Cannes serves up screen gems
THE stars were walking the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival during the 12 days of world premieres and champagne parties, but for Jewish International Film Festival (JIFF) director Eddie Tamir, the focus was on Israeli and Jewish-themed films that could premiere at this year’s festival in Melbourne and Sydney in November.
Tamir, who took over the running of JIFF last year, joined a large Australian contingent of filmmakers and distributors at Cannes, the iconic resort town on the Cote d’Azur in the south of France.
“It’s a very hotly contested market in Cannes as we are competing with commercial distributors and other festivals for films,” he told The AJN after returning from Cannes – the 16th year he has attended.
“The healthy appetite for cinema in Australia means a lot of competition. It means seeing films from 8am to midnight as well as attending meetings with agents.”
Cannes was buzzing with the premiere of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby with stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in town, along with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon from Behind the Candelabra. Steven Spielberg was also present as chairman of the international jury for the Palme d’Or, which was won by Tunisian-born director Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour.
In the spotlight was the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn Davis, about a Bob Dylan-type Greenwich Village singer-songwriter in the ’60s, as well as Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, starring his wife Emmanuelle Seigner in a film about gender politics and exploitation.
Israeli director Ari Folman, who took Cannes by storm in 2008 with Waltz with Bashir, screened his new futuristic film The Congress, which combines live action with animation as it tackles issues of intellectual copyright and internet avatars in the movie business. It screened in the Directors’ Fortnight selection.
One of the films that Tamir previewed in Cannes was Claude Lanzmann’s new documentary, The Last of the Unjust.
Lanzmann, 87, was acclaimed for his groundbreaking nine-hour 1985 documentary film on the Holocaust titled Shoah.
Drawing extensively from filmed interviews with Benjamin Murmelstein, the last and only surviving president of the Jewish Council in the Theresienstadt ghetto during World War II that he filmed while making Shoah, Lanzmann has created a powerful documentary that runs for 220 minutes.
“It is an exciting film and an important historical document that will have its Australian premiere in JIFF,” says Tamir.
Other movies that impressed Tamir in Cannes included Argentinian filmmaker Lucia Puenzo’s Wakolda, the fictional story of a family in Patagonia in the 1960s who discover they are hosting the infamous Nazi criminal Dr Josef Mengele in their cosy hotel.
Israeli filmmakers Navot Papushado and Aharon Keshales have followed up their thriller movie Rabies with Big Bad Wolves, in which a murderer becomes the victim after being captured by a law-breaking policeman and an angry father.
“Big Bad Wolves was one of the hottest titles in Cannes this year,” says Tamir. “It’s a thriller with some quirky Jewish humour.”
Before attending the Cannes Film Festival, Tamir and his wife Lindy visited the Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival in Tel Aviv, where more than 80 Israeli documentary films were screened.
REPORT by Danny Gocs
PHOTO of Josh Tamir, 18, at the red carpet premiere of The Great Gatsby at the Cannes Film Festival.
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