Apocalypto (2006) by Mel Gibson
“This film is fantastic! It really is a great movie on different peoples’ rights to self-determination. When I see Kouchner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the right to humanitarian intervention, which is making a comeback, I find it interesting to reaffirm it. In Apocalypto there’s a lot of that, a bit of “OK, right, the Mayan society wasn’t great”, but then with the final shot and the conquistadors, I thought, “yeah, OK, it was a pain before, but now it’s going to be worse.” He ties in with Cecil B. DeMille. It’s an extremely challenging movie, which holds your attention from beginning to end, and I haven’t seen that in cinema for a long time. There’s something amazing about it, which I wouldn’t have dared do myself. But then, that’s the Americans for you: they don’t question anything. There’s actually a great liberty in that. They redo the solar-eclipse thing, do anything they want. I would’ve thought, “That’s been done before, and those poor Mayans are going look like idiots,” and then the solar eclipse works really well; the screenwriter doesn’t think twice. I find that really exhilarating. You make movies, and you’re the king of the world when you do, and I wonder why I don’t take advantage of this right more often. Anything goes, and you might as well go all-out yourself. I really admire that.”

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How did you start your career?
It was actually something that had been nagging at me for a while. After high school, I thought about applying to IDHEC, but then I felt I measure up in general knowledge, and especially knowledge of cinema – all that seemed very far away for me, both socially and geographically. Things dragged on, I wanted to tell stories, and so I made do with what I had at hand, and wrote novels – unpublished ones, which were quite bad, actually. I was still interested in making movies; so I decided to write something, without putting pressure on myself. It wasn’t theater, nor a short story; it wasn’t exactly a screenplay either. I sent it to a movie producer anyway, someone named Guy Cavagnac, who had set up shop in Toulouse, and he thought it was good. He didn’t produce it, but he still encouraged me to find the money to make it. I looked around and the GREC (Groupe de recherches et d’essais cinématographiques, or Group for Research and Experimentation in Cinema) gave me 35,000 francs in those days. I learned everything with that, started to look for a crew and shot during my summer vacation – I was a night watchman at the time. It didn’t do well, but it made me want to shoot a second one. Which I did. But I gave up on it – for every project you give up on, there’s another one that succeeds, the whole thing’s rather complicated. And then I made a third short movie, and then moved on to medium-length movies.
My first movie didn’t make it into any festivals, nor did the second one, but I was rather stubborn, and I also enjoyed making them. In any case, I did that during my vacations. It wasn’t my job; I wasn’t even covered by the social scheme for workers in show business… The third short film was chosen for the festival in Pantin, but nothing else… After that, things took off. I did have this feature-length movie I’d written since 1990, right after my first short film. I wrote it based on a book I’d written 10 years earlier, and I was making short films for lack of anything else, because I couldn’t manage to find the money to make anything longer. And then one day, I started earning good money. I was a stage-manager on TV movies, I had some money, and I decided it wouldn’t be bad to write something that, with a short-movie budget, allowed me to stretch it out. I wasn’t thinking of making a 55 minute movie at the time. I told myself I was going to make a 30 to 35 minute movie, something over a quarter of an hour and which I could take my time on, with a minimal budget. So I wrote Du Soleil pour les Gueux. I’m terribly indebted to Thomas Ordonneau for that one: he decided to distribute it even before the movie was shown in festivals or elsewhere. The film was chosen for Pantin and Belfort. I’d already set up all the logistics for Du Soleil pour les Gueux, and then I got money from the CNC – thus hefty funding – to make Ce Vieux Rêve Qui Bouge. So that I wouldn’t let Du Soleil pour les Gueux fall by the wayside, I put off Ce Vieux Rêve for the next year, and it ended up being good timing for me because Du Soleil came out in March 2001 and right afterwards, Ce Vieux Rêve was in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. So a small buzz was created, and at the end of the year, we had the means to put together a first feature-length movie.
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CALLE SANTA FE is a documentary by activist Carmen Castillo coming back to Chile from exile. On October 5, 1974, she and her husband Miguel Enriquez, a famous MIR leader, were assaulted in a police raid. Enriquez is shot dead and pregnant Castillo is badly injured and loses her baby. Many years later, Castillo comes back and interviews with relatives, neighbours and former party comrades, so questioning the sense of MIR values and conjuring up aspects and emotions related to exile, frustrations, ordeals, unaccomplished goals and new hopes. The film was presented in Cannes Film Festival this year in Un Certain Regard section.

