France's reel deal at second Jakarta French Film Festival
By Nicolas Colombant
JAKARTA (JP): The poster for the second Jakarta French Film Festival on Dec. 10 - Dec. 14 has a bajaj pedicab veering onto the Carre Richelieu in Paris with the pyramids of the Louvre in the background.
The scene to be played out at the festival is actually the other way around, as French cinema arrives on a turf dominated by the fists of action-packed Hollywood movies and by Tinseltown's big names in bright lights.
Two categories of movies will be showcased at two different venues. Nine creme de la creme French features, subtitled in Indonesian, will be shown at the Taman Ismail Marzuki's Graha Bhakti Budaya theater. "Youth cinema" is also represented, with four feature-length films by young French directors at the French Cultural Center's video room on Jl. Salemba Raya.
The festival travels to Surabaya on Dec. 13, with an evening screening of three movies at Plaza Surabaya, intertwined with cocktail breaks of French cuisine. The fare will be a diverse mix of recent movies, most of them released this year, covering many of the genres -- love stories, psychological thrillers, historical panoramas and social sketches -- which make up the strength of the French moviemaking style.
"By defending our national cinema, we defend all national cinemas," commented the former cultural counselor of the French Embassy, Philippe Garnier, before leaving his post after more than three years in the country. "We have to combat the idea that globalization means monoculturism.
"Aren't we bored with always the same type of movies? Do not just sit and watch what the Americans are doing, stand up and produce your own movies," was Garnier's battle cry when he met the leading professionals of Indonesia's struggling movie industry at a seminar on coproductions last year.
Indeed, the underground competing against the forces of the American Film Exporters Association is not a crowded one. There are great filmmakers in every country, but rarely do their works make it outside of repertoire festivals or artsy film houses, even within their own countries.
India has its musicals with gangsters and forbidden love. Hong Kong has its martial arts productions and cutting edge black comedies. Britain has its down-and-out independent movies which attract cult followings. But only France has truly put in place a moneymaking industry which regularly churns out quality movies and familiar faces with international star appeal: Gerard Depardieu, Juliette Binoche or Catherine Deneuve come to mind.
Truth be told, the industry is largely subsidized. Out of every movie ticket sold in France, 11 percent goes into the coffers of a national producer's association. And French movies have met little success when crossing borders.
Despite the many obstacles, French film entrepreneurs such as Michel Houdayer, the audiovisual attache at the French Embassy, continue in their efforts to break the monopoly of U.S.-made movies.
"Clearly our goal is to create an economic environment which will be favorable to the distribution of French film," Houdayer said from his Menteng office, besieged by an array of film reels, promotional posters and heaps of subtitles in the days leading up to the festival.
"And the second emphasis is to put on display a festival which is appealing to the Indonesian public."
The festival is a joint effort of the French Embassy, the Cultural Center of France and Unifrance Film, the state-supported body which coordinates the export of the French movie industry abroad. Similar festivals are organized yearly in Yokohama, Mexico, Prague, Munich and Hong Kong.
This year's festival will be public-oriented and very much alive outside of screenings, unlike last year's debut.
"The presentation of the French movies are very important but they are only the tip of the iceberg in what we are trying to do," Houdayer explained.
Film directors, actors and producers are being flown over to meet their Indonesian counterparts. Included among the visiting dignitaries are actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, whose first movie, Tonka, which will open the event, and its producer Jean-Francois Lepetit, who made Three Men and a Baby, which was a remake of his own French movie, and who visited here last year.
A meeting is being organized between Laurent Allary, the regional Unifrance delegate based in Tokyo, and Harris Lasmana of the Subentra Group. Lasmana, the operational director of the Studio 21 chain, now prevalent in Jakarta's state-of-the-art malls, will be accompanied by his team of regional distributors. They are curious to find out if something other than the habitual fare of blockbusters can please Indonesian moviegoers
Following afternoon shows, informal sessions will take place between a representative of each movie and the public to check this pulse. Spectators will vote on each movie and during the closing ceremony a "public's prize" will be awarded.
To attract viewers, the French Cultural Center has called on the expertise of two artists from the South of France who coin themselves as "a graphic commando unit". Cecile Gras and Pascal Humbert are working with dozens of students from the Jakarta Arts Institute's School of Fine Arts to "poetically invade the physical space of the festival". The result will be a surprise to the festival's organizers and attendants alike, and maybe to the artists themselves.
Not coincidentally, when all the art is torn down, and the French film community packs up its reels and heads out of town the day after the festival ends, a team of Indonesian filmmakers and French producers will start shooting the movie Telegram in Cirebon, West Java. Putu Wijaya's script is adaptation of his own novel of the same title.
The movie is funded by a French government grant, coproduced by Art Cam International, a French production company, and directed by Indonesian Slamet Rahardjo. The movie is scheduled to be released in both Indonesia and France next year. Maybe that is when the bajaj will really get to rev up and down the cobblestoned streets of Paris.