New Asian film fest a good show for RI

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.