22/09/2003 - The first two films in competition at Viareggio look at 'others' with passion and sensitivity: The Lunatics´ Song deals with the issue of madness, while Cloud Cuckoo Land looks at the world of disability

The competition at the 20th EuropaCinema festival in Viareggio has started with the screening of the French-Hungarian film The Lunatic?s Song and the British production Cloud Cuckoo Land.
In the first film, the debutant director Csaba Bereczki and Suzanne Schiffman, who has already been a screenwriter for Truffaut, recount the story of Zoltán Frimont (Stéphane Höhn), a French doctor of Hungarian origins who ends up at one point, for mysterious reasons, being shut up in a psychiatric hospital in Romania. Bereczki wanted to show the reality of a mental hospital, showing the institution as a closed world that can be frightening at first but when seen from the inside and without prejudice is a placed filled with a rich and brave humanity. "People who are in psychiatric hospitals ? explained the director ? don?t need to resort to tricks, they live in a spontaneous way, without any filters on their world. They are free individuals and maybe this is the reason people are frightened of them. Madness is like love, it?s an unpredictable and uncontrollable state".
The film already has distribution deals for France, Belgium and Hungary. ?Unfortunately ? concludes Bereczki ? it-s difficult to secure a future for this type of film, but in spite of this you have to fight and overcome every difficulty because the public has shown it is interested in these subjects.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Matt Dickinson, who is directing his first feature length film but has already made many documentaries (An Everest to Climb), deserves a separate discussion on the personality of it?s main actor. In fact Steve Varden is a brave man who has been afflicted with a type of cerebral paralysis since birth. Varden has overcome every prejudice form people around him and he has achieved many undertakings, including taking part and winning a medal at the Para Olympics and travelling the London-Varsavia route in a wheelchair. A few years ago he decided to become a professional actor and now he has even achieved this dream with a film that has obvious links with his personal story. In Cloud Cuckoo Land Varden plays Sandy, a guy who wants to make his dream of flying through the British skies come true at all costs, even though he has cerebral paralysis. Over time Sandy will meet and make many female friends and especially Lucy (Boo Pearce), a young girl who is very prejudiced who in the end falls in love with him.
"I met Steve ? explained Dickinson ? in 1996. He wanted to become an actor, and I wanted to direct my first feature film. So we set up a company and started to write a screenplay. Together with my producer, Chris Bradley, we looked for money to fund the project. But many of the possible financers of the film didn?t want Steve on the cast. We held firm and after 7 years we?ve achieved our goal. The theme of the film can be summed up in three words: dream, passion and freedom".
"This isn?t a film about disability ? stated Varden ? it?s about the stubbornness of a man who claims the right to exist as an individual".