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Nothing was spared to make this year’s »jubilee festival« ­ the 25th International Film Camera Festival »Manaki Brothers« Bitola (28 September to 2 October 2004) ­ an event to remember. For some years now, Tomi Salkovski (festival director) and Blagoja »Dore« Kunovski (program selector) have been increasing their efforts to make Bitola a »film city« as well as a major Macedonian tourist attraction. After all, this is where cinema in the Balkan began ­ back in 1905, when Milton and Yanaki Manaki bought a Film Camera 300 in the Bioscope series from the Charles Urban Trading Company in London and proceeded to film their 114-year old grandmother at her spinning-wheel. This year, for the anniversary celebration, Spinners and Grandmother Despina (1905) could be fully appreciated by festival guests on opening night in a trailer of restored archival prints dating from the dawn of the last millennium, courtesy of the Macedonian Cinematheque in Skopje with the friendly support of Kodak.

Other festival improvements were immediately visible. Thanks to an increased budget provided by the Ministry of Culture, a second venue in the Cultural Center, equipped with newly installed projection facilities, accommodated a crowd of young cineastes with a competition of student shorts produced at European film schools. This, in addition to full houses in the 850-seat venue in the festival center that now serves the Bitola public as a year-around movie art house. Indeed, there were nights when tickets for the general public were hard to come by. »Next year, when we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first film shot in Macedonia by the Manaki Brothers, we’ll probably have to expand to a third venue,« said a smiling Tomi Salkovski at a press conference. And if all goes according to plan, he added, a brand new complex might be built on the site where a »Manaki Brothers Theater« once stood during their glory years in the 1920s.

The jubilee festival fittingly opened with the world premiere, running out-of competition, of a new feature film by a Macedonian director: Ivo Trajkov’s Golemata Boda (The Great Water) (DoP Suki Medencevic). Born 1965 in Skopje, Trajkov studied at the Prague Film School (FAMU), made an impressive feature film debut there with Minatoto (The Past), and served on the International Jury at the 2001 Bitola festival. In The Great Water (aka The Big Lake), based on a novel with the same title by Zivko Cingo, the dying politician Lem Nikodinoski (Meto Jovanovski) relives his frightful youth at a state orphanage for children of jailed parents in a dream sequence that takes him back to Communist Yugoslavia at the close of World War Two. Leaning heavily on audio and visual effects to make his point, Trajkov spares nothing in depicting the dehumanizing conditions at this state orphanage for both boys and girls, a veritable prison administered by an inept martinet and supervised by an ice-cold Stalinist matron. The story shifts into high gear when a new charge, Isak (played inexplicably by a girl, Maja Stankovska), arrives at the prison school. Shy and lonely, the 12-year-old Lem (Saso Keknovski) finds himself attracted to the newcomer’s spiritual strength, an almost ethereal presence that compels everyone at the institution to take a stance for better or for worse. Far more than just a review of Stalinist ideology in postwar Yugoslavia, the period just prior to Tito’s break with the Soviet Union in 1947, The Great Water has some riveting moments and confirmed in Ivo Trajkov a talent to watch on the Balkan film scene.

Perhaps a vote of thanks should go to a past Bitola festival for paying the way for another impressive Macedonian debut feature running out-of-competition: Teona Strugar Mitevska’s Kako ubuv scetec (How I Killed a Saint), directed by a graduate of the Tisch School of Arts at New York University. Two years ago, when cameraman Alain Marcoen ­ the brilliant DoP on Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta (1999, Golden Palm at Cannes) ­ was serving on the »Manaki Brothers« International Jury, he was approached by the Mitevska Sisters, producer-actress Labina and writer-director Teona, to collaborate with them on How I Killed a Saint. After its screening at this year’s Rotterdam festival, where it was liked by the critics, the film was invited to a dozen more festivals and went on to receive the Crossing Europe Award at Linz.
To some degree, How I Killed a Saint is autobiographical. Set in Skopje in 2001, when the Macedonia-Albania-Kosovo conflict was rapidly escalating, How I Killed a Saint is the story of a brother and sister caught in the middle of the political turmoil. Viola (Labina Mitevska) returns from America with a secret: she wants to find the three-year-old daughter she had left behind. Her younger brother, Kokan (Milan Tocinovski), a wet-eared Macedonian revolutionary, feels his country is occupied by UN and NATO troops, infiltrated by religious organizations, and dominated by weak parliamentary leadership that more than willing to broke an ethnic-cultural status quo. So he joins a blackmarket group that plies a flourishing trade for drugs and dynamite on the Macedonian-Yugoslav border ­ in the end, he pays with his life.

Twelve films competed for Film Camera 300 Awards: Bjorn Runge’s Om jag vander mig om (Daybreak) (Sweden) (DoP Ulf Brantas), Jerzy Stuhr’s Pogoda na jutro (Tomorrow’s Weather) (Poland) (DoP Edward Klosinski), Jessica Hausner’s Hotel (Austria) (DoP Martin Gschlacht), Gabriele Muccino’s Ricordati di me (Remember Me) (Italy) (DoP Marcello Montarsi), Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand (Head On) (Germany) (DoP Rainer Klausmann), M.X. Oberg’s Stratosphere Girl (Germany) (DoP Michael Mieke), Nimrod Antal’s Kontroll (Control) (Hungary) (DoP Gyula Pados), Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll’s Whisky (Uruguay) (DoP Barbara Alvarez), Johnnie To’s Breaking News (Hongkong/China) (DoP Cheng Sui Keung), Pedro Almodovar’s La mala education (Bad Education) (Spain) (DoP Jose Luis Alcaine), Agnès Jaoui’s Comme une image (Look at Me) (France) (DoP Stephane Fontaine), and Nigel Cole’s Calendar Girls (UK) (DoP Ashley Rowe).

The International Jury, headed by cameraman Cesar Charlone (awarded on opening night a Golden Camera 300 for Outstanding Artistic Contribution), awarded the festival’s Golden Camera 300 to Rainer Klausmann, the DoP on Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand (Head On) (Germany) ­ »for the creative and excellent way in which he manages to unite different photographic moods in order to intensify and emphasize the roughness of the story.« Head On, winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, is the story of two suicide-prone young Turks living in Hamburg, who find each other after mutual attempts to end their lives, marry on a whim to challenge themselves as well as to spite the Turkish community, then plunge into a downward spiral of drugs, drinking, free-wheeling sex, and uncontrolled bursts of temper. The Silver Camera 300 went to Gyula Pados, the DoP on Nimrod Antal’s Kontroll (Control) (Hungary), and the Bronze Camera to Martin Gschlacht, the DoP on Jessica Hausner’s Hotel (Austria). A Special Mention went deservedly to Barbara Alvarez, the DoP on Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll’s Whisky (Uruguay). It should be added that Control, Hotel, and Whisky were also critical hits at this year's Cannes festival.

Another festival highlight was the presence of Russian cameraman Vadim Yusov, recipient of this year’s Golden Camera 300 ­ Lifetime Achievement Award. Known particularly for his striking black-and-white cinematographic contribution to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (USSR, 1962) and Andrei Rublev (1969), Vadim Yusov thus joined France’s Raoul Coutard in 2003 and Italy’s Tonino Delli Colli in 2002 in the distinguished »Hall of Fame« on the walls of the »Manaki Brothers« festival center in Bitola.

Ron Holloway