Vladivostok 2005

Where the World Ends
By Mariska Graveland

Mariska Graveland attended the Vladivostok International Film Festival, September 10-15, 2005, in the far-away Russian city of Vladivostok. See also the festival's website www.viff.ru

For most of us it's the place where the world ends. For the people of Vladivostok, their harbour is a gateway to Asia. Located near the border to North Korea, surrounded by the Siberian landscape and saddled with closed city gates until 1992, Vladivostok hasn't had a reputation of accessibility. Their harbour was the base of USSR's nuclear vessels, so no foreign eyes were allowed to watch the Pacific waves tickle the Vladivostok fleet and the rusty cargo ships from the Far East Shipping Company. Since 1992 things have changed for all Russia, and for Vladivostok this meant an attempt to connect to the Asia-Pacific region, instead of Europe or the United States. Flying distances tell you why: even Moscow is a nine hours flight away, and the most nearby film studio is the one in Yekaterinburg, a 7 hours flight away. No wonder eyes are pointed towards Asia.

Hence the founding of a film festival that is called Pacific Meridian. The 3rd Vladivostok International Film Festival (VIFF) has dedicated itself to the screening of films from Pacific bordering countries like Japan, South-Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Mexico and Canada. Some geographical liberties with films from India, Spain and Norway are easy to forgive.

VIFF is more focused on supplying the region with films that usually aren't shown there, than on the hunt for premieres. The intense porn musical tragedy The Wayward Cloud for example, is the first film of Tsai Ming-liang that has reached the Vladivostok theatres. For a city that coped with serious electricity shortage till some years ago, art film was a luxury. So nowadays VIFF is filling a gap, but it is hard to imagine many international festival scouts and journalists are willing to bridge the distance to Vladivostok — the competition programme is simply not adventurous enough. The festival is running at the same time as Toronto, Venice and the film market in Moscow, but VIFF doesn't have the ambition yet to compete with these events. Most of the VIFF-films have won prizes at other festivals, the programming department doesn't visit other festivals often and hardly any film from 2005 is to be found. Most films have a sentimental and explicit storytelling in which emotions are spelled out.

Nevertheless being in Vladivostok, the end of the Trans-Siberian Express, is an exciting experience, and there are some treats in the programme. The jury selected the Peruvian drama Dias de Santiago (Grand Prix), the Chinese eco-western Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (Special Jury Prize), the Russian psychological drama Remote Access (Best Direction) and the Singaporean short film Cut , a daring satire on censorship. The '9288 km prize', referring to the exact distance between Vladivostok and Moscow, was presented to the Russian drama The Italian. Sidebars came with a panorama of New Russian Cinema (unfortunately without subtitles), the retrospective of the inventive Russian/French animator Alexander Alexeieff (1901-1982), and ethnographic films from the Siberian Amur River region.

Guests could enjoy themselves with outrageous buffets every night, where the Russian rich and (locally) famous are crawling around and watching the same opera singers, show ballets and crooners every night. Sincerely over the top: the guest buses received a police siren escort to all places, the blue carpet ceremony was decorated with saluting marines and tuba players on the side and the opening night was illuminated with indoor fire work that literary crushed the ceiling. Instead of watching films you could go on a 'nice' day out to the military training camp near the city, where guests could fire all kinds of arms and meet soldiers who were leaving the next day to Chechnya. Overall the festival atmosphere was energetic: a group of short film makers decided spontaneously to shoot an ensemble film in Hotel Vladivostok, where seven directors shot one hour tape each, to be edited, without any budget and with the help of actors who were guests of the festival. Goal is to premier the film at the next VIFF.

There is hope the festival will develop into a more balanced and more daring festival. And if they find the money they will make the festival last one day longer (now there are only 4 full days of screenings). For now it is to be praised that VIFF is providing the region to otherwise unseen films during the festival; after the event they will distribute films like the mild Chinese drama Mongolian Ping Pong.

Mariska Graveland
© FIPRESCI 2005

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