23rd Manaki Brothers Film Camera Festival in Bitola 2002

All the stops were pulled out for the 23rd Manaki Brothers Film Camera Festival in Bitola, Macedonia (25-29 September 2002), its 10th as an international festival of the first rank with a unique portfolio of honoring cinematographers. Tonino Delli Colli was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Robby Mueller (sometimes spelled »Muller«) served as president of the international jury. And the lineup of 15 competing films with most of the »DPs« present has never been so impressive as this year.
        Further, and perhaps most important of all for guests travelling a long distance, the air route through Thessaloniki in neighboring Greece has opened up enough to allow only minor delays at the Greek-Macedonian border on the very outskirts of Bitola.

        The big event of the festival, celebrated on opening night with a standing ovation, was the presentation by festival director Tomi Salkovski of the festival’s Lifetime Achievement award to Tonino Delli Colli, the Italian master cinematographer with 178 films to his credit, among them awarded collaboration with Fellini, Pasolini, Polanski, Malle, Benigni and others. In an interview with Moving Pictures after the special screening of Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella, delli Colli confessed to a certain bitterness about the evolution from cinema to digital technology. »I can’t relate to the new digital systems, and I have no desire to learn these new techniques. The way I see it is this: electronic cinema is more technical than artistic.«
        More or less the same opinion was shared by Robby Mueller, who was awarded on the same opening night with the festival’s Outstanding Contribution to Cinema citation. Reflecting on his work with Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Lars von Trier, he noted with some sadness that during the shooting of Breaking the Waves Lars von Trier once preferred a scene that was slightly out-of-focus over another in which the actors performed better. »the old standards that santified the image are now put aside for new methods of improvised acting,« he lamented.

        To the credit of festival programmer Blagoja Kunevski, the lineup of 15 films in the international competition included some of the season’s best productions: Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s To the Left of the Father (DP Walter Carvalho) (Brazil), Silvio Soldini’s Burning in the Wind (DP Luca Bigazzi) (Italy), Zhu Wen’s Sea Food (DP Liu Yong Hong) (China), Kiyoshi Kuroswawa’s Pulse (DP Hayashi Junichiro)(Japan), Kwak Kyung-Taek’s Friends (DP Ki Si-Hwang) (South Korea), and Bohdan Slama’s Wild Bees (DP Divis Marek) (Czech Republic). The festival’s top prize, the Golden Camera 300, was awarded to Walter Carvalho.

Ronald Holloway