remarkably extended, graphic detail, the open-air group sexual experiments of a small party of exiled French aristocrats. During a short in-person introduction, Serra counseled his unsuspecting audience that “a unique cinematic experience” awaited them. The number of walkouts after the lights dropped (some two-thirds of Cineaste’s section of the auditorium left early) represents one possible way of arguing that he was right. A more productive line of thought, however, involves seeing Liberté as an audaciously provocative attempt to reconnoiter the dimly lit borderland where Art Cinema as conventionally defined and practiced ends and other forms of “cinematic experience” begin. After all, the physical presence (and subsequent arousal and/or anger) of a theatrical viewing audience is essential to complete Liberté as an artwork. As the experience unfolds (or, perhaps better, disrobes) the proverbial fourth wall isn’t just breached—it’s bulldozed. What’s left is more like a happening than a screening: a single group of people, both living and long-dead, are compelled to establish and then navigate their own personal sexual and psychological perimeter fences as well as those of others, all under cover of dark.

All in all, Albert Serra’s preferred way of describing Liberté offers as good a gloss as any on the nature of the festival that programmed that film. A unique cinematic experience on the international festival circuit, Thessaloniki’s 2019 edition proved once again to be a notably impressive and inclusive curatorial achievement.

For information on the next Thessaloniki International Film Festival, visit here.

Jonathan Murray teaches film and visual culture at the Edinburgh College of Art.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste, Inc. 

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2