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The film opens with a hoarse and low voiceover that sounds like Jeanne Moreau’s but it is Carmen Castillo’s: the Chilean director and activist longly relates the way she was expelled from the country in 1973 by the Pinochet dictatorship after the assassination of her husband Miguel Enriquez, leader of the revolutionary movement MIR, right in front of their house in the Santa Fe street. Her voice gets a hold of you and doesn’t leave you anymore: CALLE SANTA FE is the story of her homecoming. A story from a personal point of view as Carmen Castillo also appears on screen, searching for the neighbors that helped her or facing with child memories and ageing shops, families deprived of their descendants and old revolution partners trying to find ways to continue the fight: the very one you could see in foreign televisions reports about Pinochet junta exactions and that can be seen as excerpts in CALLE SANTA FE.
The title of the movie can be seen as a claim of modesty: it is the occasion to reappropriate and describe a neighbourhood. Castillo looks into buying back the house where she lived with Miguel Enriquez and to revive a memory the dictatorship wants to censor. But the project also takes on a larger dimension. This neighborhood is like the whole nation. And the story of Castillo and Enriquez, which was given an important coverage, is a way to connect the individual history to the one of the country.
Emotion was vivid at the movie premiere at the Latina theater in Paris on the 4th of December. So vivid that just a few questions were asked to the director. After more than two hours and a half the audience had to get one’s breath back. CALLE SANTA FE is part of the documentary vein where the point of view and the personal speech are primordial. Such a way implies that the intimate and the collective history are permanently linked: images express the family tragedy or the story of a nation. Qualities swap from one to another: when one gains a political value, the other is fed with mundane details. This is where the movie succeeds but also shows its limits: it’s all about a subtle balance. Castillo must constantly moderate every of her intentions – at the first place her will to transform her ancient house into a mausoleum to the memory of her belated husband. But youth needs less mausoleums than weapons and ideas. Memory sometimes falters when one could have hoped that a powerful art like cinema could have stood up against a dictator who died before having been judged. This was Syberberg’s ambition in his colossal Hitler, A Film From Germany. Humanism makes sometimes forget, like for Straub, like in S21 the Khmer Rouge Death Machine by Rithy Panh, that truth can hardly accomodates with reconciliations.

Antoine Thirion.

Une part du ciel (2002) by Bénédicte Liénard

“It’s an absolutely wonderful film, presented at Cannes in 2001, about women’s dignity. It is a double portrait of a woman in prison and a union leader. Both of them are caught up in different forms of derangement and violations of their dignity. The two portraits intersect and interact. It is truly a remarkable film starring Séverine Caneele, who won Best Actress a few years earlier at Cannes for her role in Bruno Dumont’s film Humanity. I fell in love with it not only as a film but also on a professional level. It was a magnificent adventure with Bénédicte Liénard and the whole cast, some of whom were non-professionals. There were women in the film who were really incarcerated, who played major roles and who were excellent. It was also a great professional experience that left me with beautiful memories.”

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Not adding subtitles is a choice. It’s the one that Xavier Brillat, Dancing’s co-director with Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic, has made for Haruki Yukimura & Nana-Chan, in VOD on Dissidenz after its screening in many film festivals like the very precious International Documentary Festival of Marseille (FIDM). It’s useless to bring more precisions than the director gives to the spectator – anyway, on Brillat’s own accord, nothing is said here but very common things, shibari master’s indications to his model, actors directions and commentaries for the foreign film crew and the photographers of the magazine SM Sniper. We enter Xavier Brillat’s movie with no back reference, like any stranger in Japan : fascinated by the art, by the traditions shown little by little through the moves and the codes, a whole living world we just don’t know nothing about, or so few.
Not subtitling, is not continuing to propagate the idea of a strange Japan, ununderstandable, but it is a way to enter a culture by the most concrete and immediate path : moves, noises, intonations. It was the description of Roland Barthes in Empire of the signs, his famous essay about Japan : Orient must be discovered by its signs and its rustles, by groping, as a blind. We enter here in Japan by the trembling of the fluorescent trees that surrounds the house, by the creaking of the ropes that the master ties around the body of Nana-Chan – Shibari is the name of this as artistic as erotic art – by the focused look of Yukimura and the pleasure and effort masks of his model. Brillat films the work of the performance : a web is spined, a picture is drawn which will be shown in a final shot. Figures are done and undone, nothing lasts long, incomfort is temporary, attention focuses on knots, folds and links. These links which ties the audience to the object of his desire : elastic distance put by the device of Xavier Brillat which permits to breifly catch fragments of Japan.

