| |
| |
 |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
VENICE, Italy: Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing on Monday shone a cold light on human suffering at a re-education camp in the windswept Gobi Desert in "The Ditch" at the Venice film festival.
Set in 1960, the film chronicles the conditions facing inmates accused of being right-wing dissidents opposed to China's great socialist experiment, condemned to digging a ditch hundreds of miles long in the dead of winter.
Famine stalks the camp, and soon death is a daily fact.
"It's a film that brings dignity" to those who suffered and not a "denunciation film or a protest film," said the documentarist of his first fiction film.
"We wanted to preserve the memories, be aware of the memories, even painful ones," he told a news conference.
As Wang was born in 1967, the events "took place before my birth, so I put in great effort to understand the 1950s and 1960s in China, to understand the historical truth," he said.
"Past facts are criticisable because the Chinese people suffered, but I think it is important to show these events on the screen... to show how past history has for better or worse directed our course," Wang said.
Li Xiangnian, herself fresh out of acting school, said she discarded the techniques she had learned to embrace new ones under Wang's direction for her role as a woman who comes to the camp to visit her husband, who had died a week earlier.
"I developed an understanding of interior love, something that never changes no matter the era, the powerful sorrow of a strong woman," she said.
The limits of human endurance are also tested in Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski's "Essential Killing," a late entry in the line-up for the 67th Mostra.
In it, Vincent Gallo plays an American Taliban named Mohammed who is picked up in Afghanistan and "rendered" to Poland, where he escapes into snowbound mountains and kills to survive.
Like Wang, Skolimowski said his film was not political. "I'm trying to use as little as possible of the whole political context," said the veteran director, playwright and actor.
Mohammed's capture in Afghanistan and subsequent escape is "background, as a frame for this story," Skolimowski said. "Of course it's a fantasy, because if something like that would really happen, either we wouldn't know anything about it because it would be top secret or it would be a big scandal."
On the run in the snow, Gallo also eats bark and hallucinogenic berries - and even drinks a mother's milk at gunpoint - to survive.
"The fact that Vincent Gallo has such strange features and is an animalistic character, makes the protagonist of this film so ambiguous," Skolimowski said.
"It is an animal on the run and as such we tend to keep to the side of the underdog," he added.
The two films are among 24 competing for the coveted Golden Lion at this year's festival, to be awarded on Saturday, with Gallo also present as the director of "Promises Written in Water" about a girl with a terminal illness.
Making waves on the lagoon but out of competition is Casey Affleck's "I'm Still Here," a documentary on Joaquin Phoenix's transition from actor to wannabe rapper.
Affleck said Phoenix "never shied away from letting me see all the different aspects of his personality."
"I owed it to him and to myself to do it as well as I could and to make it as unflinching a look at him as I possibly could," said the Oscar-nominated director of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."
"This obviously was never really for me about celebrity or about fame," he said. "It's also about friendship, ambition, dreams, the artist in general."
- AFP/de
|
