3rd Motovun Film Festival
For the 3rd Motovun Film Festival (31 July to 4 August 2001), director Boris T. Matic and artistic director Rajko Grlic had to expand the festival’s modest facilities to accommodate an overflow crowd of circa 30,000 by opening an adjunct open-air venue on a schoolyard at the bottom of the hill. Three years ago, the Croatian festival on the Istrian peninsula could comfortably accommodate a third of that number on the piazza square perched atop a hill in this picturesque medieval town. That was when committed cineastes pilgered from as far away as Ljubljana and Zagreb just to watch, and cheer, the opening night ceremony - at which Rajko Grlic, the country’s best known film director, refused to bow to government demands to raise the Croatian flag and sing the national anthem. Consequently, Motovun’s only support came from the local Istrian government, backed by some international guests attending the nearby Imaginary Academy in the equally idyllic summer art town of Grosnjan.
“Next year we may have to move half the festival over to Grosnjan,” mused Matic, “but even that might not be enough to accommodate the crowds.” Anyway, some kind of solution has to be found - for, as Grlic announced on closing night, a new contract has been signed with Istrian government authorities to keep this friendly, playful, fun-loving film festival in Motovun and the immediate surrounding for the next five years. Meanwhile, a few miles down the road in the seaport town of Pula, the film festival there is lucky to attract a handful to the Vespasian arena that once hosted audiences of 12,000 and more in the glory days of Yugoslav cinema.
For the second year in a row, Motovun’s Golden Propeller, named for the marine ship-propeller invented in this town, was awarded to a British entry. Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort depicts the plight of a naive young Russian woman stranded in the UK with her 10-year-old son when her erstwhile fiancee doesn’t show up at the airport. Consigned to a refugee camp without passport, money, or rights to speak of, Tanja’s only hope is to escape illegally from the nightmare world of misfits she finds herself trapped in.
The FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize was awarded to Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land, a Bosnian-Slovenian-Belgian coproduction shot in neighboring Slovenia by a Bosnian director that was awarded Best Screenplay at Cannes. For that matter, Slovenian cinema prevailed at Motovun with two new comedies by young directors: Saso Podgorsek’s Slatki Snovi (Sweet Dreams Are Made of This), about a teenager wrestling with the seduction of newly introduced western music and movies in the early 1970s, and Martin Srebotnjak’s Oda Presernu (Ode to the Poet), about a young advertising writer asked to coin an ode to Slovenia’s poet laureate on France Breseren’s 200th anniversary. And it was announced at Motovun that yet a third Slovenian feature by a newcomer, Jan Cvitkovic’s Kruh in mleko (Bread and Milk), was invited to participate in the New Territories section at Venice. A moral tale shot in black-and-white, Bread and Milk sketches the downfall of an alcoholic who has just been released from his drying-out program and wants to start a new life with his ever-suffering wife and teenaged drug-addict son - later, on the Lido, it was awarded Best Debut Feature Film.