Monday, March 10, 2008

10th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival

Day 3

There is real sense that nothing shuts around here and people never sleep. After a late night screening I returned to my hotel, which overlooks the main street, and at two in the morning there was still lots of activity with restaurants and newsstands still doing business. Come morning it’s a different story, but as someone who is not particularly good at mornings this seems all very natural and civilised.

Today I had an early start, with a press conference at midday for a local film called A HOLE IN THE WATER, about the proposal to build a ring road around Thessaloniki that runs under the harbour. With no public consultation and rumours of corruption there is growing opposition to the plan.


Then it was off to see a film about the partition of India and Pakistan, called THE SKY BELOW, by New York based Indian Sarah Singh. This is her first film, which she made single-handedly travelling throughout Pakistan, North India and Kashmir talking with people who were affected by Partition and the human cost to the division of the subcontinent. Unfortunately the film suffered from bad projection, but it was still a moving account of one of the great catastrophes of our time. Of course, with the sixtieth anniversary last year the BBC held a season of programmes and documentaries, so documentaries about the event were still fresh in my mind, but for most of the people attending the screening this was a shocking unknown chapter in history, which led to a lengthy Q&A afterwards.


From here I had to run down four flights of stairs to the main Olympion cinema for my next screening, which was a double bill. There are quite a few of those here, mainly due to the short running time of many of the films, which seem to be around 60 minutes. The first was a Polish film, IN SEARCH OF A LEGEND, about a group of young Polish sailors going from Greenland to Vancouver through the North West Passage. It started of with a fantastic animated sequence outlining the history of sailing that route through the Arctic waters, which was followed by some superb aerial photography, but after that it was fairly average. Not wanting to take anything away from their achievement but they did it in the warmest part of the year, rarely under sail and using all the latest electronic navigation equipment. There was never any real sense of danger that makes for interesting viewing. But this wasn’t the film I wanted to see.


I had been recommended THE WHISPERING OF THE TREES by Tom Lemke as a positive and uplifting film, which was my remit, It is about the indigenous people of southern Chile that take their name from a tree that grows in the area. This tells of a family that is trying to retain their heritage in the face of a fast encroaching civilisation. The film follows the family as the go into the forest to collect a special kind of pine nut that not only supplies them with food for the year but also some cash from the sale of the nuts they don’t need. It was great to see a family that wanted to keep its simple culture and lifestyle despite the temptations of materialism. There were a lot of parallels with the Paskowitz family in SURFWISE.

After the screening I went back to the hotel intending to work but bumped into Sarah Singh, whose film I had seen earlier so we headed off to a seafront cafĂ© so I could interview her about her film. We ended up talking for hours about India and world politics and travelling and ended up continuing the conversation over dinner at small restaurant in the agora (the market). A huge spread of fresh fish, grilled vegetables, salad and bread – more than we could really eat. We left there just in time to catch the final film on my schedule for the day: FLOW: For Love OF Water.


The film came across as being a television show without going into any great depth or covering any real new ground. Of course, if it was aimed at a general American audience their awareness of these matters about the poor state of water supplies in countries places like Asia and Africa can be limited, at best, so on that score it was informative and also showed some of the positive things that are happening to ensure people are getting fresh drinking water. It also showed how multinational corporations are taking over the control of water supplies and either pricing it out of the reaches of those who need pure water the most, or simply cutting off the supply all together. It also concentrated on the ridiculous state of the bottled water industry, which in most cases is selling people tap water at inflated prices. It did get a bit repetitive at times and while it was trying to stress the fact that the world is heading towards a time when there will be a huge shortage of clean water for drinking and domestic use it did not talk about the importance of water conservation. It was a good starting point but for such an important issue it needed to go further and do it more boldly.

And again, heading back to the hotel the town was alive with activity, but it was carnival after all.