Antoine Thirion

Buy the DVD or download the film here.

How did you get into cinema?
I got into cinema through the door marked “passionate about films” and through a school. I believe in training. I studied at a place called INSAS. I majored in directing and when I saw films by Renoir or other great masters, I decided it was better to be an average producer than a really bad director. So I became a producer, much later on.

What motivates your choices as a producer?
I started producing in 1987, twenty years ago and I decided to focus on fields where there was a sense of real urgency, meaning mostly in developing countries and mostly first films, always seen from the inside, with filmmakers from countries that interested me. At first, I produced a lot of documentaries because it was important to me to immerse myself in a range of realities. Then from around 1990 or 1992, I started producing fiction. It adds up to about one hundred films, with around thirty feature films for cinema. The rest were films for Arte or similar channels: Channel 4 or German TV.

In twenty years as a producer, have you seen any changes?
The overriding trend is still the same. The deregulation of all the systems means that today, it’s all about ratings, with everyone competing for a very wide audience making it pretty difficult for non-mainstream works to exist. Obviously, this trend worries us.

You also have experience as an actor.
I played the leading role of Vincent in the film Lundi matin by Otar Iosseliani. It was a chance encounter. I used to run into Otar Iosseliani every day in the staircase and one day, he offered me the role. He likes working with non-professionals. For me, it was a wonderful experience, no doubt about it. What I’m worth on-screen is another story but as a producer, it was wonderful. Being in this role taught me things about films from another angle.

What are you up to at the moment?
First up, we’re extending our editorial policy to DVD, so we’re releasing four new titles: Tinpis Run, the first film in the history of Papuan cinema, which is a distant echo to our editorial line in the 1990’s; the film Cahiers de Médellin a magnificent documentary by Catalina Villar; Le chant des baraques, Robert Bosis’ very strong film on Portuguese immigration and last up, Femmes du Hezbollah on a subject that is very much in the news.

What are your projects?
We have five feature films in production: one in Palestine that starts shooting next month, which is the first film by a young woman; an Argentinean first feature film that starts shooting in September; a major film by Tsai Ming Liang to be shot next February, with Raoul Peck, about Marx’s childhood and finally, the next film by the great Spanish director Agusti Villaronga called Barbares d’occident, whose films include El mar and Aro Tolbukhin.

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The movies in competition :

Feuerherz (Heart of Fire) - Germany/Austria - by Luigi Falorni

Julia - France - by Erick Zonca

Lady Jane - France - by Robert Guédiguian

Caos calmo (Quiet Chaos) - Italy – International Premiere - by Antonello Grimaldi

Happy-Go-Lucky - UK - by Mike Leigh

Restless - Israel/Germany/Canada/France/Belgium - by Amos Kollek

Elegy - USA - by Isabel Coixet

Sparrow - Hong Kong, China - by Johnnie To

Kabei (Kabei – Our Mother) - Japan – International Premiere - by Yoji Yamada

Kirschblüten - Hanami - Germany - by Doris Dörrie

There Will Be Blood - USA - by Paul Thomas Anderson

Zuo You (In Love We Trust) - China - by Wang Xiaoshuai

Lake Tahoe - Mexico - by Fernando Eimbcke

Gardens of the Night - Great Britain/USA - by Damian Harris

Tropa de Elite (The Elite Squad) - Brazil - by José Padilha

In S.O.P. Standard Operating Procedure - USA - by Errol Morris