Art Film Slovakia

Films are about voyages.  They take us to far-away lands, to people and places we don’t know, and perhaps reveal dreams we did not realize we had. Or they return us closer to home, to lives just down the street, or across the tracks, or the street we have never gone down although we pass it every day.  The image on the screen may stop us - we have seen it before, talked about it, heard of it, read it, dreamt it.  Or the image is so foreign none of its language makes any sense, but we cannot look away.  "The movies are life," Gerard Depardieu commented when he was honored by Art Film.

Art Film Slovakia, in Trencianiske Teplice, a quiet spa town two hours from Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, offers guilty pleasures of one kind or another.  It offers films of interest to cinephiles who see film as art, but also films of interest of the general viewer, often grouped around themes.  This year Art Film focused on comedies such as ‘City Lights’, ‘Ninotchka’, and ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’. Last year it was dance films, football films (to commemorate the World Cup), children's films and Asian films.  In addition, Art Film presents classic films of the past like ‘Five Easy Pieces,’ ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ and ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’, and always screens films from Eastern Europe, particularly Slovak ones (film festivals in Toronto and Montreal always reserve a place for Canadian films).  This year the festival screened ‘War Games’ and ‘The Man Who Stopped Them,’ which was privately screened at CIA headquarters.

Film festivals the size of Art Film Slovakia are always international in scope,  and after watching a number of films one comes away convinced the differences between the First and Third Worlds are at once obvious and less obvious than one thought.  Ann Hui's Hong Kong film about wife abuse, ‘Night and Fog,’ seems little different from stories here.  They may not be us, but their problems are as much ours as theirs.

There were surprising and unsettling voyages in Trencianske Teplice.  Koji Wakamatsu's ‘Caterpillar’ is a powerful, if understated, protest against war, this one of the Japanese during WWII, but played out in the homeland after a soldier without limbs or voice is returned to his village.  He is hailed as a conquering hero and villagers ritually mouth nationalistic pieties.  Obviously he can no longer be the chauvinist (and wife-beater) he was.  His wife becomes head of the household and assumes the role of proud hero's wife for the War God, as villagers dub him.  Collaboration may take many forms and does not stop at the top.  ‘Caterpillar’ does not want Japan to forget its guilt.

‘Lebanon’ is also about war does to men, this one Israel's first Lebanon War in 1982.  Filmed almost entirely inside an Israeli tank, the film does not let us leave the tank any more than the crew can.  The crew sees the world outside -- the Syrian commandos they fight -- only dimly through the gun sights and the periscope.  The tank is less a weapon for them than their prison.  We see how disorienting and frightening their struggle is to understand what is going on through the camera, which jerks back and forth and fades out of focus, while the soundtrack is a hail of bullets and rockets, steel against steel, and the grinding sounds of the tank engine.  War is hell, if not madness, says director Samuel Maoz, who served in a tank himself during the first Lebanon war.

‘Teheran,’ an Iranian film, is an intricate, neorealist take on a Teheran underworld of child smugglers, prostitutes, thieves and those who struggle to earn a living however they can.  Children are money and pass hand to hand, but no one gets ahead.  The spiral is increasingly downward.  The despair of its people is palpable and irrevocable.

John Frankenheimer's ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ took me back to an earlier and seemingly more innocent time in America, but which was, nevertheless, a sign of today.  And while watching ‘Metropia,’ an animated feature about a bleak future akin to ‘1984,’ I wondered what the younger audience members thought, and also what they might have thought of me, the only one in the audience over 50. In its dystopia, I saw overtones of Metropolis, Eraserhead, Brazil.  I did not know what the film brought to mind for the young.  I was no more than a tourist in their world.  

There were also Roman Polanski's ‘The Ghost Writer,’ Atom Egoyan's ‘Chloe,’ Todd Solondoz's ‘Life During Wartime,’ and Michael Winterbottom's ‘The Killer Inside Me,’ which have been screened at other festivals and written about extensively.

For me the films of Art Film were not the only voyages.  Trencianske Teplice itself took me back home and returned me to my childhood.  The poppy seed roll at breakfast, brynskove halusky for lunch.  Stoda babas on the street, those wizened, old women in black I saw on the streets of birdtown in Lakewood, Ohio. And there was the Slovak woman I met at my hotel, born in Trencianske Teplice and now living in California, who returns every summer for the festival.  But you do not need to be Slovak-American to make the trip here and experience the satisfaction of films and the ambience of Trencianske Teplice.  

Unlike some other film festivals, which are sometimes confusing and answers to questions are not found, Art Film is well-organized and its staff always helpful.  It screens more than 200 films over nine days and can be as demanding as you make it.