It is clear from the start that realism was a huge concern for the director. Archive footage of Nazi-occupied Paris is chosen to introduce the viewer to the fiction, and the involvement of several historians and survivors in the film to ensure accuracy is always evident.
As commendable as it may be, the effort is not enough to carry the film, which would also need substantial dramatic material. Besides, only Joseph Weiszman, now aged 80, survived the camp of Beaune-La-Rolande, making the notion of close depiction of reality somewhat problematic.

There is a distinct fracture between the first part of the film, strictly factual, and the last. Following the deportation to Vel d'Hiv, LA RAFLE abandons the path of historical exactness and loses itself in melodramatic overflows. From this point on, the material feels overtly dramatized and manipulated, particularly in the way it handles the contrast between the innocent children’s world and the hardships of reality. Noé Zygler's character, whose angel visage and naivety are exemplar, is notably used – the term here seems to be justified – to secure the viewer's empathy, thanks to his lisp and his incomprehension of the events.
With its heavy realiance on violins and classical repertoire (Wagner, Debussy), even the soundtrack is forcibly tear-jerking, often struggling to underline the points the story is trying to make, as in the justaposixion of Hitler's idleness and the Jews' malnutrition.

LA RAFLE’s attempt to enhance the horror of the story tragically backfires. Instead of following is primary objective – to reproduce the facts in the most realistic way – the film paradoxically attenuates their atrocity (meant as it is to be shown to children) and exaggerates the relational melodrama.
Was such heavy dramatisation really necessary? Would history not suffice? As heartfelt and respectable as it is, the authors’ intent to shed some lights on a crucial page of France’s past should perhaps have been conveyed through a more factual account. Instead, it quickly sinks into pathetic sentimentalism.

Samba, as we used to call him, was a smart, intuitive and knowledgeable individual who enjoyed communicating with others. Conviction and integrity characterize this life. In the time he spent at Durban Talent Campus in 2009, and at the Berlinale Talent Campus in February 2010, he impressed everyone, showing an immense appeal and charm.
He became friends with many of his colleagues, being the epitome of vitality, energy and curiosity about life. He always mantained that this trait was the foundation of his filmmaking activity. He displayed a striking openness to the world, never ceasing to rely on his analytical mind. This is what made Samba a good and inspiring young filmmaker.

El Hadj Samba Sarr developed his skills during numerous filmmaking workshops around the world, travelling across Africa and to Europe and America. He attended workshops with renowned filmmakers such as Newton Aduaka, whom he met in Canada in 2008. He was able to start his career with the help of fundings by the European Union and by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France.
His first film AMULYAKAR (2002), explored the notion of football as a tool of social integration in Africa and was awarded the Audience Prize at the Festival de Film de Quartier of Dakar in Senegal in 2002. In the same year he won a prize at the Festival Codigital of Barcelona. TV5 and Canal France International bought the film and broadcasted it to international audiences.
His documentary GRAINES QUE LA MER EMPORTE (2007) remains the most successful film of his short and eternal career. Acquired in 2008 by Canal France International , it was regarded as the best documentary at the Festival Image et Vie of Dakar in 2009, and selected at the Festival de Films Documentaires d’Amiens in France. He took part in the 2009 Talent Campus in Durban with his feature film LE PRINCE DES GAZELLES, and this year he went to Berlin to participate in the Campus Editing Studio with his documentary project BASSARI GREEN GOLD.
Regarded as an important voice of Senegalese cinema, in 2009 he also realized LA DISCORDE, a short film dealing with the problem of cultural shock. It was presented at several festivals, such as Africa Fespaco, and was awarded the "Prix d'encouragement" at the Festival Films Panafricains du FNUAP, in Dakar.

In the words of Senegalese poet Birago Diop, ‘the dead are never dead, they are in the flowing water… they are in the shadow that comes on… They are in the tree that quivers’.
And there is and will be Samba.

Adapted from a short novel by Ah Mei (a personal friend of the director), the film has a strong focal point in its study of female characters. Despite Yin’s refusal to acknowledge gender interpretations of her work, it is clear that KNITTING is primarily concerned with following women on the path of self redemption, in a world where men are deserting cowards. The international title itself goes beyond the activity of one of the characters, and hints at a subtle, feminine bonding process.

Opposite in characters (one is clumsy and dumb, the other strong and tough), the two women engage in an overexposed conflict that the director fails to pace correctly; instead of delicately showing their feelings, most of the scenes depict bullying and prevarication, thus making the final resolution rushed and unnatural. Devoid of heartfelt and dramatic substance, the film never appears as emotional as it should be, and Yin’s fresh originality in poetry doesn’t translate well in her sophomore film effort, marking a step back from its predecessor THE PARK.

We’re at an abandoned mansion shooting Star Cinema’s latest film MISS YOU LIKE CRAZY. (Star Cinema is perhaps the Philippines’ most prolific mainstream film studio.) The cast and crew have been shooting for almost a week now. Continuously. No actual breaks. “We haven’t had any sleep,” Cathy tells me. A few hours ago, they packed up at five in the morning, and then went straight to the editing room to start cutting. After that, they had those edited clips approved by Star Cinema management. It’s now 5:30 pm and the sun is about to set. Why are they all smiling? “This is how we are every Valentine’s - we kill ourselves with work,” Cathy says. For the last couple of years, Star Cinema has been releasing a rom-com during Valentine’s. They’ve all scored big bucks.
It’s January 27. MISS YOU LIKE CRAZY is set to show on February 22. So far, they’ve shot 60% of the film. In two days, they’re leaving for Malaysia to shoot the rest. “I haven’t made a film that didn’t have a playdate,” she says. “But that’s how it is in Star Cinema. As you saw a while ago, we didn’t have the right lighting equipment. But what can you do? These are things that people don’t know about us.”

