Festival Central

All week we had noticed an odd group at the Intercontinental Hotel, where the festival kept the staff and press.  They were all incredibly fit and kept to themselves.  They looked tired all the time.  They ate a lot at the continental breakfasts.  Some worked out in the hotel gym every day.  One was a dwarf.

Then it hit us as we watched the closing night ceremony – they were actors and dancers from LA brought in to do a Broadway-styled number choreographed by Otis Salid who's put together similar theme-shows for the Academy Award and the Olympic ceremonies.  This theme – an American film director escorting an Arab boy through a history of film, with dancers and actors performing to clips projected on three screens.  One actor dressed as a gangster glared under "The Godfather." An Asian dancer jumped around with a sword under "Crouching Tiger."  A woman on stilts and the dwarf in clown makeup rolled about.  (Hard to say where they fit in to the film theme.)

Later, festival awards went to:

Producer Peter Bouckaert, and Director Nic Balthazar of BEN X
Winner of the Black Pearl Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature Film. The
award carries with it a cash prize of AED 300,000  ($81,000 US)
 
Michael James Rowland of LUCKY MILES
Winner of Black Pearl Jury Prize for Best New Director (Feature Film).
The award carries with it a cash prize of AED 300,000
 
Ensemble Cast: Nadine Labaki, Yasmine Al Masri, Joanna Moukarzel.
Gisele Aouad and Sihame Haddad of CARAMEL
Winner of the Black Pearl for Best Actress. The award carries with it a
cash prize of AED 300,000 
 
Carl Markovics of THE COUNTERFEITERS
Winner of the Black Pearl for Best Actor. The award carries with it a
cash prize of AED 300,000  
 
Paul Taylor of WE ARE TOGETHER
Winner of Black Pearl Jury Prize for Best Documentary Film. The
award carries with it a cash prize of AED 300,000
 
Producer Gundny Hummelvoll, and Director Hisham Zaman of BAWKE
Winner of the Black Pearl for Best Short Film. The award carries with it a
cash prize of AED 100,000 ($27,000US)
 
Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont of  MANON ON THE PAVEMENT
Winner of the Black Pearl for Best New Director (Short Film). The award
carries with it a cash prize of AED 100,000 
 
Josh Raskin of I MET THE WALRUS
Winner of the Black Pearl for Best Animated Short Film. The award
carries with it a cash prize of AED 100,000 


Afterwards, the dancers and the rest of the contracted American help who had been rushing and sweating this Herculean project through finally let their tense shoulders drop – relaxing at the closing night party, then proceeding to get hammered.
 

Venturing into downtown Abu Dhabi, we found a rare wall of graffiti alongside equally rare, dilapidated apartment buildings - a bustling mini-neighborhood tucked underneath tall towers of glass.  It was Friday, a holiday. 

At the center of these buildings, the local mosque began prayers over electric megaphones.  Men streamed out of storefronts carrying their rugs.  Cars stopped, children hushed. 

The mosque quickly filled, and the late-comers laid their rugs on street corners and sidewalks, rushing to any available spot as the scratchy song echoed off the Sheraton and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Crossing the street, another mini-neighborhood with another mosque, another loudspeaker.  No songs here.  Instead - emphatic, excited words.  Punctuated and energized.  Rallying.

As they knelt, the loudspeaker hushed. The neighborhood, previously alive with yelping taxis and delivery trucks, stopped for a moment.  Silence.  Then back up and to work, creating a quick traffic jam as taxis jockeyed for a lane leading back toward the hotels.

For the filmmakers at well-attended Variety MEIFF party, the jet lag fog had just started to lift.  The extremes at the festival have worked all week to keep people disoriented - the revolving doors between the extreme hot outside and cold inside, the free flowing campaign, the mirrored surfaces, and football field sized hallways that never end.  Every day there's been a reception but last night's finally felt alive, a prelude to tonight's awards ceremony.

"Caramel" director Nadine Labaki was honored with the Middle East Filmmaker award, pictured with MEIFF's Mohamed Khalaf Al Mazrouei, Variety's Ali Jaafar, festival director Jon Fitzgerald, and Variety's Alberto Lopez.


Earlier, Paul Haggis, pictured with Jaafar, gave a Master's Class to local students.  Journalists were allowed to listen for 15 minutes before being asked to leave.


"I Love Hip Hop Morroco" filmmaker Jennifer Needleman asked what would happen if these falcons' blindfolds were removed.  "The birds would try to take your hair," was the answer.  The gentleman then proceeded to show her a bloody finger, which the bird had apparently tried to take earlier.

by Marjorie Baumgarten
If there's an imminent screenwriters' strike looming over the film industry, it would be hard to detect any signs of uncertainty hovering over the Austin Film Festival. The Texas conference was held from October 11-14, while the film festival component continues through October 18.

