Marseilles is best known to general film buffs as the stomping ground of Popeye Doyle in French Connection II. It’s here, in July’s baking heat, that the Festival International Documentaire de Marseille showcases an array of cutting-edge fare, the bulk of it comprising works shown in public for the first time. FID has established a reputation for rigorous, often experimental pictures – usually tackling social, political and economic issues, frequently from oblique angles. It’s an uncompromising, unorthodox programme: unusually, the three competitive sections routinely mix mid-length and feature-length material and, despite the word “documentary” in the festival’s title, many offerings blur standard definitions of fiction and non-fiction.
Refreshingly, FID seems to have little truck with the current international fashion for documentaries running to extreme lengths. This year’s most forbidding offering was a 146-minute filmed lecture on German philosopher Martin Heidegger – unlikely to be displacing Harry Potter at your local multiplex any time soon. Given the economic imperatives of the distribution system, it’s really only film-festivals which can afford to take a chance on such a wildly esoteric-sounding project as, say, Xurxo Churro’s Vikingland.
Having stumbled across a stash of video tapes in his town library’s local studies section, Churro realised they had been shot during 1993-94 by one Luis Lomba – like Churro, a native of the northern Spanish province of Galicia – during his time working below decks on a ferry. What starts off as fairly banal home video-style larks grows steadily more intriguing as Lomba explores the camcorder’s capabilities. He tapes extended on-the-job footage that resembles experimental video art and, during enigmatic cabin interludes, we discern a more introspective man than the happy-go-lucky chap known by his colleagues. Vikingland has evidently been arranged into shape by Churro – into chapters inspired by (and named after) non-fiction interludes from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
While it lingers strongly in the memory, Vikingland wasn’t the most accomplished debut on show . That honour must go to Yuval Sagiv’s How I Filmed the War, which was receiving its first screening outside its native Canada, where it premiered back in May 2010. Admittedly, the lack of spoken dialogue might not appeal to all, but this austere adaptation of Lieutenant Geoffrey H Malins’ memoir of the same title – in which he reflects on his experiences as the British Army’s official cinematographer during the First World War – tells a fascinating story in a radical but accessible style.
Sagiv presents excerpts from Malins’ book – phrases and sentences, in their original fonts, floating on plain white backgrounds – alongside footage from the Battle of the Somme, with additional comments from a 1993 academic text which put Malins’ claims and recollections under an analytical spotlight, penetrating what the film refers to as a “blanket of misinformation”.
The result is an engrossing and illuminating examination of moving-image war reportage in one of its very earliest manifestations – Malins was perhaps what we now call an embedded journalist – which works as both a tribute to Malins’ artistry and bravery, and in its latter stages an almost unbearably poignant reminder of Great War horrors. How I Filmed the War is one of the most effective and original documentaries of the decade so far.
Another Canadian newcomer to note is Andrea Bussmann, whose 40-minute Canadian-Mexican production He Whose Face Gives No Light goes behind the scenes on an upcoming Mexican feature to interview a series of pensioner extras and bit-part players in between scenes. Beautifully shot on crisp digital video by acclaimed director Nicolas Pereda, He Whose Face offsets its avant-garde tendencies with a likeable strain of down-to-earth humour. Mexico was much in the spotlight throughout FID XXII. Highlights included Nicolas Echevarria’s ethno-religious documentary Child Fidencio from 1980 and Roberto Gavaldon’s enjoyably lurid melodrama/thriller Night Falls from 1952. Natalia Almada’s The Night Watchman is a fine treatment of a great subject: the contrast between the opulent tombs of deceased drug-cartel kingpins, and the rudimentary shack inhabited by the grizzled chap employed to look after them after dark.