Cathy is probably Star Cinema’s hottest property right now. She’s directed eight blockbusters for her mother studio - including last year’s YOU CHANGED MY LIFE, which earned over 240M in Philippine pesos and is the highest grossing Filipino film of all time. It’s been quite a journey for the single mom (her husband died last year due to a car accident), whose directing career started in 1999 when Star Cinema was looking for an assistant director to replace Olivia Lamasan, who was then being launched as a director. The assignment was simple: a one-camera shoot for the youth-oriented TV show GIMIK. “Your role here is to reprimand the teen actors,” director Laurenti Dyogi told her. “You’ll discipline them.” A year later, she was asked to direct an episode of MAALAALA MO KAYA, the drama anthology considered to be the training ground for the studio’s upcoming directors.

Her big break happened in 2005. She was having a delicate pregnancy and gave birth in September. Just a month after, she received a call from her mentor Olivia Lamasan: “I know you just gave birth, but would you like to do a John Lloyd-Bea project with Unilever?” A month later, they were rolling. The project was the Close-Up toothpaste brand promo flick CLOSE TO YOU, where teen actors John Lloyd Cruz and Bea Alonzo were first introduced in the big screen.
Today, Cathy is under contract to direct three pictures every two years. Good enough for someone who started in the industry making coffee for the production crew. “Son of a bitch, I studied four years in the University of the Philippines (the prestigious state university) to make coffee for you? Is this part of the job? Yes. Sorry, but yes. You can’t have a lot of pride here. But you do have to have some self-respect. It took years of sacrificing before getting here. I even sold encyclopedia, going door-to-door.”

“Do you read Peyups or Pinoy Exchange?” Cathy whispers to me. They’re shooting cast interviews for the film’s promotional featurette and the production manager just screamed, “Quiet on the set!”
Peyups is the online discussion website of the state university’s community, while Pinoy Exchange is a frequented online forum. “I read one time: The people in Star Cinema do not think,” Cathy says. “It really hurt me. You know, when I was a student in U.P. Film, I was like that. I’d attack all the commercial films of Star.” She laughs. “But come on, if we can make a good story, why not? But that’s not how the system works! There are budget limitations.”
I point out to her that her films have budgets of over 25-30M (a local independent feature film is commonly produced within a budget of one million). They’ve all grossed more than 100M each, except probably MY ONLY Ü, which grossed 79M. “That’s true, but we’re talking here about 30M. That’s not small,” she says.
“Why risk something that big for an experimental film?” Cathy says that MY ONLY Ü is a perfect example. In the film, she tried using an unconventional storytelling format. “But look what happened, it didn’t earn,” she says. “This is a business. We may want to be out of the box, but it’s not that easy.”

“Quiet on the set!” the production manager screams. Cathy looks at me and laughs. “The best way to change the industry is to start inside, not by criticizing,” she says. Cathy’s dream movie is a musical. She’s pitched it to the management, but to no avail. “Tita Malou, maybe we can try this out,” she recalls telling Malou Santos, one of Star Cinema’s top honchos. “I understand why she doesn’t want to do it. Because I’d be fooling her if I say, Tita Malou, this will earn, promise!”
Cathy says that whenever she thinks about the control Star Cinema has on her, she looks back at that one afternoon in esteemed local director Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s directing class where they had an argument about the merits of independent films. “Indies shouldn’t forget commercial value because you have to make people come and watch your film,” Diaz-Abaya apparently told them. “You can’t just be auteur all the time,” Cathy adds. “If your attitude is like that, perhaps you yourself are killing your own industry.”
“Look, there’s no ugly film until you’re able to make one. At the end of the day, I’m just telling a story,” she says. “And I happen to make it according to the taste of the crowd because I believe filmmaking is entertainment.”
“Indies are a different school of thought for me. I don’t have their strength. Very brave stories. But that doesn’t make our films poorer in quality. You know, indie and commercial should be merging, not separated. Just think about how it’ll be if their intelligence and our commercial skills merge.”

“Direk Cathy and I are like lovers,” lead actor John Lloyd Cruz says. “We’ve known each other for eight years. We’ve been on and off. We always fight. I’d say something that would hurt her. Little things. We’re like characters in movies.”
They just finished shooting one of MISS YOU LIKE CRAZY’s pivotal scenes. There’s a short break. About a dozen fans somehow got pass security and are inside the film set - their camera phones aimed solely at John Lloyd, perhaps the country’s biggest star right now.

I tell John Lloyd about Cathy’s thoughts on commercial and independent films and he smiles. “There are many people who instantly think negatively about commercial films. There’s a sort of disgusto, to the point that’s already offensive,” he says. “But it’s a challenge to create and portray simple, common characters. Do they think it’s easy? Many people, especially those who belong to the indie movement, they think mainstream characters are shallow and easy. But why don’t they try it out? Why don’t they try to portray common characters that you bump into everyday? Sometimes I pity us from the mainstream - they think we’re all shallow.”
He pauses because we couldn’t hear each other. The mansion is located right beside a river and there’s a marching band practicing on the other side. They’re now playing “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys.
“I respect everyone. But we all have our own pros and cons. In indie films, for example, the stories have a different flow. Many don’t get it. Sometimes to the point that it’s impressionist. I respect that.” In 2007, John Lloyd appeared in independent film STILL LIFE. He says he’d be more than willing to do another one. “Just let me see the script.”

