This is my first time as a guest at a foreign film festival, which means my flights and accommodation were paid by the festival This is also my first visit to Greece, which, given how extensively I have travelled throughout Europe, I found quite amazing. Being picked up from the airport in a top of the range Mercedes and driven to a hotel makes a nice change from public transport and sleeping on floors with friends. The first thing that struck me was how similar it is to Italy, except with a different language and alphabet. Driving while talking on the phone, café society, smoking everywhere (although even Italians aren’t allowed to do that now), newsstands on the streets and beautiful window displays in the shops. And of course the Mediterranean attitude that can appear as chaotic to the more ordered mind.
The festival itself is held, literally, on the shores of the Aegean, at a venue known as The Pier, which is old warehouses that have been converted into cinemas and galleries. Once registered and settled in I went through the bag with the programmes to start planning my week, looking for films that will appeal to me. Film festivals are always a lottery, and the programmes are written to make all the films sound interesting, and I’m sure they are to someone.
From my experiences of film festivals in the UK the opening night has just one film and is a gala event and the rest of the films kick off the following day, (apart from press screenings of course), but here there had already been a full programme of films before the official launch. Being a guest of the festival I got an invite to the opening night gala and it was an interesting affair.
Photocalls and press pens didn’t seem to exist as the photographers swarmed around the front of the stage while the guests and local dignitaries arrived and exchanged niceties, to a barrage of strobe lighting. Once everyone was seated and the lights dimmed for the 9.30 start, there came the sound of drumming from the back of the Olympion’s auditorium, and a troupe of drummers marched down the centre aisle. Then the speeches began, from the festival director followed a variety of local politicians. Introductions are all part of festival life and thankfully they didn’t go on for too long (well half an hour isn’t that bad) and the film finally got under way.
My Blueberry Nights (which for some reason I got in my head was going to be about portable e-mail devices – wrong berry!) is Kai War Wong’s latest film and his first in English. Kai is best known for In the Mood for Love and 2046, both stunningly beautiful films. This one quite match the imagery of those two films but it is still beautifully shot. As with his previous films this is a slowly paced love story of failed relationships and chance meetings. In an interesting piece of casting the lead role is given to singer Norah Jones, who having just finished a relationship makes friends with café owner, played by Jude Law with a Mancunian accent. Not wanting to fall in love, she takes off across America working in bars and diners. Here she meets characters with their own relationship problems: the always excellent David Strathairn plays a drunk cop who can’t face the fact that his wife (Rachel Weisz); Natalie Portman as a hustling gambler who can’t talk to her father and, her own denial of her affections for the pieman.
Jones does a commendable job in her first acting role, Law is Law, Portman and Weisz do their best with the characters, but the main problem is you don’t really care about any of them, with maybe the exception of Strathairn’s, which is a shame for such a nice looking film.
But after the film it was party time. I left at 1.30 (the smoking was getting too much for me. After just a few months of the UK smoking ban it was really strange to see people smoking in public places) and it was just starting to warm up. On the short walk back to the hotel it was clear that Thessaloniki is a nocturnal city.