Maybe it was the lure of barbecue and the prolonged Austin summer that lulled out-of-state screenwriters into their overall good spirits. There's nothing like a festival and numerous parties celebrating the art and practices of the screenwriter to escape the gloom that might otherwise darken the mood this frequently overlooked tribe. Perhaps it's the weekend's conviviality of the like-minded, all drawn away from the solitude of their individual writer's rooms, that makes the festival a refreshing shot in the arm for the scribes.

In Austin for the extended weekend, the professional screenwriters are panelists, judges, and honorees: gurus to the festival's rank and file of hopeful nonprofessionals. Some listen to 90-second pitches throughout several panels that winnow out an elite group of competition finalists. Others join festival attendees for casual yet organized "conversations" and "roundtables," including Terry George at the "Reservation Road" screening, and "Juno" director Jason Reitman with the film's writer, Diablo Cody.

Yet, by and large, the panels are customized how-to's, geared toward imparting information and expertise to the inexperienced. Sample panel topics include Common Mistakes Writers Make, Getting the Most Out of Competition, Getting a Writing Job, Writing the Drama, Writing Comedy for TV, and so on. Over the four days, sizable audiences took copious notes, nodded heads, and asked pertinent questions, but there's no escaping the truth of the conference's primary attraction: up-close and personal access to professionals who already have experienced the good fortune of getting their movies made. Tellingly, panels addressing such issues as packaging, copyrights, and contracts were easy to find, but there were none on the more advanced topics of residuals, collective bargaining, and recoupment formulas.

Given the nitty-gritty nature of most of the panels, it's understandable that curiosity was heightened for the star panels featuring conversations with this year's top honorees: recipient of the Outstanding Television Writer Award, Glenn Gordon Caron, the creator of "Moonlighting" and "Medium"; recipient of the Distinguished Screenwriter Award, John Milius, who also presented a screening of his early film "Big Wednesday"; and recipient of the Extraordinary Contribution to Filmmaking Award, Oliver Stone, who presented a screening of his "Born on the Fourth of July." Naturally, it was the panel titled In the Trenches: Writing a War Film, featuring Stone and Milius à deux, that attracted the greatest audience.

Despite one heckler whose beef with Milius was never fully elucidated (although it had something to do with a desire to get Milius to retract his expression of discontent with "The Deer Hunter"), the mood was civil and utterly fascinating. Milius declared his favorite war movie to be "Battleground," while Stone cited his as "Dr. Strangelove." Both men love Malick's "The Thin Red Line" and agree that every American should have to serve his or her country, especially in the armed forces. Stone said the difference between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq is the modern absence of a "citizen army." Volunteers "remain loyal to the military" and don't "bitch and moan" when things go wrong like drafted citizens do.

We can be certain that a lot of these ideas are going into Stone's current preparation of his next film "Pinkville," about the My Lai massacre. Milius argued that "everyone should have to have their lives interrupted" so that no one could avoid the problem. Although Stone would wince when Milius would express his love for "the Bomb," Milius explained his feeling that war is part of existence and to make "an anti-war film would be like making an anti-rain film." Both men loved the opening of "Saving Private Ryan" and strongly disliked the rest of the film, found "Hamburger Hill" too pro-American, and "Black Hawk Down" too muddled. Stone called "Starship Troopers" one of the best war films of recent years, and Milius cited "The Seven Samurai" as one of the best war films ever created. The session was a true master class.

Marjorie Baumgarten covers film for the Austin Chronicle.

All photos by Jack Plunkett/Austin Film Festival.

Earlier in the week at MEIFF's Film Financing Circle in Abu Dhabi, six filmmakers pitched their projects for a cash prize of $100K. Above, from left to right:  Rusudan Chkonia ("Keep Smiling"), Soman Chainani ("Love Marriage"), Fadal Al Muhairi ("A Corsair's Tale"), Kayvan Mashayekh ("Batting for Palestine"), Max Gruber ("We Kill What We Love"), FFC director Adrienne Briggs, and John McFarlane ("Friends & Money").

Ali Jaafar wraps it up here, along with news of an Abu Dhabi-based screenwriting lab, with Paul Haggis set to provide mentorship.

In the clip, Relativity Media’s Ryan Kavanaugh announces a surprise second prize.  Later, BBC Films head David Thompson and Hyde Park Entertainment chief Ashok Amritraj bestow the first.