“She makes you think. You’re not like a puppet.” I’m talking to lead actress Bea Alonzo, who’s talking about Cathy. I share with her what her director and leading man told me a few hours ago. “They’re right, because people think lowly of us. As if we’re less passionate. But we’re exerting the same level of hardwork.”
Bea says the only thing she hates about her job is that she gets stuck with good girl roles. “We can’t decide for ourselves. Star Cinema has the last say on everything. We have scenes where I’m supposed to smoke, where I’m supposed to curse, but it’s forbidden because I apparently have an image to protect. But I do agree with them.”

It’s close to midnight when dinner is finally served on set. We’re in a makeshift dining area under a giant tree. Our only source of light is the set of Christmas lights still attached on the tree’s branches. The marching band is still practicing. “Two more days, Noel, two more days!” Cathy tells her cinematographer. It’s close to midnight when dinner is finally served on set. We’re in a makeshift dining area under a giant tree. Our only source of light is the set of Christmas lights still attached on the tree’s branches. The marching band is still practicing. “Two more days, Noel, two more days!” Cathy tells her cinematographer.
Noel Teehankee, who’s worked with Cathy in almost all of her films, borders on stereotype: Ear piercings, a goatee, a shaved head, a swagger, an English accent. When I ask him if compensation is good in Star Cinema, he answers: “It’s funding my beers and comics and PS3, so I’m happy.” After spending a day on set, I realize that not only has he got major skills, but the guy’s probably the kindest one there. “When we shot YOU CHANGED MY LIFE, I didn’t sleep for three weeks straight,” he shares, smiling. “We haven’t slept for the last week and we’re flying to Malaysia in a few days to spend another batch of sleepless nights. That’s work for us.” Noel is still smiling. “A mainstream studio shooting abroad is a practice in independent craftsmanship,” he says. “I’m excited.”

“I’m scared, to be honest,” Cathy tells me over our catered dinner. “Are people prepared with the film’s tone?” Apparently, MISS YOU LIKE CRAZY is not a rom-com. For the very first time, Star Cinema is putting out a romantic drama for Valentine’s. “The story is slow, similar to BEFORE SUNRISE. That’s why we’re very nervous. I hope it’s received well. If it becomes a hit, then I’ll make one more step towards unconventionality. So, I hope, I hope.”

The marching band starts playing another song. “How many hours have they been there?” John Lloyd quips. They’re playing what seems to be a Brazilian dance tune. “Is this Tahitian?” Cathy asks. She stands up and starts dancing to the beat.
A crewmember approaches her. “The people who made the film poster are coming in. They’re going to show us what they made. Apparently, it’s not your usual Star Cinema poster.”
Cathy smiles at him. “Even if I have revisions, can anything still be done? If it’s been approved by the management it’s already final, correct?”
“Yes, Direk, correct.”
“Okay. Let’s just dance.”
Cathy gets back to dancing. The band continues to play.

How long did it take to finish?
We knocked it off very quickly. I like working fast - just to get something down on paper. In the course of getting a script finally finished, it’s changing all the time: I’m adding to it, taking away. Plus there’s going out and trying to raise the money and simplifying it so that the executives can understand it. Then you start designing it, and actors come and they’ll add. It’s a constantly shifting thing, but with PARNASSUS, I didn’t expect it to shift as much as it did. This time around we simply had to. [Gilliam’s referring to the passing of lead actor Heath Ledger on January 22, 2008; Ledger was then on a brief hiatus from the shoot as the production team switched gears to handle all of the “Imaginarium” sequences.]
I’ve always wanted to be surprised, and Heath managed to surprise me more than anything that has ever surprised me in life. It was interesting. It was an once-in-a-lifetime experience - or the last of someone’s lifetime experience - and what it did was turn the film into something a bit more magical.

Were there scenes included that you had to delete after his passing?
Well, we needed to get three other people [Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law.]. We didn’t need to change the script too much, as the basic conceit could be moved very easily. But I did need to drop one particular scene that Heath wouldn’t be around to do, and put another one where he was supposed to be in on the other side of the mirror. In both instances, they were improvements, so in a way, it was Heath posthumously co-directing and re-writing the film. [In the closing credits, the picture is labeled as being ‘A Film from Heath Ledger and Friends’.]

And so the dialogue concerning James Dean and other tragic figures was always in place?
It was all in there - every one of those words. After all, the film is about mortality and the business of not dying young. But that was at best spooky and at worst… [pause].
You’ve just got to be careful with what you write. This one was the most painful and difficult but the results are fantastic. People who see it just feel that it’s seamless [with the other actors portraying Ledger’s behind-the-mirror personae] and can’t imagine it any other way.

A few words about the fantasy designs in PARNASSUS. How do you begin and how do you prefer to work?
In a way, I just start drawing things completely out-of-scale. With this one, we wanted to give the impression of [Parnassus’s] stage behaving like a pop-up book. In regards to the other stuff, I storyboard like I did with all of my previous films and in my animation. You start looking at references, painters, photographs and gather them together. With this one, there was a lot of material, like the American painter Grant Wood - his landscapes are what are behind Jude Law on his latter. There were elements of [American artist] Maxwell Parrish, but we didn’t succeed as much with that one.
There are a lot of different inspirations I’m stealing from, I must be honest. You know, all of it becomes like a magpie work: anything that catches my eye I try to incorporate. And it evolves. The trick is to be working with good people who have a flexible approach as well. And you just keep playing and inventing. You never quite stop until you cut the last bit of film or put the last bit of music in.

