Three Continents film festival in Nantes

by Aidan O'Donnell

Article published on the 2009-11-27 Latest update 2009-11-27 18:11 TU

“Festival-goers come to the festival because they know that they are going to see something that they won’t see anywhere else”, says festival Director Philippe Reilhac, “in no other festival in France or in Europe”.

The festival in question is Nantes’ Three Continents film festival which has been running since 1979 and is once again serving up the best of cinema from the southern hemisphere.

Reilhac says the festival’s mission, as it has developed over the last three decades, has been “to give exposure to those cinematographies and those professionals in South America, Asia and Africa [and] to try to show those films that were impossible to see in Europe and in France”.

He points to this year’s focus on filmmakers in the Horn of Africa, an element he’s particularly pleased to have scheduled. “Some people I was meeting, or in the media, they were telling me ‘but what are you talking about? Do you mean there are films that are made in Eritrea and we don’t even know where is exactly Eritrea on the map?’”

Mural painted outside festival headquarters proclaiming that cinema “is nothing, wants everything and actually manages - something”

So the festival has brought The Journey (Aida Ashenafi, Ethiopia, 2008), Milenu (Isaias Tsegai, Eritrea, 2006), a Dutch/Ethiopian documentary My Future (Lieven Corthouts, 2008), and Tears along Trail of Fears (Mohamed Asenai & Mohamed Abdallah Salah, Eritrea, 2001). There are also five short films from Ethiopia, a script-reading from Somalia and Haïle Gerima’s award-winning epic, Teza.

The competition section is dominated by Asia this year, something the organisers say is an indication of the current success of Asian cinema and a trend they are happy to reflect. Films from China, South Korea, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam are all in competition with the Philippines and Thailand, also represented in the non-competition section.

Claire Lajoumard is at the festival with Adrift (2009), a Franco-Vietnamese production from director Chuyen Bui Thac. She says this story of a newly-wedded couple, Hai and Duyen, has gathered a lot of attention since its release in Vietnam two weeks ago.

But Lajoumard believes regional dominance is cyclical between Asia and South America, and says South America has gone on the offensive in filmmaking terms. “Even some very small countries such as Peru, Bolivia, Colombia - there wasn’t any feature films, for years”, she says, “right now there are new directors, new films, new projects coming from many, many areas of Latin America”.

Pete Teo is in Nantes to present another of the Asian competition titles, Call if you need me (James Lee, Malaysia, 2009). It’s the story of Or Kia who comes to Kuala Lumpur to work for his gangster cousin, Brother Soon, in the debt collection business.

A scene from James Lee’s understated gangster film, Call if you need me (Malaysia, 2009)

Teo says that the geographical provenance of films can mean less and less since the world is shrinking in terms of film language. “The language of film, the language of cinema is now more and more universal”, he says. 

The film is a twist on the gangster genre and tries to represent the reality of life as a gangster where life is mostly about killing time rather than people. “In terms of the language of gangster genre, everybody knows what to expect, what happens in a gangster film, because it’s a genre film,” he says, “Call if you need me is really a sort of deconstruction of that genre but you can’t deconstruct something that people don’t already understand”.

Franco-Iranian director Mehran Tamadon speaking to an audience on Wednesday after a showing of his film Bassidji

The competition also includes films from Egypt, Argentina and Israel as well as the Iran-France-Switzerland documentary, Bassidji. In this film Director Mehran Tamadon set out as an Iranian-born French atheist, to meet the defenders of the Islamic Republic - the Bassidjis. They talk theology and best way to run a republic. The film has taken on added meaning since the protests following Iran’s disputed elections.

“I saw people – protesters – trying to talk with the Bassidji, going up to them and addressing them,” he told the audience after a screening of the film, “and I understood something: everybody believes that you have to talk. People have to talk to each other”.

A scene from Mehran Tamadon’s chat with the guardians of Iran, Bassidji (2009)

People spend a lot of time trying to talk to each other in Whisper with the Wind (Iraq, 2009), a film that director Shahram Alidi describes as “an anti-war film and a road-movie”. The film centres on Mam Baldar who travels around Iraqi Kurdistan with a battered tape recorder, recording oral messages and delivering them to friends or family.

“I decided to make a film about war without seeing any guns, or blood,” says Alidi, “so when you delete all this, what remains is aesthetic: composition, form, colour”.

He says he had to rely on these aesthetic basics to make people come and see the film. He also didn’t want to assault people with the film, but for it to linger and stay with them for a few days, taking a while to make its full impact felt.

“Like an injection,” he says.

The Three Continents film festival in Nantes runs until 1st December.