12/02/2004

Romuald Karmakar lost control after the umpteenth nasty question at the stormy press conference following the screening of Nightsongs, a film reminiscent of Fassbinder’s style, based on the play by the Norwegian Jon Fosse. It’s the story of a night that will change the life of an unemployed man from Berlin, who usually spends his days sitting on the sofa at home, along with his long suffering partner. The audience watching the screening as part of the competition for the Golden Bear, laughed out loud at the film and a lot of people walked out.
The German director is being accused of being too heavy handed with the original work, in spite of his excellent credentials as the director of the multi-award winning film The Deathmaker in 1995 and Manila, which won the Silver Leopard at Locarno in 2000, and at the press conference he defended his new film: "It seems obviously to me that journalists are so used to see American action films that they’ve lost their sensibility to all other types of cinema. And I’m not joking".

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There was a better reception for the Turkish/German director Fatih Akin, back from last year’s success with Solino. His new tale, Against the Wall [+see also:
trailer
film profile], featuring second generation immigrants , went down well with the public.
After a failed suicide attempt, Sibel manages to escape from the harshness of her Turkish family, by entering into a marriage of convenience with a fellow Turk who is an alcoholic and drug addict.
"I’ve shown a romantic story set in the multi-racial working class in Hamburg", says Akin, "I had thought of doing a comedy, then the screenplay changed, become more of a realistic drama".

Today also saw the presentation, in competition, of Weeping Meadow: Trilogy Part One, the first part of the trilogy looking at 20th century Greece by Theo Angelopoulos. It was written by the director, together with the Italian Tonino Guerra, and the film is a nostalgic and delicate work of memory looking at the painful years of emigration and war.
It’s about the love shared by Eleni and a young accordion player, as seen through the painful moments and tragedies of Greek history, starting from the flight from Odessa after the invasion of the Red Army in 1919.
"At the start I thought of just making one film, called Trilogy and based on the Thebaid cycle, but then the duration would have caused production problems and so I decided to develop various elements gradually, covering the span of three episodes", comments Angelopoulos. "Recounting the most important events of the century as seen through the eyes of a woman was a new and interesting challenge".

(Translated from Italian)