How do you work with your cinematographer, Nicola Pecorini? [Gilliam and Pecorini have previously collaborated on 1998’s FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and 2005’s TIDELAND.]
Nicola’s quite exceptional. He’s a big opinionated Italian who sometimes agrees with me. Most of the time when we agree on something it’ll be because we’re working instinctively - it’s always bad when I have to sit down and talk analytically of what we do, because I can’t, as it’s all instinctive to me. Nicola builds up a bible which is quote elaborate, attaching photographs for reference. All of it’s done in prep, and then when we start shooting we end up throwing everything out the window and wing it.
The trick is to plan in detail, so that if anything goes wrong, we can always revert to the plan. But if we have a better idea we can move off of our original approach. The good thing about film is that you can always retrieve it in the editing if you’ve gone too far from the map.

When did you decide to cast Tom Waits as the devil figure?
He’s just one of the few living gods out there, I think. I worship him and his music is spectacular. I just think he’s the best in this country. And for the devil, he can do the most sublime, sweet beautiful stuff to the darkest and most disturbing, and those are things the devil should have to play with, it seems to me. He’s totally seductive in the role.

Backtracking quite a bit, what was it like to have dinner with Federico Fellini during the filming of BARON MUNCHAUSEN?
It was very funny, and an amazing experience. While we were making MUNCHAUSEN, Fellini kept poking his nose in because I was on his turf with his designer. And finally, on the last night - my last night - we all went to dinner. His wife, Giulietta Masina, was there. And it was great - the thing I remember most was walking arm-in-arm with Fellini around the Trevi Fountain. That was my first and only time at Cinecitta. I remember telling him, “After 8 months of Rome, I think I’ve been raped. You Italians raped me, and you ended up making your movie. But I must admit - it was enjoyable to be raped by you guys!”

And backtracking even further - before you were a film director - you did the animated opening titles on a Vincent Price film. [1970’s CRY OF THE BANSHEES, directed by Gordon Hessler.]
Yeah, it was all very basic stuff, but the interesting thing was, soon after that, I came back from a month-long holiday with my wife and found a letter from Stanley Kubrick. He wanted me to do the opening credits for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971), but by the time I got back, it was much too late. So, my career with Kubrick - over before it even began! I’m sure I still have the letter somewhere - there’s so much junk in my house.

Although you’ve never adapted him proper, I feel there’s a lot of Philip K. Dick in your work. And you’ve expressed interest in the past.
Oh yeah, he’s absolutely extraordinary. After THE FISHER KING (1991), [screenwriter] Richard LaGravanese and I wanted to adapt A SCANNER DARKLY, but the studio in their wisdom - after making more profit for them than anyone else that year - simply said no. And that’s the moment I realized I couldn’t even begin to understand what Hollywood was all about. If it wasn’t about making money, then what? We were just two guys who just made them a lot of money, and were asking for nothing more than to option a book and let us write a script. And it was still no... It eventually got made [by Richard Linklater in 2006], but I never saw that version.
I think I kind of secretly steal from him, though. You know UBIK? I’ve always loved that one. And then there’s THE WORLD JONES MADE, which really intrigues me because it’s about a society where everything’s become relative, and along comes a guy who can predict the future - suddenly things aren’t so relative anymore! [laughs]. Of course, there are no definite plans to make that one - like everything else at the moment, it’s just another vacant dream.

Dibakar Banerjee's LOVE SEX AUR DHOKHA (Love, Sex and Betrayal) ostensibly assembles the stories behind the scandals, using hand-held video, closed circuit television, and spy cameras to loop us in and out of today's headlines. So what if the film sometimes forgets what kind of camera it has been shot on? LSD is still something of a high-concept, low-budget knockout, further consolidating hope that a Bombay New Wave really is in the offing.

Essentially three short films packed into a two-hour feature, LSD's first - and best - story involves a couple working on a film about star-crossed, class-divided lovers. This itself provides an occasion for parody and homage, but eager beaver Banerjee finds a way to elaborate the clichés of the film-within-a-film-within-a-film into pure nightmare for his social-rebel protagonists, splicing in a shock ending that'll take the wind out of you sooner than you can say 'Khap Panchayat'.

LSD then storms into its next chapter, where Banerjee surmounts the challenge of crafting an intelligible narrative out of nothing other than surveillance camera footage. Of course, he is aided in his efforts by the actors (who enunciate clearly and stand bang in the center of the fish-eye) but I'm not complaining. To his credit, cinematographer Nikos Andritsakis develops an unobtrusive visual style without distracting from the centerpiece: a campaign of seduction that begins in the aisles and backrooms of a small supply store and ends with a viral sex-tape on the Internet.

The film's closer details a sting op against the tawdry pop moghul ‘Loki’. Though it’s a bit of milquetoast, lacking the urgency and originality of the preceding material, the third chapter is occasionally salvaged by the helmer’s dark humour. Everywhere evident in LSD – in the sets, in the casting, in the shots, in the lines – is the same pathos that distinguished his KHOSLA KA GHOSLA and OYE LUCKY LUCKY OYE. In those films, Banerjee first shared his sense that the comic and the menacing are never more than a gap apart in India's exploding urbanity. With LSD, he stares for the first time into the maw of death at the center of banality – and closes the gap entirely.

NOTE: Banerjee is an expert in irony, but even he could not have predicted the speed with which film would race from the big screen to home video and on to the web. A high-quality, subtitled copy of LOVE SEX AUR DHOKHA is easily available for viewing on the Internet.

