Thessaloniki Day 2

As a member of the press attending a film festival there are certain obligations. It’s not all parties and schmoozing. There are films to watch, interviews to do and, of course, reports to write. For the print version of the magazine this is something that usually happens a long time after the event has finished. Thanks to the marvels of modern communication up-to-date reports can be posted online almost immediately, depending upon the inclination of the correspondent. The problem is the more films and events I attend the more I have to write, which then means not being able to attend other events. It’s the old razor’s edge that requires very careful balance.

Most of the morning was spent writing up the first day’s report while waiting for a DVD screener of a film I had to watch before interviewing the director. When the disc arrived, later than anticipated, it was plagued with technical problems. As we all know, the much-hyped infallibility of CDs and DVDs was just that – hype – and the writable versions are even more unstable. How anyone can trust their archives to this medium is beyond me, and the initial promises of 100 years are definitely unproven. But that is a whole other discussion. I got about half way through the film, a Spanish film called El Orfanato (The Orphanage) by Juan Antonio Bayona, when it stopped playing and, unfortunately it had no chapters to skip forward with and normal fast forwarding was not working well either. But I saw enough of it to get a feeling of the director’s work.


The film is a psychological thriller/ghost story, along similar lines to Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others. The film centres around Laura, who spent the happiest years of her childhood growing up in an orphanage. Thirty years later, she returns with her husband and Simon, their son, with a dream of restoring and reopening the long abandoned orphanage as a home for disabled children. As the opening day draws near, tension builds within the family. Laura slowly becomes convinced that something long-hidden and terrible is lurking in the old house, something waiting to emerge and inflict appalling damage on her family. The film manages to maintain an air of both mystery and suspense throughout, with the director citing Hitchcock as one of his major influences. It is shot in the dark, muted palette that are common in Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo Del Toro’s films (in fact Del Toro is one of the film’s producers). The film showed at this year’s FrightFest in London and should be getting a UK release in the new year.


During the half hour interview with the director Bayona we discussed the film’s themes, its production and the state of Spanish cinema. A transcript of the interview will appear in a future edition of the magazine.


Although there are films showing from 10 in the morning at any of the seven cinemas the Festival is using, it wasn’t until 7 in the evening that I caught my first screening. Small Gods is a Belgian film written and directed by Dimitri Karakatsanis, a Belgian filmmaker of Greek extraction. It was an unusual film, with minimal dialogue for a complex story that was part mystery and part road movie (made all the more unusual given the small size of Belgium). The story jumped backwards and forwards through timelines, revealing more about the characters and their story but never fully revealing what had happened to them and how the three protagonists came together and whether what we saw was even a true account of events. Despite the fractured story and some unusual cinematography that utilised various focal planes and the flat colours of the Belgian winter, the movie does keep the viewer engrossed.


The opening of Digital Wave programme was with a 1989 Greek digital film called the Dream Factory. I wish I had paid more attention to the date before going to see it as it was very dated and although the story idea was interesting there was far too much talking (and therefore subtitles to read), combined with the pixelated images I found myself entering my own dream factory.

Feeling a bit bleary eyed after that experience I went back to my hotel for a supine snooze before my next film at 1 o’clock. I dragged myself from my slumber just in time for start of the movie, and was glad I made the effort.


Dainipponjin, as the title gives away, is a Japanese film, which can be a real gamble. Having seen more than my fair share of dodgy anime I always approach these films with trepidation. To be fair I have also seen some outstanding Japanese films and I will happily add this one to the list, not because of its artistic merits but simply because it is great fun. It is mockumentary, written, directed and starring Hitoshi Matsumoto. He plays Dai Sato aka Dai Nipponjin (Dai the Great Japanese), a sixth generation superhero who grows to enormous size when exposed to electricity and battles the monsters rampaging across Japan. He is also a typical working class schlub. There’s never quite enough money, there are few prospects for the future, his wife has left him and he hardly ever sees his daughter, and his grandfather suffers from dementia. And to top it off nobody cares about his superhero antics, despite the best efforts of his agent. It is a wonderful parody of modern Japanese culture, and although possibly not to everyone’s taste it is good entertainment.


I left the theatre at 3 in the morning to a torrential thunder storm, which luckily soon passed, but it didn’t seem to have dampened the enthusiasm of the locals to be out partying and generally moving about in the weather that was a lot better than that of Edinburgh in August.