Hani Mustafa reviews the highlights of the Milano Film Festival The Milano Festival of African, Asian and Latin American Cinema, which takes place annually in March, is an exceptional opportunity for films from these parts of the world to find exposure. Initially the festival had only paid attention to African cinema, whether produced in Africa or about African immigrants. This went on from 1991 until 2003, when the festival changed its name and added both Asia and Latin America, turning into a forum for cinema from the South as a whole. In this, the 20th round of the festival, the Egyptian filmmaker Ahmed Maher is on the Window on the World (i.e. the official competition) jury while Ahmed Abdalla's Heliopolis competed for the Best African Film prize. There are also official competitions for documentary and short films, with special programmes on cinema and football -- a unique feature to celebrate the next World Cup -- to be held in July in South Africa. There is also a newly introduced section entitled Forget Africa, which shares a programme with the Rotterdam Film Festival. The winner of the Best Film prize in the official competition was the Korean filmmaker Ounie Lecomte's debut, . It is a film that rests on the kind of powerful drama that approaches tragedy. The story of a little girl named Jinhee (Sae Ron Kim) who rides behind her father on his bicycle and seems happy in his company, it opens with scenes in which the filmmaker insists on closing in the frame so that no sign of the father's face appears at any point. The only scene in which the viewer glimpses the face of the father is when he leaves Jinhee in an orphanage attached to a church: the state of sorrow on his face as he sees his daughter for the last time, then leaves. The daughter, whose father willfully parts with her, is shocked to be at the orphanage. The scenes depicting her first few days there clarify the extent of her suffering in the attempt to adapt to a new environment while the script moves forward through minor details of life in the orphanage. It depicts the love story between the supervisors and her lover, for example, showing how they undertake their relationship as it were by correspondence. The film, which is particularly strong on acting, also registers Jinhee's relationship with an older colleague who hides the fact that she has turned 12 to avoid being evicted from the orphanage. Through a range of childhood pursuits the relationship between them intensifies. A memorable moment is when the bird they have raised together dies and they bury it in the garden. Thus Jinhee's second shock: following her being adopted by a family, her best friend leaves. At this point Jinhee decides to bury herself, just like the bird, in one of the most beautiful scenes in this film. The film ends when a European family adopts Jinhee, and for the first time since her entering the orphanage we see her smile in the course of the farewell party the children of the orphanage throw for her. One of the films screened in the official competition was Rigoberto Pérezcano's Norteado (Northless), a Mexican- Spanish co-production. This is the fictional debut of Pérezcano, who had made several documentaries. Certainly his directorial technique demonstrates documentary experience -- a purely cinematic language that departs in many ways from conventional, dramatically based technique. Set initially in the frontier town of Tijuana, the best known crossing point for illegal immigrants from Mexico into America, the film opens with a young man named Andrés (Harold Torres), who has left his family to seek his fortunes in the land of opportunity. There is little dialogue and few dramatic shifts, eschewing immersion in humane details that might distract from the main dramatic line which concerns Andrés's border passage. The scene in which Andrés meets the middle man who will take him across the border is not only silent but dry, but as such it serves as an adequate introduction to the story, introducing the journey through the desert borderlands. Here each man is for himself: either they make it across or they are arrested; the director does not indulge in scenes showing the brutality of the police with illegal immigrants. His concern is to give an effective idea of André's failure to make his way to America and his return to Mexico, as it were, with his tail between his legs. Andrés reaches a greengrocer's in Mexican frontier town right behind the border, and works temporarily for the owner, Ela (Alicia Laguna), who is in her forties, and her young partner Cata (Sonia Couoh). Human relations develop but in the same slow tempo: Andrés takes Ela out to dinner, and they grow emotionally closer. Neither Cata nor her boyfriend Asensio (Luis Càrdenas) like Andrés much initially, but things eventually improve. The script never stops at such emotional and humane points, however: relations are never developed, and all that is emphasised is the transient nature of Andrés stay. It turns out that Cata's dislike for Andrés has its roots in the fact that her ex-husband too had immigrated illegally to America, and no sooner did he get there than he phoned her to say that their life together was over. Andrés, hidden inside an armchair, is eventually driven by Asensio across the border -- the ending and perhaps the film's most beautiful scenes. The Tunisian filmmaker Raja Ammari's Dawaha: Buried Secrets -- also screened in the official competition, it received the Best African Film award -- presents an appropriately exoticised, magic realism-imbued dose of Orientalism. It revolves around a family of three women: the mother and her two daughters, Reda and Aicha, the latter -- an adolescent -- seemingly mentally challenged. The entire family squats in an abandoned wing of a remote palace in Tunis, where the servants used to live. The story begins when the palace heir arrives with his girlfriend, and the director depicts Aicha as she watches the couple engaging in an intimate moment. The voyeur appears like a ghost whose presence the two lovers never sense. An intense dramatic shift occurs when the girlfriend discovers this poor family, with the result that she is kidnapped and kept prisoner in the former servants' wing. The script is full of violence on the part of the mother, whether directed against Aicha or the girlfriend -- and the film ends with a number of murders committed by Aicha.