When Ken Jacobs found a film reel in a garbage can in 1985, he instantly knew that he had to rescue it – it was perfect. He picked it up, put it together, and screened it without any changes. He gave it the title of PERFECT FILM, and turned it into a very interesting example of experimental filmmaking with found footage, with a non-existant degree of intervention on the material. Jacobs knew that the raw energy of witnesses’ reactions to the murder of Malcolm X needed no alteration.
TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON (1969), on the other hand, required a completely different approach. It is a one-minute long sequence which Ken Jacobs turned into a 90-minutes film, altering it in every conceivable way: scratching or drawing or colouring all over the celluloid, zooming in and out, changing the frame-per-seconds speed. No trace of the original remained visible.
STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH (2004), one of Jacobs’ most renowned films, stands as a middle ground between the two, covering a journey of six hours through an endless amount of images produced in and by the United States in the last 100 years. As in a dark cinematographic aleph, we get to witness the racist ethnographic films of Osa and Martin Johnson, a television programme trying to explain how love works by experimenting on a monkey, cartoons from the 20’s, home movies and more. Jacobs organizes the long excerpts by using a non-intrusive voice over. The rationale behind the choice of images is elusive, making the film a calm zapping through that gigantic factory of images that are the United States.

One of the most extreme and fascinating examples of found footage documentary films is THE ATOMIC CAFE (1982, by Jayne Loader, Kevin and Pierce Rafferty). Just as in ROSE HOBART and PERFECT FILM, the genesis of this work is fortuitous: Pierce Rafferty stumbled upon a catalogue of “3433 U.S. Government films” in a San Francisco bookstore. The catalogue included animations, newsreels, institutional short films and educational and propaganda movies about the Cold War and the atomic bomb. He immediately bought the catalogue and involved his brother Kevin and the journalist Jayne Loader to discuss what to do with the materials. It was obvious that a movie could be made using all that footage. The question was, which one?
As time went by and the lenght of the footage increased, they realized that those images were so powerful that they didn’t need to be altered. They illustrated the spirit of the 40’s and 50’s so clearly that voice overs, music and intertitles were superfluous. The result is both hilarious and frightening - a faithful account of an era marked by lies and paranoia.

Of course, not all found footage films can be easily categorized as experimental or documentary. The work of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi is halfway between both universes. The couple is obsessed with war, and they made it the central theme of UOMINI, ANNI, VITA (1990), PRIGIONIERI DELLA GUERRA (1996) and OH, UOMO (2004), just like the atomic age was at the core of THE ATOMIC CAFE.
Fires, mass graves, massive exiles, battles, military parades: the images viscerally illustrate how wars, massacres and genocides affected landscapes, cities and people. However, unlike THE ATOMIC CAFE, the work of Gianikian and Ricci is not discursive. The editing is neither informative nor rhetorical. The films weren’t made for us to know about the massacres but rather for us to feel them in our own flesh. The alterations of the image (colour filters, acceleration and deceleration, soundtrack) usually enhance the original sense rather than changing it. A sad image becomes sadder with music. A lysergic sequence is underlined by chromatic alteration. That’s why their best film probably remains FROM THE POLE TO THE EQUATOR, a kaleidoscope of expeditions and journeys undertaken at the dawn of the twentieth century. In this film-trance the phantasmagorical and feverish atmosphere reaches peaks of great intensity.

The universe of found footage is incredibly big and fertile. The appropriation mechanisms are endless. From the violent ones that mutilate images until they become unrecognizable, to the more subtle ones, that generate sense through editing. From propaganda to reflection. Homage and criticism. Rescue from decomposition and creation of thematic catalogues. Obsessive exploration of a single image or frantic montage of thousands. There is still a lot of ground to cover – there are as many possibilities as images.

The legend goes like this: Duchamp got a urinal and displayed it as a work of art in a museum exhibition. As usual, things are not that simple. In fact, the urinal (signed by Duchamp with the pseudonym Richard Mutt) was rejected in 1917 by the Society of Independent Artists and was displayed 33 years later, in 1950, in New York City. Between 1917 and 1950, there were many comings and goings, endless debates and quite a few urinals. But, in a sense, the details are not important, so let’s just say that Duchamp got a urinal and displayed it as a work of art in a museum exhibition. This act generated a considerable scandal because it destroyed (or at least brought to question) many suppositions regarding art and artists: how could it be that a work of art was produced by a urinal factory and not by an artist? How could it be that technique and hard work were replaced by a whim? How could it be that the work displayed was something serialized and not unique, an object exactly the same as thousands of others?

When the urinal was rejected by the Society of Independent Artists in 1917, the art magazine "The Blind Man" published the following: "Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object." To take something that has a specific purpose, to change its context so that it loses its original meaning and to relocate it to give it a new sense: that is exactly what found footage does; except for the fact that it uses images instead of urinals. The director of found footage films precisely takes images shot by other people and uses them to create something personal and new.

One of the first examples is John Cornell and his short film ROSE HOBART (1936). Cornell, an artist from New York, frequented antique shops, warehouses and garbage dumps. One day, in one of his walks, he found a copy of the low budget adventure film East of Borneo and picked it up. When he watched it, he started feeling two things. One, that the film was soporific. Two, that he was falling in love with the actress Rose Hobart. So he got a pair of scissors and tried to improve the film, cutting the scenes which he felt were boring and leaving the ones in which his beloved appeared. When he finished, he had reduced the film from 77 to 18 minutes. As a final touch, he added images of an eclipse, which he took from another movie. ROSE HOBART became well-known in some circles and was projected, through a blue filter and with a Brazilian song as a soundtrack, in several museums. A dull feature film, with synchronized sound and a defined story line, became a semi-silent, hypnotic and mysterious short film. The images weren’t tied any more to a spatial-temporal logic but rather to an oneiric one. In fact, they say that during one the screenings a furious Dali started kicking the projector and shouting to Cornell, "You stole my dream!"

