By Alex Deleon, Miskolc
September 19, 2013
As befits an international film festival, Cinefest Miskolc offers a mixed bag of new international features in competition, a cache of old classics, non-competition information films, a strong slate of docs and shorts, a goodly turnout of international directors here to present their films, and seminars with prominent visiting professionals. The media presence is still primarily from within Hungary but can be expected to expand in the future as this still young at ten years old festival becomes better known.
The "House of Arts" with three projection halls inside is the home of the Jameson CineFest in sunny downtown Miskolc.
A listing of films viewed so far with directors, country and basic themes:
Halima's Way,Anton Ostojic, Croatia, the Jugoslav war.
Krugovi, (Circles), Srdan Globovic, Serbia; The Jugoslav war Young and Beatiful (jeune et belle) François Ozon, France,
Sex between young female and older men, pornography.
Floating Skyscrapers, (Plynace Wiezowce), Tomasz Wasilewski, Poland; sex, gayness between males, bisexuality, pornography.
Il Futuro, (the future) Alice Scherson (Italy);
sex, young female and much older man, (Rutger Hauer!), pornography => [Note: pornography plays a role in all of these sex-oriented fiĺms ...pointing up one of the accepted ills of contemporary society]
Iron Sky,Tino Vuorensala, Finland;
Sci-fi, Nazis (A highly imaginative comedy to say the least -- surviving Nazis now live on the dark side of the moon ! -- (Shook many people out of the doldrums at Berlin last year)
Glorious Deserters, (Deserteurs), Gabriele Neudecker, Austria;
The Nazis in retrospect, from an Austrian perspective, told as first-person narratives by young men who were ostracized after the war.
You and the Night, (Les rencontres d'après), Yann Gonzalez, France;
Avant garde experimentalism, sex, surrealism, weirdness
with - Alain Fabien Delon, son of a famous father! (as its principal
saving grace)
Sugar, Ryan Fleck/Anna Boden, USA; [Info] Immigration, race relations, and baseball ... after a fashion. xlnt non-professional black cast.
Ex-Jugoslav Directors go Head to Head in friendly competition:
Two strong dramas from neighboring former Jugoslavia dealt with the aftermath of the war that made that multi-ethnic country break up into half a dozen descendant states.
"Halima's Way", by Croatian director Arsen Anton Ostojic, takes up the question of the proper reburial of Bosnian war massacre victims in mass graves and was previously viewed at the Southeast European film festival in Los Angeles. The film was accorded a standing ovation here and director Ostojic informed me that he has now traveled to over a dozen festivals with Halima where it has picked up no less than 17 awards. "Halima" will be the Croatian entry in the 2014 Oscars in Hollywood.
The Serbian drama "Krugovi" (Circles) is so named because of the ripple of after effects permeating the lives of people now widely scattered, who witnessed or participated in the murder of a Serbian soldier by his own comrades when he tried to save an innocent Moslem storekeeper from being beaten to death in the public square of a peaceful country town twelve years earlier. An extremely complex story that is structured like a whodonewhat thriller because the key evidence of the public square brutality is not revealed until the very end. Director Srban Golubovic, is one of the leading new directors in Belgrade and this picture shows why.
Both of the above films are based on actual events that took place in a horrible civil war whose memories still all too fresh in the minds of those who went through it. Interestingly Srdan and Arsen are competing against each other both here and again in the next Oscars. My feeling is that "Circles" will grab the honors here, but I may be slightly prejudiced because I have old friends from the Montenegran town of Trebinje where Circles is centered, and have always wondered what that far away place looked like. Trebinje and the surrounding area is very much a character in "Krugovi".
Serbian director Srdan Golubovic fields audience questions from the stage after the screening of his hypnotic polit thriller KRUGOVI
And finally, a quick note to an American friend on the most exotic film of the week, just seen with a surprisingly lengthy Q@A with the director that went on until near Midnight. The title is "SUGAR", the name of the hero, and this American indie qualifies as 'exotic' here on three grounds; (1) the subject is American baseball -- more exotic in Hungary than soccer or rugby is in the States, (2) not only baseball, but Minor League, Bush league baseball, and (3) the whole business seen through the eyes of black Spanish speaking players from the Dominican Republic!
You'll probably never get to see it because it was released in 2008 as an HBO/American Film Showcase production and has not had any public circulation to speak of, but i'm just telling you about it because it was so off-the-wall weird -- especially turning up in a place called "Meesh-colts" in the Hungarian outback!
The whole first half hour takes place in the Dom. Republic, which shares half of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (Columbus landed there) with Haiti, the poorest country in the world -- and the language spoken was a dialect of Spanish so thick I had to read the Hungarian subtitles to follow it.
The main guy Miguel "Sugar" Santos is a young good looking talented pitcher who is spotted by an American baseball scout and picked up by one of the low level Kansas City farm teams. From there it segues to a small baseball town in Iowa where Sugar is assigned to a very proper church going Grace before dinner religious white family who are baseball fans -- to live with them and learn English. They have a squeaky clean blonde daughter who will start making him forget his true love back home, and it goes on from there to something very different from the success stories we are conditioned to expect from sports minded films of this kind.
There are lots of baseball scenes, mostly intended to illustrate Sugar's curve ball prowess, but pitching is not the stuff that motion picture suspense is made of, so the baseball scenes are more or less background filler for Sugar's personal drama which is the body of the film.
No time for deails here but I can tell you that it ends up in Porto Rican New York with numerous unexpected twists and turns. Basically a Spanish language film inhabited mostly by black non-actors, which gives it a kind of semi-documentary authenticity you would never get with somebody like Denzil Washington in the lead.
A real one-of-a-kinder that raised many questions from an intelligent Hungarian gathering -- far more than I thought it would. But no shit -- a black baseball flick in the backwoods of Hungary is almost an event in itself. I can't say that I loved this film but it was certainly worth sitting through and sticking around afterward merely for its uniqueness if nothing else. A great baseball film it was not, but as a problematic Caribbean immigration film it works on multiple levels. And as a Black film the all it needed was a couple of songs by Lena Horne to make it an instant classic.
Directed in tandem by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Jose Rijo, an amateur actor with charisma to burn, was impressive as the titular hero "Sugar". Director Ryan Fleck was here to present the film and field audience questions.
CineFest founder and director, Tibor Biro, is constantly on his
handy hotline during festival days ...
Internationally famous sand animation artist, Ferenc Cakó, is
serving as a member of the international jury. Seen here with
lovely wife Ildiko at the venerable festival hotel Pannonia.