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Norbert Baumgarten’s Befreite Zone (Liberated Zone) (Germany), one of six »first features« in a strong competition at the 9th »Faces of Love« International Film Festival in Moscow (8 - 18 March 2004), was awarded the Golden Arrow by an international jury headed by Swedish actress Lena Endre, a stage-and-screen protegé of Ingmar Bergman. A comedy set in eastern Germany, one in which literally everyone, young and old, is mired in a love tryst with someone else, Liberated Zone had been a critical hit as well at the 2003 Berlinale, where noted Berlin critic Alfred Holighaus had selected the film for his new, enterprising, challenging Perspektive Deutsches Kino section.

Liberated Zone was Baumgarten›s diploma film at the Konrad Wolf Film and TV Academy in Potsdam-Babelsberg, although it should be added that the director, born in Bautzen in the GDR, had already worked in theatre and video before enrolling in the Babelsberg Film Academy. The film features a bevy of young talent, both professional and nonprofessional, in a riotous spoof of mores in a provincial town that, in the mid-1990s, had yet to shake off the lethargy of former GDR times. Since everyone associated with the film, from producers down to bit players, apparently knew the milieu inside out, this fast-pace comedy, packed with would-be entrepreneurs and bonehead rednecks (as hinted in the title), rings true right from the start. Liberated Zone is about bored adolescents, beer-table braggarts, and cheating couples in a backwater town in a changing East Germany. The only excitement here, outside of the neighborhood disco, is the soccer game on weekends. The hero of the team is »Blondi,« the nickname given to Ade Banjo (Michael Ojake) because he’s a black soccer player from Nigeria who has singlehandedly kicked his team into the German Cup Finals. As the day of the big game in Berlin approaches, the town officials dream of a brand new stadium ... while the naive young Sylvia (Johanna Klante) thinks only of her next rendezvous with Blondi, not knowing that he already has a German wife, who in turn prefers to live in the west rather than the east.

Under programmer Sergei Lavrentiev, a top Russian film critic, Faces of Love has developed over the past decade into a prestige event on the festival circuit with a rather unique portfolio. The 16 films selected for the competition offered the viewing public a cross-section of cultures and styles from around the world, focusing on every »face of love« imaginable: flirting, romance, seduction, bacchanalia. German actress Hanna Schygulla was honored as a special guest. On opening night, a sellout crowd in Dom Kino (aka Actors House) warmly received veteran Russian director Sergei Solovyov’s thought-provoking Anton Chekhov About Love, an insightful compilation of three Chekhov short stories (The Doctor, Volodya, The Bear) that featured prominent actors in a poignant chronicle of a youth’s unrequited love. Catherine Breillat arrived from Paris to introduce her imposing Anatomie de l’enfer (Anatomy of Hell) (France) and stayed on for a round of interviews. Adapted from her »Pornocracy« book, Anatomy of Hell is far more than just a tantalizing film about a beautiful woman who pays a macho to spend four consecutive nights looking at her while lying naked on a bed. More a documentary than a fiction film, it contains some rather explicit scenes, enough to drive some spectators from their seats.

Some entries in the festival sidebars clearly added to audience viewing pleasure. Among the Special Screenings was a pair of by Berlin producer Regina Ziegler: Fridrik Thor Fridriksson’s On Top Down Under (Iceland) and Bernd Heiber’s Nr. 23 (Germany). Over the years, and by popular demand, the festival has booked nearly all of the 30 shorts in the Ziegler-Film collection. Two French erotic classics from a bygone prudish age were booked for the »Let’s Do It Slowly« sidebar: Claude Autant-Lara’s adaptation of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black) (1954) and André Cayatte’s Le vie conjugale (Anatomy of a Marriage) (1963). And in the mirthful »Let’s Change the Dress« sidebar you could see the first screen version of Alexander Pushkin’s jocular Domik b Kolomne (The Little House in Kolomna) (Russia, 1913), a two-reeler directed by film pioneer Pyotr Chardynin that features a man-in-drag scene. And Kurt Hoffman’s Fanfaren der Liebe (Fanfares of Love) (Germany, 1951), a comedy about two male musicians disguising themselves as women to get a job in a female orchestra, anticipated Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (USA, 1959) by nearly a decade.

As for other Arrow Awards, Sarah Polley was voted Best Actress for her performance in Isabel Coixet’s written-and-directed My Life Without Me (Canada/Spain), the story of a young wife and mother doomed to a premature death by cancer who decides to hide the bad news, leaving behind instead recorded memories for all her loved ones. Ondrej Vetch was awarded Best Actor for his portrayal of a wayward lothario father in Juraj Nvota’s Krute radosti (Cruel Joys) (Slovakia), a sketch of provincial life in 1933 in a sleepy Slovak town. The award for Best Acting Couple (a unique prize found only at Faces of Love) went to Sidse Babett Knudsen and Björn Kjellman in Natasha Arthy’s Se til venstre, der er en svensker (Old, New, Borrowed and Blue) (Denmark), a tragicomedy about a bride-to-be who deserts her fiancee at the altar for an old flame who arrives on the scene from Kenya to take a HIV test. An extra Couple Award was given to actors Son Ye-jin and Cho Seung-woo in Gwak Jae-yong’s Koo-le-sik (Classic) (Republic of Korea), in which Son Ye-jin plays both the mother and daughter. Classic is a poetic rendering of an unfulfilled love that reaches its completion in the next generation.

Faces of Love is one of three film festivals sponsored annually by Russian media entrepreneur Mark Rudinstein under the auspices of the Kinotavr Group of Companies, an umbrella organization that also runs the Mir (World) venue in downtown Moscow. The other festivals take place in the resort city of Sochi on the Black Sea: the International and Open Russian Film Festival in June, followed by the International Children’s Film Festival in November. Thus, before Faces of Love had even closed, the core of the Kinotavr staff (festival director Sitora Alieva, programmer Sergei Lavrentiev, foreign coordinator Nina Govorova) has begun working on the coming Sochi event, slated June 1 - 14. »It’s our 15th anniversary,« said Mark Rudinstein. »Everyone is invited. We’re planning a gala celebration!«

Ron Holloway