FOCUS:

Look on the website of Film By the Sea Festival ­ www.filmbythesea.nl ­ and you will find a mermaid decorating this year’s program and all the posters of the past five international film festivals held in the picturesque Dutch seaport town of Vlissingen. This year, under its enterprising director Leo Hannewijk, the festival expanded its charming mermaid presence on the North Sea coast to include the parallel site of Scheveningen, a popular resort town on the very doorstep to The Hague, the Netherlands capital. The double-decker event ­ first Vlissingen (10-19 September 2004), followed by Scheveningen (13-17 September 2004) for five days, then back to Vlissingen again ­ may appear complicated at first sight, particularly to the native moviegoer, for the towns are an approximate two-hour drive apart. But the sixth edition had its purpose and proved to be one of the top events on the festival calendar this year.

First of all, there were the 25 films in the EuroFocus section. Since The Netherlands is currently serving as Chairman of the European Union, the opportunity presented itself to welcome the ten new EU members with a tip of the hat to the eight countries in the group with a proud national film culture: Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Secondly, thanks to international contacts enjoyed by festival codirector Steve Klain, a pair of Lifetime Achievement Awards were presented in Scheveningen by EU parliamentarian Hedy d’Ancona (also Chair of Festival Board) to (ex-)Czech director Milos Forman and American producer Saul Zaentz, best known in tandem for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (USA, 1975) and Amadeus (USA, 1984). That event alone drew a hefty response from the entire Dutch cultural and intellectual community. Add to this the festival’s traditional Film & Literature competition, plus previews of the coming fall film season (Steven Spielberg’s Terminal, Michael Mann’s Collatoral, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset), popular talk shows and workshops, and those nightly hip musical performances, and you know why Film By the Sea attracts cineastes from as far away as Brussels (to Vlissingen) and Amsterdam (to Scheveningen). Altogether, nearly 100 entries ­ an eclectic assortment of old, new, and seldom seen films ­ were programmed at the festival.

Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (USA), scripted by the inventive Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, 1999, Adaptation, 2002) and starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, opened the festival to a strong press echo. Among EuroFocus guests present to introduce their films were Polish actor-director Jerzy Stuhr (Tomorrow’s Weather), Hungarian director Karoly Makk (A Long Weekend in Pest and Buda), and Estonian director Ilmar Taska (Set Point). Turkish auteur director Ömer Kavur was on hand for the screening of his awarded classic Motherland Hotel (1986) in a five-film Turkish retrospective special. And talented French newcomer Éléonore Faucher presented her award-winning Brodeuses (A Common Thread), one of the hits at Cannes in the Week of the Critics section.

Eight films contended for the festival’s Grand Prize for Best Adaptation of a Literary Work: Achim von Borries’s Was nützt die Liebe in Gedanken (Love in Thoughts) (Arno Meyer zu Kuingdorf’s Love in Thoughts) (Germany), Hilmar Oddson’s Kaldaljos (Cold Light) (Vigdis Grimsdottir’s Cold Light), Sean Walsh’s Bloom (James Joyce’s Ulysses) (Ireland), Eleanor Yule’s Blinded (Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin) (UK), Larry Parr’s Fractured (Maurice Gee's Fractured) (New Zealand), Scott Smith's Falling Angels (Barbara Gowdy’s Falling Angels) (Canada), Michael Mayer’s A Home at the End of the World (Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World) (USA), and Vinko Bresan’s Svedoci (Witnesses) (Juric Pavicic’s Alabaster Sheep) (Croatia). A competition with many high points ­ among them, the choice of a Scottish setting for the Zola classic, the decision to short cut through the Joyce masterpiece, an Icelandic writer’s recollection of an avalanche that buried his family ’ the jury, composed of professional writers and filmmakers, awarded the Mermaid Statuette and a purse of EUR 5,000 to Vinko Bresan’s Witnesses, an indictment of moral acquiescence to crimes against humanity on the part of inhabitants in a Croatian village during the recent Balkan conflict. Serb nationalist Slobodan Milosevic, for that matter, is currently facing a international tribunal for war crimes in a nearby Scheveningen prison.

Ron Holloway