Marrakech Film Festival 2009: report

Geoff Andrew reports from the 2009 Marrakech Film Festival where Christopher Walken, Jim Jarmusch, Abbas Kiarostami and Alfonso Cuarón were in attendance

Clearly, stars like the sun – and I’m not talking astronomy. The place to be mid-December was Marrakech, where the ninth edition of the Moroccan city’s film festival managed to attract Christopher Walken, Emir Kusturica, Saïd Taghmaoui (the Moroccan actor probably best known in the UK for his roles in ‘La Haine’, ‘Hideous Kinky’ and ‘Three Kings’) and Ben – sorry, Sir Ben – Kingsley, to all of whom tributes were mounted. And then Jim Jarmusch and Alfonso Cuarón were also in town, both of them giving fascinating masterclasses – and both, as it happens, electing to finesse their pal Kusturica’s confession during his own on-stage talk that if he hadn’t become a director, he’d have become a gangster; each politely proffered the opinion that he’s a gangster anyway.

Meanwhile, an impressive roster of international talent turned up to serve on the jury alongside homegrown choreographer, dancer and writer-director Lahcen Zinoun: actresses Marisa Paredes and Isabella Ferrari; actress-directors Fanny Ardant and Nandita Das; and writer-directors Mike Figgis, Elia Suleiman, Pablo Trapero, Christophe Honoré and Abbas Kiarostami. (The last, serving as the jury’s president, was taking time off from putting the finishing touches to ‘Certified Copy’, his eagerly awaited new film starring Juliette Binoche.)

But what of the movies on show? Thankfully, the Festival is not just about celebrity, even though a clutch of Korean auteurs passed through – including the veteran Im Kwon-Taek – for a survey of that country’s cinema. There was also a mini-survey of recent Thai films, a trio of documentaries playing on a specially designated ‘environment day’ and, perhaps most unusual, a pleasingly diverse fistful of comedies playing in audio-described screenings for the blind and partially sighted. In addition to this Prince Moulay Rachid, the Festival’s seemingly rather active president, provided free cataract operations for 250 patients at the local university hospital; since film is at least partly about the art of seeing, this initiative – which also included an exhibition of photographs taken by the blind or partially sighted – seemed especially valuable.

Local audiences often proved marvellously enthusiastic: a screening of Bruce Beresford’s ‘Mao’s Last Dance’ – a biopic of a Chinese ballet dancer who defected to the West during a period spent training with a company in Houston, Texas, which is essentially a corny fable about the triumph of liberating capitalism over oppressive communism – saw the protagonist’s first kiss greeted with applause and whistles, while loud cheers and clapping would accompany any old gag or plot development of which the audience approved. So perhaps it didn’t matter too much that the new movies weren’t especially exciting; for a population whose filmic consumption for the rest of the year consists mainly of mainstream melodramas, musicals and action pics from Hollywood, Bollywood and Egypt, anything a little different appears to come as a welcome diversion.

The Festival’s competition highlights new and comparatively unknown directors. The standard was generally middling, with films notable for one aspect or another rather than as a whole. Ursula Antoniak’s Irish-Dutch ‘Nothing Personal’, for example, boasts good performances from Stephen Rea and Lotte Verbeek (who won the Best Actress prize), but for all its studied visuals and psychological ambiguity, the film fails to convince; too many moments feel like art-movie clichés rather than reflections of real life. The same goes for ‘True Noon’ by Tajikstan’s Nosir Saidov, and for ‘Love and Rage’ by Denmark’s Morton Giese; what initially looks set to become an interesting study of a talented young concert pianist’s battles with his nerves steadily degenerates into implausible, incoherent melodrama, oddly implying that mental illness is hereditary even as it dismisses that possibility.

Better was ‘My Daughter’, by first-time Malaysian director Charlotte Lim Lay Kuen; it’s an impressionistic, elliptical account of an 18 year old’s attempts to keep her waywardly self-destructive single mother on the straight and narrow, though the narrative does rather fall apart towards the end. It won the Jury Prize, while the Golden Star itself went to ‘Northless’, by Mexico’s Rigoberto Perezcano. It starts boldly if a little over-familiarly as a documentary-like account of one young man’s efforts to make it illegally into the United States – but then the narrative keeps taking surprising (but, mercifully, very credible) twists, so that we’re repeatedly asked to reassess our assumptions about the various characters and their motivations. The movie rings true throughout, and rightly proved a popular winner.

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