Delighted, Samir Farid writes from Thessaloniki Despite the crisis now suffocating Greece, unprecedented since the coup d'etat of the 1960s, the 52nd Thessaloniki International Film Festival (4-13 Nov) was held as scheduled. In this way Greece indicates that art is not party to political conflict, and that culture is the basis of civilisation: a point that it is only natural for the oldest civilisation in Europe to be making. Thessaloniki is one of the most important festivals in Europe (and by extension the world): after Cannes, Venice and Berlin, Rotterdam and Locarno. No doubt there is a connection between the volume of productions and the size and importance of the festivals in each of the host countries. The first time I attended Thessaloniki was in 1999, and I was honoured to be on the jury in 2003; indeed it has been among the principal constituents of my cultural constitution in the last decade. Over the course of its history the festival has discovered a great number of those who would later become significant players on the international film scene, especially under the directorship of the great film critic Michael Dimopoulos, including the American master Jim Jarmusch. At present the festival is directed by Dimitri Eipides. Thessaloniki is an enriching experience: as well as the films, you encounter books, photo exhibitions, seminars and debates. The only disappointment was the way in which two absolute gems were not sufficiently rewarded, the American filmmaker Mark Jackson's Without (which received the best director award) and the Greek filmmaker Menelaos Karamaghiolis's JACE (which received the best actress award). As for the rest of the awards, they were evidently selected by standards outside the arena of artistic-aesthetic value. * First, a word about the Arab contribution, which was not part of the official competition. Having watched most Arab films produced this year, I can safely vouch for the Morrocan filmmaker Leïla Kilani's On the Edge being the best of them all; the film had been screened in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes and also at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. I was honoured to head the jury of the National Moroccan Film Festival of 2009, when Kilani received the special jury prize for her feature- length documentary Forbidden Places. On the Edge is her fiction debut. In both films, the social and political issues of the homeland are the artist's principal preoccupation; she depicts these issues with passion as well as artistic skill, proving herself a distinguished auteur particularly on this occasion. While Forbidden Places dealt with political detention, On the Edge centres on Badia (Soufia Issami), a shrimp factory worker in Tangiers who practises prostitution and robbery with her coworker Imane (Mouna Bahmad); they are joined also by two middle-class girls working in the duty-free sector: Asma (Sara Betioui) and Nawal (Nouzha Akel): an all-female gang, arrested at the start of the film, prior to the titles; only afterwards do we see the circumstances that drove these women to such a lifestyle in crime as well as the night underworld of Tangiers, of which we see no cityscape until the middle of the film. Here as in Forbidden Places the style is neither wholly documentary nor fictional; Kilani is reminiscent of the Dardenne brothers, but with a Moroccan originality all her own. Along those lines, Kilani makes use of unprofessional actresses, among whom Soufia Issami stands out as truly impressive, thanks to the coaching of the director, especially in the scenes were she is scrubbing her body in the shower after a day at the factory -- removing not only the smell of shrimps but the misery of her life. Extremely long shots give an impression of spontaneity and flow. Some may take issue with Kilani for making men in the film background ghosts with no role in the life of the characters whether positive or negative, placing the film in a narrow female space. Yet I feel this detail merely reconfirms the originality of the artist, for she is as much a woman as a Moroccan as a modernist and an activist struggling for social equity and freedom. * Without is a work with many connotations; the film could have been called Untitled, Meaningless, even Void. Jackson is an auteur in every sense of the word, not only because he is the director, screenwriter and editor but also, more importantly, because of his distinctive, peerless cinematic style and his profound vision, recalling the Beckett and Sartre. The film is classic in the sense of preserving the Aristotelian unity of place, time and topic and in terms of the meticulous, painting-like framing. Most of the action takes place in a stylish house in Washington, where all the implements of modern luxury are available. Far from material misery, the film depicts spiritual and existential misery. It is a call for philosophical contemplation offering pure cinematic enjoyment without preconceptions of any kind. This takes place through a relationship between Joslyn, a college student not yet 20, and the octogenarian Frank, who is wheelchair bound, cannot speak and is perhaps also deaf. During her holiday, Joslyn arrives at the house to take care of Frank -- for money, in the absence of his only daughter, who is away with her family. During those days Joslyn, the young woman, appears as lonely, indeed as disabled as Frank. They never truly interact, each living in their own egotistic monologue, in an entirely separate world, the only connection between them taking place through touch which Joslyn cleans Frank's body. You do not like either of them, nor hate them. Instead you contemplate the state they are in, wondering about youth, age, strength and weakness. All the secondary characters dramatically serve the two characters, and Jackson's skill comes through in their ghostliness and absolute frivolity, rendered through the shot angles and the audiovisual context; we can hardly see them, we can simply hear what they say and sense what their presence. * JACE is the second full-length feature by its director, which comes 13 years after the first, Black Out ; the title is an acronym for Just Another Confused Elephant, a reference to the fact that, when an elephant loses its parents, it becomes confused and distressed. This is the state of the protagonist of the film, who has no real name and remains silent for the nearly three hours duration of the film; each party gives him a different name. The film tells his story from the age of seven to the age of 27, in three stages each of which features a different actor. The length of the film reflects its epic style and the long temporal space and multiplicity of places it includes; not is a minute is superfluous or wasted. The epic approach reflects a sense of belonging to Greek culture, recalling Homer, of whom Karamaghiolis proves himself a worthy heir, for this is the first truly epic Greek film. This new epic from Greece about our times since the fall of the Berlin Wall reveals a perceptive and engaging vision of what has been happening in the world. In a seamlessly powerful blend, it combines historical reality with a sense of the metaphysical absolute -- without the least depiction of political events at any level but rather through an expression of human potential at its lowest as in the Balkan Wars through the life of a Greek-Albanian child whose mother is killed while she was feeding him by her brother because the father was her brother-in-law; the boy does not see his father until the age of seven. That same day, said father is killed right before the child's eyes by a members of a human- trafficking gang. Before he dies, the father tells his son never to utter a word -- and he remains silent throughout his life, trying in vain to flee the gang -- until he too is killed. This is a contemporary Ulysses, without heroism and without a lover awaiting his return. The style of directing adopts all the elements of the epic, making the film a landmark in the postmodern.
