Q&A

There was something in the air at the Hotel Urban during this morning’s Q&A with the artists; that fizzy anticipation of the last day of school that you can almost taste. For the very last time this year, everyone took their places among the multicoloured seating installation that was our press conference room and waited with baited breath as the victorious and the vanquished were announced.

The smiley director Ismet Ergun kicked off the dance with an emotional and intimate insight into what spurred her to make the film “Bende Sira” (it’s my turn): “I grew up in a town in Turkey where me and my friends didn’t get much opportunity to go to the cinema. My uncle however, ran a cinema and I used to take my friends there after school. The places however were limited and so we used to take it in turns”. The film was screened yesterday in Sala Excelsior without subtitles which many assumed to be a technical error. On the contrary, it was the director’s explicit choice: “I didn’t want to have any words, but instead to show the audience just the images. I studied art; I love to make the images appear as if you were looking at it in a frame”.

Presenting Laila Pakalnina, director of “uguns” (fire) and festival documentary jury member, was writer Tiziano Scarpa, who uses the directors documentary-esque perspective as the background for his poetry readings. “I only told her about it when I saw her here in Trieste – explained the writer- luckily she wasn’t angry and didn’t blame me”. When questioned about the form she used, the literary director replied “I started filming feature films, then eventually I decided to write a short: it’s the same difference between running long distance and sprinting, just two different disciplines of the same sport.”

Director of “Za 4 godine” (In Four Years Time), Nebojsa Slijepevic explained “I had been commissioned to make a film on a twenty six year old boy who, after a terribly road accident, was forced to use a wheel chair. What struck me most was his passion for the visual stimulation.”

A pinch of Italy was exposed in director Georges Salameh’s, “Oros Falakro” (Mount Falakro)- a travel diary through research into the Greek civil war: “I came to Italy after I had finished my studies in France. I had worked in Sicily on a documentary on the mafia and decided to stay there seeing as my wife is from Palermo”. Then on the film: “I had filmed everything more than 10 years ago, but I only decided to put it together a little while ago: it was a sort of pilgrimage through memory”.

Fabrizio Grosoli revealed how he was touched by the provocative suffering exposed in the film and introduced “Das geheimnis von deva” (The Secret of Deva). The film tells the story of two young gymnasts training at Deva and of the everyday sacrifices they must endure in order to achieve success. Director, Anca Miruna Lazarescu commented on this: “it was quite selfish of me. I used to do gymnastics but I gave up very early because I wasn’t that good, I never managed to get to the top....Pitic and Malina though, the two children, should be able to have the success they deserve” 

Lazarescu went on to discuss the school’s training methods: “it’s strange to see athlete’s so young suffering in such a way, particularly because of the brutal methods used by the trainers”.

Serbian directors Dinko Tucakovic and Milan Nikodijevic tackle a very sensitive subject with “Zabranjeni bez zabrane” (Censurati senza censura). The film is based on the “black wave” cinematographic movement and the censorship it suffered which also had an effect on Nikodijevic’s own film: “it is based on the censorship imposed by the totalitarian regime, but the ex-Yugoslavian dissidents weren’t portrayed negatively. We wanted to shoot whatever we pleased but at the same time we didn’t want to go to prison as had happened to others during other totalitarian regimes in Europe. Then a little curio from Tucakovic: “the film is going to become a small television series: we filmed over 40 hours worth of interviews which we couldn’t put into one film. So now we’re going to make 5 separate episodes out of them”.

The last interview of the day was with Alvaro Petricig director of “Mala Apokalipsa”, which had its world premiere in Sala Azzura. “I was in an abandoned village and I wondered to myself why, as humans, are we so fascinated by ruins? I wanted to recuperate some elements of a humanity which otherwise might have been lost”. The director carried on to talk about the technical elements: “I used a diverse mix of materials and linked them to the images which would recall the ruins. I used past history and old materials, whilst at the same time imagining what would become of these abandoned places in the future”.