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 OLIVIA STEWART gives us a wrap up of her BIFF experience for 2008.
The hard part about being a professional reviewer is having less time to enjoy a festival’s spectrum of choices. Other commitments meant forgoing BIFF seventeen big events and stellar guests – spearheaded by Morgan Spurlock and his opening night film Where in The World Is Osama Bin Laden? – or reflecting on a star talent lost too soon with Heath Ledger’s posthumous Chauvel Award.
Terrorism and war were BIFF’s most topical themes, and subsequently featured prominently in the program, Katyn was shocking and sobering, not just for its graphic, stomach-turning depiction of the brutal World War II execution of 12,000 Polish reserve officers from the nation’s intelligentsia – thus wiping out the future generation of Poland’s best and brightest minds. Equally disturbing was its expose of the victors’ power to not only write, but also rewrite, history - the Soviets had elaborately reconstructed events to falsely blame the Nazis.
Writer/director Andrzej Wajda’s film was a watershed, revealing the truth that couldn’t be told publicly until after the death of Soviet communism, his mastery, and viewers’ sense of social conscience, saw Katyn claim eighth in BIFF’s Top 10.
Without the same intensity, but similarly provoking a sense of outrage at political manipulation and corruption, was Z, a sell-out session despite being made in 1969.
A thinly-disguised reconstruction of a Greek politician’s assassination, this Oscar-winning French-Algerian political thriller retained potency in an ever-more cynical world.
Terror’s Advocate had a fascinating subject: controversial French lawyer Jacques Verges, who has defended Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal and a female Algerian bomber he later married. Unfortunately, Barbet Schroeder devoted too much of its 132 minutes to early cases and talking heads, barely touching on Barbie.
Jeanne Moreau lent gravitas to One Day You Will Understand, an understated account of a son’s quest to find answers about his family’s Holocaust history in the face of his mother’s silence. A faithful German production of Hansel and Gretel provided lighter viewing. Revisiting the Brothers Grimm fairytale as an adult, I found myself considering the moral, which, apart from a basic triumph of good over evil, seemed to be don’t abandon your children because they’ll find their way home anyway.
Every year you have to pick one dud, and for me it was The Sun Also Rises, a China/Hong Kong production BIFF’s Ben Cho proclaimed as “magnificently realised and bursting with giddying exuberance”. Jumping from one story to another with odd characters and scenarios, I just didn’t get it.
Now giddying actually did apply to Man On Wire, featuring the irrepressible and eccentric (one might say ‘mad’) French highwire walker Philippe Petit, who spent 45 minutes casually playing on a cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. UK director James Marsh has crafted his doco, voted BIFF’s fourth favourite, entertainingly in the style of a heist caper. One surprise was finding Aussie documentary-maker Mark Lewis (Cane Toads) featured as a co-conspirator, Marsh also captured moments of poignancy, via the supporting players Petit left in the shadows and footage of the WTC site when construction commenced, eerily similar to its post-9/11 appearance.
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