New Asian film fest a good show for RI

By Helene Feillard

DEAUVILLE, France (JP): The Asian crisis has had a positive impact after all; after being piqued by dramatic headlines from Indonesia, the French public has found a new interest in Indonesian films.

For a long time, Indonesia was simply not in the news. Today, even on a trip to the supermarkets, the French hear news about the change of regime, rioting, East Timor or massacres in Aceh. No wonder the first Asian Film Festival, held in Deauville from March 5 to March 7, met with increased interest from French cinephiles.

Deauville is one of France's hippest sea-side resorts. It was cold for the Asian film amateurs who converged on this small city west of Paris, but they quickly forgot about the weather and the rough seas to watch a selection of Asia's best and most recent films.

Twenty films were shown in just three days in two huge cinemas, the center International de Deauville and the Cinema du Casino de Deauville. This translated to around seven films per day.

The great majority of the films were new, with only two retrospectives by Shin Sang-Okk, the great Korean film maker. The festival got under way with the screening of Kuldesak by a collective of young Indonesian directors, followed by Storm Riders from Hong Kong's Wai Keung Lau.

The opening ceremony presented Joan Chen's much applauded first movie as writer/producer/director, introducing two extremely talented actors -- the young Lu Lu and Lopsang.

The festival was the brainchild of a group of Asia lovers and cinephiles who had nurtured the project over the past three years, having failed to stage it in 1998 due to the Asian monetary crisis. In the end the festival was held on a tiny budget, just 1.4 million French francs. Despite this and the organizational difficulties inherent in a first attempt the festival was a definite success, holding out great promise for the future of the event.

Ten Asian countries, Cambodia, South Korea, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, China (including Hong Kong) and Thailand were represented by a number of actors, actresses and directors.

In contrast to the jury at the Cannes film festival, Deauville elected to let the public decide the Prix Premiere du Public, From 20 films, 11 were selected and submitted to the audience and the winner was chosen by votes on cards distributed to the viewers.

The first prize fell to the breath-taking and poignant Indian film, Earth, by director Deepa Metha. The director and the film's leading actress, Nandita Das, were both at the festival and both received an enthusiastic ovation from the public. Nandita getting special attention for her exceptional portrayal of a nurse who accompanies a small Parsi girl through a Lahore beset by ethnic and religious strife. Deepa Metha offers a new angle to the street violence between Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims through the eyes of an innocent child who witnesses massacres, killings and lynchings. Deauville's public seemed unanimous in agreement on Earth's high quality and its strength of message. It was greatly applauded when Nandita Das accepted the prize from the festival's organizer, Alain Patel.

The festival did not give second or third prizes and it is difficult to measure the impact of the remaining 10 films. But it seemed that Indonesia's Daun Di Atas Bantal succeeded in raising great interest. Garin Nugroho's film was already shown in Cannes in June 1998, and was later screened in Parisian cinemas in December and January.

Strangely enough, the film did not attract many viewers (only around 1,500 tickets sold), but these are the worst months to show new films in France -- the two other films in the festival which were screened in cinemas in the winter, Deepa's Earth and Cambodian-born Rithy Pauli's Un Soir Apres La Guerre (An evening After The War), suffered a similar commercial fate.

In Deauville, Daun Di Atas Bantal was back in favor as the desperate life of street children in Indonesia's cities was moving for many here, if this can be measured by the number of viewers wiping tears from their eyes outside the cinema. Daun Di Atas Bantal is well directed and, despite the emotional subject, avoids Indonesian actors' recurrent temptation to overact.

Daun Di Atas Bantal stood out because it offered a different image of urban life than the majority of films shown in Deauville, which tended to show cities in an accelerated rhythm of images, day and night, flashes of neon, speeding cars, the mafia and violence. Variations of this were evoked in Tom bar Karaoke from Thai director Pen Ek Ratanamang, Blue Moon by the Taiwanese director Ke Yi Cheng, Swallowtail Butterfly by Japanese director Sunji Iwaiqui and Kuldesak by four young Indonesian directors, Mira Lesmana, Nan T. Achnas, Riri Riza and Rizal Mantovani, a film not granted the warm response given Nugroho's film.

Kuldesak was perceived as technically inferior to Daun and rejected for its amateurism. The film dared to compete in esthetics with the international avant-garde du cinema hoping this unconventional trial would boost Indonesian directors' creativity. The film's true value resides in the fact that it was produced at all and in its role as a forerunner of a more democratic cinematographic expression.

Kuldesak aims to encourage Indonesian filmmakers to overcome the constraints of their current situation. Could this be the start of a promising future?

Other successes in Deauville were Korea's Spring in my Home Town, praised for its beautiful images and mature composition, and Jam from Taiwan's Chen Yi Wen.

The audience was a young one and came mainly from Deauville's surroundings as Parisians tend not to venture far from Paris in the winter.

Organizers were happy though that the festival made a good start in spite of some complications for the organizers -- most notably that the copy of Earth arrived only one day before the beginning of the festival, not leaving much time for work on subtitles. The man behind the festival, Prof. Alain Patel, a French surgeon very active in Franco-Asian exchanges as well as cultural and medical assistance, said he was "encouraged" by the public's response in Deauville.

This year the festival ended in the red and will need perhaps three years to stand on its own, but, he says, "this is usual for all festivals. Deauville is a gambling city, so we accept the stakes."

The festival's aim is to give greater exposure to Asian cinema in France. Patel says the Deauville experience is expected to help the production crisis in Asia, while amplifying cultural exchanges between Europe and Asia.

Indeed, the French public knows and is fond of Japanese movies, and increasingly so of Chinese films, but Southeast Asia is till very much unknown to moviegoers, but perhaps it time for this to change.

Some of the films shown at Deauville evoked Asian filmmakers' dilemma of how to cope with the economic crisis and its impact on film financing. Many Asian directors complained they had difficulty finding production houses.

The question is raised of the relationship between film directors and government sponsors: how much independence can a government sponsored film have?

But Asian films in general must also face the threat of the widening impact of films made for television, more attractive to producers tempted by short-term profits. An Asian director's independence can only be guaranteed by a small budget, making technical ambitions difficult to satisfy -- Kuldesak being a good case in point.

An exception was Andrew Lau's Stormriders, which was warmly applauded by the public in Deauville. Lau's special effects were very convincing although he admits having spent only a tenth of what a Hollywood film spends for special effects. The Asian economic crisis may have given new vigor and efficiency to Asia's film industry, together with revived interest from Europe.