Thessaloniki International Film Festival


November 10 - 19 (Greece)



With daily temperatures of 26-27 degrees
C and nightly festivities fuelled by the generous flowing of sponsors'
highly drinkable products, Thessaloniki's 's 41st International
Film Festival proved a lively fin de saison event thay not only
showcased a strong selection of features from other festivals but
managed to secure some international premieres in both competitive
and hors concours slots.

With
avant-garde British director Peter Greenaway's The Death of a
Composer programmed as the official surprise film on the closing
day (19th), the festival also brought at the last minute veteran
New Yorker Jerry Schatzberg's first feature in 11 years, The
Day the Ponies Come Back, a highly engaging dramatic comedy
about a young Parisian (well played by rising star Guillaume Canet)
in search of his lost father in a remarkably run-down area of the
Bronx today.

In
the International Competition for first or second features, the
main jury chose Polish-born Pawel Pawlikowski's BBC-funded film
Last Resort as Best Film, receiving the Golden Alexander
trophy and 12,500,000 drachnmas cash and also saluted the thespian
skills of leading actress Dina Korzun as a resourceful Russian mother
looking for refuge in an almost Orwellian modern Britain, and Paddy
Considine as the wily local who befriends her. The film also won
the top award of the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Jury and will
be released in cinemas in the UK on 23 February 2001. Another more
thoroughly Polish debut, Happy Man directed by Malgorzata
Szumonowka, also focussing on an intense relationship between a
distraught mother and her more grown-up son in contemporary Cracow
received the Artistic Achievement award while the sharply-shot portrait
of a dysfunctional family on the run from the German authorities,
Christian Peitzold's The State I'm In (Die Innere Sicherheit)
won the best screenplay prize.



If the spirit and presence of fest President Theo Angelopoulos loomed
large over proceedings -with a complete retrospective of his films,
two striking exhibitions of photos and designs and a splendid programme
of music from his films composed by Eleni Karaindrou presented in
the city's gleaming new Concert Hall- other auteurs of note attending
included "grandmother of the nouvelle vague" Agnes Varda (for a
Tribute and gala screening of her latest, documentary
Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse), Tony Gatlif (bringing the
opening film Vengo),
Philippe Faucon (with Samia),
Iran's Jafar Panahi, Arturo
Ripstein, Ventura Pons,and most of the directors competing.
Regardless of the balmy temperatures,the seven cinemas were packed
each day with local and professional audiences and there were good
attendances at the many press conferences, panels and symposia.
Of the two dozen productions in the Greek Panorama, box-office hit
Safe Sex (by Thanassos Papathanassiou and Michailis Reppas)and
the more sophisticated, urban comedy Cheap Smokes (directed
by popular TV personality Renos Haralambidis) found more favour
with foreign guests, while the documentary films seemed ironically
to show more cinematic qualities than the features in Greece's current
domestic crop.

Phillip
Bergson