Editor

Lets not forget that this festival, established 14 years ago, the Festival of New Author Films www.faf.rs in Belgrade Serbia honouring the different type of festival audience respecting two aspects: looking at the new possibilities of motion picture expressions and renewing classical patterns of film narrative in the changed technological and civilization context. Beside the homage showcase of Zivojin Pavlovic one of the most important Serbian filmmakers and the French philosopher and most influent film critic of all times Andre Bazin, festival did a great respect to a mainstream audience in Belgrade.

One of the films that we had a chance to see on the festival was a brand new film by David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Chambers Lynch, which is another cop-killer road movie. Her work resembles enough on her father’s (David Lynch) close ups and opssesion with suffer and abuse in the special way of showing violence. Lets not forget, Jennifer is also known by contervisal film from 1993 „Boxing Helena“. Her „Survaillence“is an aggressive soundtrack including conveniently used an old song by Violet Fames, as we see the rapid fire shots of a massacre perpetrated by two assailants as they enter and kill everyone in sleep: violence and unrest hit the viewer at once. “Surveillance” is something close to what David Lynch does best (“Twin Peaks”,” Lost Highway”) in the genre. If you check portrait gallery of characters: an eight year old child, couple of junkies and a trigger-happy policemen the local police shom themselves as incompetent, inexperienced and ridiculous, everything confirm her father's pattern.
One of the very best of festival is „Palermo Shooting“ by Wim Wenders, showed on Cannes Film Festival but in uncut version. This time this is a brilliant piece of work that portraits travel and remainds best on „Until The End of The World“. This time Wenders again engages a briliant musicians to help him cover and emphasis the story, just like in „Until The End of The World“. Wanders here presents incredibly varied and well chosen music to introduces the very 'of the moment' use of the bipod to deliver songs that links us with the central character. This concept is a clever a subtle social comment, at which Winder’s has always been good. It says an awful lot about contemporary fast living and modern man at the cutting edge of successful life. The entire film is full of subtle, poignant and cohesive moments of straight story blended to great effect with the surreal. He goes a step forward, original enough and comic and make his character of death played to perfection by Dennis Hopper, who is almost everywhere, on the edges of reality. Through the powerful and beautifully composed shots and music that follow Finn (the main character) as he comes to grip with Palermo to follow his own ghosts. Maybe this is his autobiography after all. The main character a good looking man, deliberately desirable rotate his camera from the 360 degree, from the beautiful classic car through Palermo's old streets, which makes the film ultra modern, and breathtaking. Here Wenders is in top form in the composition of his scenes and extra position of cultures and ideas. And points out at the sheer metaphor of life, relating the situations which seem surreal and that go beyond 'coincidence'. This is a fabulous and original use of music with breathtaking cinematography which takes us on a remarkable 'voyage'.

The first Madonna’s directing debut „Filth and Wisdom“tracks the philosophy of Western sucess “to go up you must go down first“, a cute little comedy drama about weird bohemians of Eastend London, struggling to become someone. Story that might look like her own. It seems that Madonna did not wanted to make a big directing name of herself, how much she wanted to portrait the way of living in contemporary UK. So everything went down to a witty „all right Rusky“ dialoque which might be a show off how well she learned British English during her prolonque stay in UK and marriage to an English man Guy Ritchy.

More to music, A New Author Film Festival in Belgrade this year followed the tradition of showing music biographies, films such as „I’m Not There“ by Todd Haynes, „Rolling Stones-Shine a Light“ by Martin Scorsese, „Joy Division“ by Grant Gee, „Lou Reed’s Berlin“ by Julian Schnabel, „Egzodus 77“ by Anthony Wall. That is a very clever move, how to bring into a cinema a music buffs that otherwise would not come to the festival.

Hunger gets Award

The Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen’s strong feature debut “Hunger” wins the main Aleksandar Sasa Petrovic Prize of A New Author Film Festival in Belgrade Serbia and shares the money of 7000 euros with the Kazakh’s film “Tulpan” directed by Sergej Dvortsevoy. According the Jury of festival (Boris T. Matic, Ferenc Torok and Gordan Mihic) no matter of two completely different film expression, aesthetic structure and layers, both stories have equal strength, reaching the top qualities of film art, sound and image given ahead in McQueen’s kind of experimental and non-narrative film that shows the final days of IRA activist and political prisoner Bobby Sands, just before he died after 66-days of hunger strike in 1981. Film equally effective, dramatic and distressful won the prestigious awards including the Camera d’Or for best first feature film at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and the equivalent at the Toronto International Film Festival. The Author Film Festival Jury also awarded amazingly visual Kazakh’s film “Tulpan” that also won FIPRESCI The Film Critics Award and Aleksandra Petković-Petko Award. And in Cannes the film was honored with awards the “Prix de l´ Education Nationale” and with the “Prix de la Jeunesse”. The festival also gave The Freedom Award to a Bosnian film “Snow” directed by Aida Begic and Serbia’s FIPRESCI Award to “The White Night Wedding” directed by Balthazar Kormakur.

Radmila Djurica