|
 With such venues as New York, San Francisco, Moscow and St Petersburg on its itinerary, Durham can count itself lucky to have the chance to enjoy the compact NICE (New Italian Cinema Events) travelling film festival, 5 nights of recent Italian films unlikely to get a showing outside Italy other than at international festivals, but extremely accessible, attractive and thought provoking to wider audiences nonetheless. Sadly the ferstival is a minor casualty of the Icelandic ash, as directors who were to visit and talk about their films have been reluctant to risk becoming marooned on the British Isles away from their busy schedules, but there are introductions and discussions after each film. Hosted by the Modern Languages Department of Durham University, and showing there and with a couple of screenings at ARC Arts Centre in Stockton, it's the kind of enterprise that should be very attractive to a supposedly arts-hungry city, but sadly rather low-profile publicity saw only a handful of people watch the excellent opening film
PA-RA-DA Directed by Marco Pontecorvo A name to conjure with, and yes, Marco is indeed the son of Gillo Pontecorvo, director of the outstanding Battle of Algiers, the cult film of 1966 which brought urban freedom fighting graphically and naturalistically to the screen. Years of experience as a cinematographer are evident too in the effortless style of this naturalistic retelling of the story of the young French-Algerian clown Miloud Okili (Jalil Lespert) who in 1992 travelled to Bucharest, almost on a whim, and found there a cause worth staying for and devoting his life to. As a result of Ceausecu's policies of encouraging large families by banning birth control and abortion while simultaneously impoverishing the nation to almost starvation levels, the early 90s saw Romania's capital awash with street children, some escaping poverty at home, others fleeing the dreadful orphanages where destitute families had placed them. Known as ‘boskettars' (forest people, or as many in our own society would say, feral) they lived in the sewers, surviving on begging, prostitution and theft, glue-sniffing to make it all bearable, and ruled and abused by criminal gangs. Into this world steps Miloud, with his compassionate sense of outrage, joining the few people trying to make a difference to the situation. With the criminal enforcers and the police as enemies constantly trying to subvert what he does, he brings a taste of freedom to the children via involving them in performance art. Away from the darkness of their sewers and breathing fresher air than the druggy fumes from their plastic bags they blossom and learn self-reliance and self-respect, though not without sad casualties along the way. Hand-held camerawork and use of non-professional ex-street-children playing roles they are all too conversant with themselves makes for a real documentary feel, yet there are moments of unaffected, often tragic, poetry, such as the moment we watch one of the children dancing in an abandoned railway wagon to Tchaikovsky, only to discover it is purely for the warped pleasure of a punter. Darkness often rules, in the sewers and in the dangerous spaces frequented by the children, but their ultimately successful performance as the circus PA-RA-DA lights up the previously forlorn city centre park with magic, as we see their true talented and exuberant selves emerging. Like his father's film, this is, as well as a strong story, testament to how things were, and still are, as along with the closing credits we see contemporary shots of present day destitution in the same city, and learn that as well as the circus troupe performing throughout Europe, the organisation born in Romania now also does work with street children in Italy and France. http://www.nicefestival.org/ Seen at Elvet Riverside, Durham, 28 April 2010 |
