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Beyond the red carpet
Being a jury member at the Troia film festival in Portugal is not as grand as it sounds. Yet, it was a golden opportunity to catch movies one is unlikely to ever see in India, writes Bhaichand Patel.
After a few days, you suffer from film festival fatigue. How many films can one see in a day? I know festival regulars who will start at nine in the morning and go on till past midnight. They manage to see six or seven films in a day if you count the ones they walk out of because the film has not met their exacting standards. My mind ceases to function after the third screening of the day. After that, it is all a blur. Films are best enjoyed in small doses. My tolerance is particularly low for high-brow films that have lots of shaky camera work and an aura of aesthetic integrity. They can be infuriatingly bad. Friends claim that I sometimes snore at these screenings and disturb their sleep.
I am happy to report that my 10 days at the Troia film festival in Setubal were an altogether happy experience. The delightful seaside town is an hour’s drive south of the Portuguese capital of Lisbon and I was invited to be on their press jury. This is not as grand as it sounds. There is a film festival in progress somewhere in the world every day of the year and some even overlap. The organisers of these events have a hard time rounding up an international jury. They would like to invite Tom Cruise or Shah Rukh Khan, but will they come?
That’s where I come in. If you are on a jury you get to party a lot and hobnob with celebrities, more so in a modest film festival such as Troia than at somewhere as huge as Cannes. The downside is that, wherever you are, you have to sit through a lot of God-awful movies. On such occasions, it is always advisable to locate the exit nearest you. Or snooze.
My four colleagues at Troia were from Poland, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal. Our task was relatively simple. While there were over a hundred films, we were to select the best film from only 16 that were in the official competition. That meant seeing no more than two films a day. Even I could handle that. It gave me time to see some of the out-of-competition films, especially those from India: Shwaas, Bow Barracks Forever and Mansarovar. This year, Troia also paid homage to Satyajit Ray by putting up a retrospective of his films. Who wouldn’t want to see Mahanagar and Charulata again? But the problem was that all the Ray films were on DVD, not 35mm. I saw not much point in coming all the way to Portugal to watch these DVDs when they are available in the dungeons of Palika Bazaar in Delhi for Rs 200.
The opening night film was a bit of a dud (Factotum from Norway starring Matt Dillon) but it was preceded by a rare screening of Terje Vigen, a silent 1917 masterpiece. Made by Victor Sjostrom, who contributed significantly to the international pre-eminence of Sweden in silent cinema, it’s based on Henrik Ibsen poem, whose death centennial is being commemorated this year. Terje Vigen has all the eye-rolling and melodramatic gestures common to the films of that era but Sjostrom was a master storyteller. The audience sat through the 53 minutes spellbound by a tale of the sea and the people who earn a meagre living from it.
Sandip Ray, son of Satyajit and a filmmaker himself, was on the main jury that gave the top prize, The Golden Dolphin, to an Israeli film, Eyal Halfon’s What a Wonderful Place. The film is populated by immigrants, mostly illegal, who have come to a troubled land to work as hookers, farm hands or domestic help. These people are at the bottom of the Israeli economic and social ladder and the director shows dexterity in having the paths of these people cross again and again. The title of the film is ironic.
It was a good film but our jury opted for a Chilean film, Matias Bize’s In Bed. The story is set on one night with only two characters, strangers who meet at a party and end up in a motel bed. The two don’t even know each other’s names, one is about to get married, but end up revealing their fears and innermost secrets. The film was a small gem. You won’t see In Bed in this country any time soon. It is too sexually frank for Indian sensibilities.
