There is nothing about this festival that is small from the giant projection halls in the Giant "CUBE" Building on the beachfront which houses the main events, to the big names that come and go every day. Hungarian director Istvan Szabo and his leading lady of "Being Julia", Annette Benning, took a side trip to Bilbao on Monday to see the new Guggenheim -- which is closed on Mondays -- but for these ultra special guests it was opened for a "private screening" of the collection. Yesterday it was old French New Waver, Claude Chabrol, here with his latest, "La Demoiselle d'Honneur", and today Hollywood independent and political maverick, John Sayles, accompanied by the leading man of his "Silver City", David Huston, son of the legendary Director John Huston and brother of Angelica.
The Sayles press conference was packed to the rasfters and many of the questions, as to be expected with such a politically engaged director, centered on the upcoming presidential elections in the USA. Sayles stated that because of the slanted media in North America, it may be a very close call.
However internet activity has now become so ubiquitous that to some extent the establishment media is being by-passed through private political messaging. Therefore, don't be surprised if it turns out to be a landslide in favor of Kerry -- hmmn...
His new film, "Silver City" is about gubernatorial election shenanigans in a small town in Colorado, with echos of a Raymond Chandler murder mystery in
which David Huston is an investigative reporter turned private eye, trying to get at what lies under the surface, when a mysterious corpse is found and
sleazy candidate, Chris Cooper, seems to be involved. The film also has a cameo by Kris Kristofferson as a shit-kicking cowboy who is actually much
smarter than he lets on. Says Sayle, this just what it is like in the new wild west. People out there (Denver, for example) still adhere to the image of the individualisatic cattle rancher and silver miner, but, in actuality today, a mere two per cent of the population is involved in such earthy activities, whereas the real economy is based on telecommunications, real estate development and the like. FOX NEWS which plays a great role in forming public iopinion is little more than a mouth piece for extreme right winger Rupert Murdock, and, when asked to compare CNN to FOX NEWS, Sayles said --well, CNN is a bit to the left of FOX but far to the right of Reality.
It is just because the mainstream media tend to distort and cover up the realities of things like the war in Iraq that Mr. Sayles feels that it is his "patriotic duty" to make films like this which try to make the public aware of the kinds of things that are lurking under the political surface.
As for Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", he said there was nothing new in it that shouldn't have been reported in the mainstream media three years ago
if they had any sense of anything but making money by dumbing the news down to a form of sound-bite entertainment.
"Silver City" has already opened in the States with what he called an "intelligent campaign", and will open here in Spain on October 15.