Six years later, in 1942, the US Army entrusted Frank Capra the production of WHY WE FIGHT. The story is better known and much less poetic than ROSE HOBART's - the United States were about to intervene in the Second World War and the Government needed to explain to the soldiers why it was indispensable to fight. So they called Capra, who had never directed a documentary film, entrusted him with the mission and provided him with plenty of images. They were of different sorts and different origins: full-length narrative films, educational movies, documentaries, short films, newsreels, etc., produced in the United States or in the allied or enemy countries. Capra and his collaborators spent months going over the images and finally took what they needed, reordered it, added some maps and a voice over (in fact, two voice overs) to produce WHY WE FIGHT. In this documentary series, the voice over is essential. The images often seem unconnected and the voice over is the only thing that keeps them together. A baseball match, a car cutting through a desert and two fishermen in a small boat find a connection through the line "we Americans love sports. We enjoy travelling. We hunt and fish." Capra and his team turned an overwhelming amount of footage into a series of almost seven hours, with the objective of motivating the American soldiers, extolling a set of ideals in opposition to others, reconstructing several battles and describing the idiosyncrasy and the history of the most important belligerent nations. All this using images produced by others, shot with completely different intentions.

ROSE HOBART and WHY WE FIGHT are two radically different films. One lasts 18 minutes, the other seven hours. One was produced by a single person, the other by a big team. One was a personal initiative and had no external financial support, the other was entrusted and funded by the US Government. One doesn't have a clear objective, the other does. One is elusive and sensorial, the other transparent and argumentative. Nonetheless, they both have something in common - they take images produced by others and use them for their own purpose. Through editing, voice over, chromatic alterations and the use of music, the images are transformed into something else. A close-up of Rose Hobart stops being the element of an adventure plot and becomes a hallucinatory image. A scene of a baseball match stops being an anodyne moment of a newsreel and becomes a symbol of the American passion for sports. ROSE HOBART and WHY WE FIGHT embody two different types of found footage films: the appropriation of images for experimental (the former) or documentary (the latter) purposes.

Part II

AFTER (Spain) is the new film that Sevillian director Alberto Rodriguez has presented in competition in the Ibero-American Fiction Feature Films category at the Guadalajara International Film Festival. The director himself admitted that the film was born amidst complicated circumstances, following SEVEN VIRGENES's success at the Spanish box office and the international recognition that came with it: "after four troubled years, - he says - the hope for new projects started fading away; then we began working on AFTER with these negative feelings and finished with an even worse state of mind. It was more demolishing than what we initially intended."

Rodriguez adopts here a three-part structure, following the events of a single evening in which three old friends get together after a long time. AFTER therefore is made up of three subjective points of view, and the truth escapes the eye. The focus is instead on raw emotions, which make Rodriguez's fifth effort a rather obscure one.

The stories of Manuel (Tristán Ulloa, LUCIA Y EL SEXO), Julio (Guillermo Toledo, EL CRIMEN PERFECTO) and Ana (Blanca Romero) all carry masked emotions, further disrupted by a spiral of fear and drugs. The outcome is cleary imaginable by the viewer, but this tortuous path of drama, confusion and dependency doesn't lack a tragic grip on the viewer, tackling contemporary concerns as our relationship with our public persona, our love scars and the tendency to fight pain through alcohol and drugs. One evening can be enough to make you seek excess as an escape valve.

The house is often perceived as a space in which reality can be outgrown, and where political and social transformations are filtered by the daily routine of the family members. SOUTH DISTRICT (Zona Sur, Bolivia), Juan Carlos Valdivia's third feature film, makes this filtering the topic of its story, posing questions that are central to Bolivian contemporary society, reflecting upon social inequality, racism and the intergenerational struggle of moral and ideological values.

The plot centers around the house of a wealthy family in La Paz. Carola, the mother, is a successful businesswoman who devoted her family environment to the control of her three children; Patricio, the eldest son, is a college student in sexual frenzy and the recipient of all of the comforts and luxuries accrued by the mother; The teenager Bernarda rebels against her mother's moral values and seeks her own sexual identity; Andres is the youngest son, innocently observer of the events. The patriarchal role is vacant but temporarily held by Wilson the butler, who completes the variegated family picture. These characters will move amidst a complicated network of relationships, disrupting traditional roles and building up the dramatic tension before the eyes of the viewer.

The single element that defines SOUTH DISTRICT is the balance between visual and narrative language. The construction of the narrative, based on the repetitive use of travelling shots, easily accommodates the grasp of the plot's contemplative atmosphere. The personal discourse of the film is evidently shown through a collective loneliness of characters framed by the camera while looking outside the house, each absorbed in their own thoughts. When Wilson chooses his own family dimension, returning to his home town for his son's funeral against Carola's will, SOUTH DISTRICT reaches its peak while music engulfs the scene in visual poetry, symbolically assessing the importance of Wilson's social condition – an indigenous Bolivian living in a modern country, claiming his place in the social occurrences.

As one of the hardest social phenomenons to tackle for any government, famine has always been a recurrent topic for documentary filmmakers in Latin America. GARAPA (2008) follows in this tradition, and has gained significant international recognition before being awarded the Best Film prize by FIPRESCI at the 25th Guadalajara Film Festival.

Following the success of his previous effort in social dissection of life in the favelas, the acclaimed fiction work TROPA DE ELITE (2007), author and director Jose Padilla now presents a visual essay focusing on the drama of three Brazilian families in the region of Vila Olha d’Agua. Although the plot is not exactly breaking new grounds in exposing social problems of peripherical segments in Latin American nations, the visual account of the daily routine of Rosa, Rosalina and Lucia works quite well as a narrative pivotal point, and at times seems to morph into an ethnographic registry. Eventually, the realism of the characters' suffering manages to steer the tone of the story towards cruder territory, exploring the human condition under extreme situations of misery.

