20/10/2007

Eight years after The Five Senses (presented in the Directors’ Fortnight), and after much television work (from The L World to Six Feet Under), Canadian filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa is back on the big screen.

The director behind Eclipse is in competition at the RomeFilmFest with Fugitive Pieces (making its European premiere after debuting at Toronto), an adaptation of Anne Michaels’ best-seller on young Jakob, a Polish Jew who escapes the Nazis with the help of Athos (Rade Serbedzija), a Greek archaeologist who risks his own life to take the boy with him first to an Aegean island, then Canada.

Set mostly in Europe (between Poland and Greece), Fugitive Pieces is a reflection on the impossibility of forgetting horror and the sense of guilt of those who survive it. As an adult, Jacob (played by British director Stephen Dillane) is a writer obsessed with memories: of his parents killed before his eyes, his musician sister who disappeared, and the Yiddish he forget then relearned through neighbours, also Holocaust survivors.

While the material may be emotional, Podeswa cools is down, perhaps to maintain at a distance an experience not unlike what his father lived through. The result is a rather traditional film (with editing, by Germany’s Wiebke von Carolsfeld, that jumps back and forth in time) that impeccably reconstructs the setting but is more lyrical in its words – Athos’ maxims, the moving pages of Jakob’s books – than in its images.

Besides the locations (above all the island of Hydra), Greece also offered the film creative synergies (musician Nikos Kypourgos) and, most importantly, funding: along with Canada’s Serendipity Point Films (headed by Robert Lantos, a native of Budapest and long-time producer of Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg and István Szabó), Fugitive Pieces was produced by Greece’s StraDa Productions and Cinegram.