Balinale puts Bali on Int’l Calendar As “Eat, Pray, Love” ends shoot in Ubud
Despite the financial slowdown the 3rd Balinale International Film Festival that took place here in Bali over six days 20 - 25 October showing 25 films and staging seven film workshops has hit its stride, earning its place on the international film festival circuit with over 2,000 people attending.
Some valuable lessons over last year have been learned and applied by the organizers in what is commonly agreed by those attending to have been a much more professionally organised event. In 2008 the Balinale lasted ten days, showing 45 films with just 350 people attending. “It was just way too much, particularly with only one cinema available”, says Sherri Dean, Balinale’s Producer.
Deborah Gabinetti, the Festival Director and her team, are to be congratulated on putting both Bali and Indonesia on the movie-making map as well as a job well done at a time when national cultural agencies, who play a large role in sponsoring such events, have cut their budgets. In fact Deborah Gabinetti, who heads up the Bali Film Center, has been a woman on a mission for quite a few years now to bring film production to Indonesia. That the Balinale Film Festival will now play a considerable role in promoting that aim is now clear. In fact it already has.
As soon as Ms Gabinetti learned that Paramount had acquired the film rights to “Eat, Pray, Love”, a spiritual odyssey via Italy, India and Bali written by American Elizabeth Gilbert, she was on the ‘phone to Paramount persuading them that the Bali section of the movie should be shot in Bali. Executive Producer Stan Wlodkowski, himself no stranger to Bali, came to the 2008 Balinale to check things out. He agreed and the deal was done, with Brad Pitt’s Plan B in charge of production. The movie “Eat, Pray Love” (EPL in brief) is in the final stages of being shot here in Bali right now, with actors Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem being filmed in the Ubud, Uluwatu and a number of other villages. The movie, which also stars actor Billy Crudup, is to be generally released in 2011.
A major feature film such as EPL will without doubt encourage a lot more people to visit Bali. Whether this will inspire a spate of feature films to be shot here remains to be seen. I hope so. We do not lack potentials. Vicki Baum’s “Tale of Bali”, K’tut Tantri’s “Revolt in Bali”, could both make great movies along with John Coast’s delightful “Dancing Out of Bali”. A film treatment of the Mads Lange epic is also long overdue. An obvious candidate and a favourite of mine would be “The Nightcomers”, set in 1950’s Java by Eric Ambler, a writer of literary thrillers along with Graham Greene, to whom other good writers in the genre such as John Le Carré, Charles McCarry and Richard Condon owe much.
Balinale 2009 showed 13 feature films, 2 children’s films, as well as 10 shorts, ranging from 21 minutes to 1.30 minutes duration. It was a varied program, which went down well with audiences. If there was a theme to the movies shown, it was music. The most popular movie shown by popular vote was “Still Bill” (USA 82 mins, Dir. Damani Baker) on the life of the enigmatic soul singer Bill Withers, whose songs captured the times, who seemed to arrive from nowhere and then simply disappeared again. Juan Laguna’s (Spain/Senegal) “Princess of Africa” 76 mins, pulses with the music of Senegal and Spain. “El Sistema”, Dirs. Paul Smaczny & Maria Stodtmeier (Venzuela) 120 mins, told the inspiring story of the network of youth orchestras set up in the poverty stricken barrios of Venezuela.
The feature movies I got to see were “Mary & Max” Adam Elliot (Australia), “Valentino: The Last Emperor”, Matt Tyrnauer (USA), and “Il Divo” Toni Sorrentino (Italy). I was sorry to have missed “Morning of the Earth” (Albert Falzon, Australia 1971), a surfer’s movie containing footage of Bali back then, “Still Bill” referred above and “Inglourious Basterds” since, with the exceptions of Kill Bills 1 & 2, I’ve always greatly enjoyed Tarantino by way of light relief.
A little bit of animated movie goes quite a long way with me so I enjoyed “Mary & Max” so far as it went. I did find it a bit contrived, though I much enjoyed Max and voice over Philip Seymour Hoffman. As for Valentino, I always wondered how someone who looked such a vulgar fright himself, that dreadful hair, mahogany tan and much too tight tailored suits, still designed for women with such classic flair and originality. Valentino never demeaned women by making them look silly. The answer of course was creative talent, total dedication, a good business and life partner, and being a real shit to everyone around him whenever he felt like it. One of our party had worked with Valentino designing shoes back in the 1980s. Of course we asked. He kept shaking his head and saying “It was terrible, terrible….”.
Tell me about Italian politics…..
The best movie of the Balinale for me was “Il Divo”, Toni Sorrentino’s 2008 Cannes award winner on Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy, who entered politics in 1948 and became a Senator for Life in 1992 and is still politically active today. This was a stunningly well-filmed and deeply layered, highly complex movie that reminded me of nothing so much as the political version of Antonioni’s “Red Desert” (1964) on industrial alienation in Northern Italy.
For anyone who is not Italian to have even the remotest grasp of Italian politics is a signal achievement. We know that essentially a Christian Democrat led coalition was able to prevent a post-war Italy from going Communist. We know how in the 60s and 70s the Red Brigades tried to destroy the capitalistic system, to the extent of murdering Prime Minister Aldo Moro. We know that corruption is endemic among revolving door coalitions and the Mafia has and continues to wield great power in the South.
A master of manipulation and maneuver, Andreotti’s latter career was bedeviled by charges of political murder and dealings with the Mafia. What makes this movie so good is that this physically unattractive and unappealing man begins to charm one with his dry sardonic wit, love of his wife of 60 years and very nuanced devotion to the Catholic church. The movie conveys a feeling of how the political game is played in a country that is barely 150 years old, but whose great social institutions and power blocs go back some 1,800 years.
Whether or not Andreotti was guilty as charged will never be known for sure. It would actually be rather odd if an Italian premier did not have some political discussion with the Mafia, who are a historical, political, as well as criminal presence in the South. But even if he did murder and collude as accused, the movie’s brilliance is that it brings you to the understanding that there are areas of governance where most of us cannot go and cannot judge, unless we ourselves are an informed party to the process. When we pass through that portal momentarily, we can only hope that those who live there act for the greatest good. Other than that, all we can do is throw the bastards out when they break the rules.