One of the stylistic achievements of the documentary lies in the visual conceptualization through which the lives of these families are analyzed by a black and white mise en scene, aesthetically emphasizing the emotional rhythms the individuals move in. At the same time, the minimalistic presentation, underlined by the lightning and the lack of music, grants it an air of intimacy and emotional closeness. A feeling of despair is experienced on several occasions as Lucia is about to enter her house, walking down a dark tunnel with a faint light slowly appearing. In the form of a metaphor, the chiaroscuro of this scene reflects the two central aspects of the documentary. On the one hand, the relationship among the families, portrayed as a daily collective struggle to survive in a hostile world with a blurred male presence as the family support; on the other, the fragile effort of the government in solving the problem. Most outstanding is the indication that the characters are helpless and abandoned beyond the basic needs of food and hygiene; they do not have a visible trace of existential aspirations.

Padilla's documentary only hints at the degree of emotional involvement required to identify with the story; however, in this dialectic process, the images of Garapa speak loud and clear, and appear crowded with malnourished children, suffering mothers, streets with no names, broken families, inclemency of the weather, life's inequity and random injustice.

THE GOOD HERBS (Buenas Hierbas) is a portrait of Mexico and the ancient wisdom of its inhabitants; on top of that, it is also about female sensibility, a theme that has become the trademark of Novaro's work.
The protagonist Dalia (Ursula Pruneda) assists her mother Lala (Ofelia Medina) in her daily efforts of collecting recipes to cure the ailments of the soul. When Lala's condition degenerates, Dalia is forced to take care of her full time, a situation that presents the woman with a terrible decision.

In her new film, Novaro attempts to take her audience on a journey of exploration into new narrative territories that outgrow reality. The story is told as a reflection of sensations, odours and sounds, apparently arising from the dialogue between the women and the plants. Looking at the flowers in detail causes them to contemplate us in eternity, according to the director of DANZON.

Despite being loosely conducted in terms of narrative conventions, THE GOOD HERBS is meticulous in the use of dialogues and dramatic energy. In order to shape the characters of Lala and Dalia, Maria Novaro makes good use of daily events punctuating the progress of the disease, such as Dalia's work at a local community station - a kind of description seldom found in Mexican cinema.

Each sequence opens and closes with a recipe for the heart, a new flower and sweet melodies performed by Dalia's friends, who appear intermittently, just like the spirit of the dead granddaughter of one of the characters, an element that draws the story into the realm of magic realism and provides an emotional counterpoint to Dalia's tragedy. In addition to a book of recipes to heal the sorrow and renovate the spirit, THE GOOD HERBS is also the first seed in Maria Novaro's new style of storytelling, more subtle and more intimate.

“Love at first sight” was the name of the conference that actor and director Diego Luna and producer Pablo Cruz presented as part of the activities at Talent Campus Guadalajara, now on its second edition at the International Film Festival in Guadalajara. Luna and Cruz talked to an audience who was eager to find answers on selecting actors and how casting has a direct influence on the final project.

ABEL, Diego Luna's second movie and his first fiction, was the example used to contextualize problems in movie making in Mexico. Both asseverated that, even if national production has increased, Mexico still does not have a proper industry, and Luna emphasized that it is an activity that does not generate revenue. “In México you can not make a living from filmmaking, however we can professionalize the processes to improve the outcomes”, he said.

He also commented on how he selected Karina Gidi and José María Yázpik in the leading roles of his film, and made reference to the 400 children that auditioned for the leading part. About his work for television, the actor said he prefers to forget about it, since it is very different from what he seeks to do on the big screen. On the small screen time makes the difference, and a certain immediateness is required. Films, on the other hand, have the crucial advantage of a larger time span allowed for creation.

The attendees watched the trailer that was presented at Sundance to sell ABEL, which will soon be released in Mexico. Luna explained that there are three stages to having a successful casting. The first is to summon actors and have them display their tools; then the director must enter into a joint recognition process with the actor so that in the third stage both can meet and communicate in such a way that this good selection is conveyed on screen. Through their comments, Luna and Cruz firmly confirmed the notion that for films that want to capture their audience, love at first sight simply does not happen.

How does a screenwriter survive? What do the big Hollywood studios look to produce? The power of movie reviews, screenplays, original stories and the importance of creative freedom were among the topics touched on during the first activity of the Talent Campus Guadalajara.

At the Stelaris Hall of the Hotel Fiesta Americana, students from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean gathered around to talk to Michael Tolkin, screenwriter of such films as Oscar-nominated NINE, DEEP IMPACT and THE PLAYER. Titled "The Sunset of the Empire", the masterclass was moderated by Jorge Sánchez Sosa, the director of the FICG. Tolkin stated that Hollywood has a well established form of work, and that film productions are determined by financial potential. They do not follow intuition, and are interested only in the numbers that a film can generate.

The recent screenwriters' strike and the Hollywood crisis were other topics touched upon during the question and answer session. Tolkin said that Hollywood is not interested in drama as a film genre. He advised the attendees to make a list of their 10 favorite movies, just as a creative exercise. This will allow them to clarify who they want to target with their projects. He assured that even though it will be a biased selection, it will allow them to focus better, and to have a grasp on what kind of audience they are looking for.

Television, dvd, cable TV and the digital era were mentioned as factors of the crisis the celluloid is facing. The filmmaker said that, in spite of all this, the industry persists and will continue to do so. After all, he concluded, "the Seventh Art will evolve along with the spaces where it is screened."

“Women are much more intelligent than men”. This is how Barry Gifford describes the female character's strength in WILD AT HEART, directed by the renowned David Lynch. The Mexican director Antonio Urrutia moderated the conversation with Barry Gifford in absence of Guillermo Arriaga.

The auditorium was nearly packed with curious young people who wanted to meet the poet, artist and screenwriter who describes himself as a "lover of the small things". Small things are often the least obvious although, as Urrutia points out, in America "things are very obvious".

Most of the attendees were interested in hearing about the work relationship between David Lynch and him. This conversation revealed that many in the audience are followers of his work. Aside from WILD AT HEART, Gifford also wrote LOST HIGHWAYS.

The author, with good humor and eloquence told some anecdotes about his writing process with Lynch. He also spoke of his collaboration with other directors such as Coppola, Gus Vant Sant and the Spaniard Alex de la Iglesia who directed the film adaptation of his novel "Perdita Durango".

Complaisant with the audience, Gifford shared his impressions on the film industry with the Talents. He defined it as a "rock and roll business, for which you have to be passionate about". He also spoke about his life, revealing the origin of his interests in certain topics such as the US-Mexican border. He also expressed the critique that in these times we are always connected to our computers and telephones, we no longer have time to be alone with our own thoughts. The best things in life, he says, “happen in silence”.

As his last comments, Barry Gifford asked the young filmmakers in the audience why they want to make movies. After listening to them, he said: "no one really knows. Whoever comes here to give you answers is just being kind".

Lisa Cholodenko’s third feature centres around the marriage of Nic and Jules, a Los Angeles-based lesbian couple who raise a teenage daughter and son. The idyll of their domestic life gets disturbed when the kids decide to meet their biological father, the mothers’ sperm donor. They do it secretly in order not to hurt mom and mom’s feelings, but not much time passes by before their father Paul charms his way into the family. Four is a family, but five is a crowd, and the odd one out has to be determined.

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT shows the prototype of what a 21st century family may look like. The film does not question the functionality of a same-sex marriage, but takes it for granted. Nic and Jules’ marriage is presented like any other, with its usual ups and downs, and Cholodenko makes a point of testing it with problems generally perceived as typical only of heterosexual unions. The couple struggles with parenting, trust, fidelity, professional success or lack thereof and its effect on the relationship.

Slick production with predictable plot lines packed in a recognizable format of family drama and romantic comedy serve the purpose of acquainting the wider American audience with the possibility of functional gay marriages. With its accessibility, the film gets the message through to a potentially prejudiced average Joe without being condescending. However unlikely this may seem, Joe will be able to identify with a lesbian, as he will surely sympathize with Nic’s desire to keep her family in firm control and her wife tucked away in the kitchen.

We do not get the sense that Cholodenko spares us any sexual details that the sensitive types may find unpleasant, but the film is still very non-confrontational and tiptoes around any potentially flammable gender issues. The director takes an occasional benevolent jab at the trendy feminist perception of life where even buying a truck gets interpreted as a “proactive” move, but she never judges the validity of her characters’ choices.

The agenda does not get in the way of storytelling, nor does it make the characters appear contrived. Carried by the strength of the star performances of Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, the film beguiles with the humanity of the characters and wonderful, light-hearted humour that prevents it from turning into a melodramatic sap. As for the people who find the film offensive, or a result of having nothing more important to say, they will have to get used to it or keep their eyes firmly closed, because we can expect films with a similar intent and more provocation to be shown everywhere quite soon.

Jan Raiber will remember his 30th birthday for a long time. Not only did his first feature-length film premiere at the Berlinale in the section Perspektive Deutscher Film, but it also put a full stop to a chapter of his life marked with insecurity and doubts.

Rainer had spent most of his life with a vague feeling that he may have been fathered by a different person than his younger siblings. Having decided to finally determine his place in the family history, Jan set out in pursuit of long-suppressed facts. He armed himself with a camera and became the director and lead actor of an autobiographical documentary.

ALL MY FATHERS tells a story that is deeply personal and not that uncommon, which initially makes us wonder whether we have any business watching it. However, once Jan’s search starts producing shocking results and we witness real people reacting to the soap-opera twists of their life, we are taken for an emotional rollercoaster ride that is hard to resist.

The first fruits of Jan’s detective work come quickly. He learns that, at the time of his birth, his mother was married to a man called Uwe, which leads him to conclude that Uwe is his biological father. Or is he?

While the film does convey criticism of the conservative line that parents’ authority should be indisputable and their personalities virtually unknown, it primarily functions as an inadvertent satire on human selfishness and cowardice. Once it has broken the wall of silence, the film puts in plain sight how manipulative people can be when they are unwilling to pay the price of their past mistakes.

What distinguishes ALL MY FATHERS from an underproduced reality show that tracks down long-lost sweethearts is the honesty with which Rainer approaches his craft, as well as the courage to wash dirty laundry in public. These qualities turn the satire into a light comedy of manners where we would rather laugh off than judge the characters’ flaws.

Indeed, the film evokes an inordinate amount of laughter given the seriousness of its content. This is mostly due to the flippancy of the film’s most memorable character, Jan’s mother, who is evidently unable to cope with the burden of responsibility. We cannot help laughing at all the confusion she caused, however obvious it may be that the people affected by her actions do not find the events as funny as we do.

Raiber manages to develop a slice-of-life episode into a well-rounded story. Those who have no taste for reality shows will still easily enjoy the young filmmaker’s effort, as it produces genuine rather than fabricated emotions.

Jasmila Žbanić (director of ON THE PATH in this year’s Berlinale Competition) chose and introduced THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL as her selection for the Berlinale Retrospektive. In 1992, during the war in Sarajevo, she saw this film in a cold cinema run on a generator. The beauty of this film warmed her and her fellow viewers, instilling in them a sense of hope: “Art is stronger than destruction and it gives you the power to survive”, said Zbanic.

After a day at the factory, Iris returns home to make her parents dinner, optimistically puts on eyeliner and goes out to a dance club solo. Seven bottles of soda later, with disappointment and smudged makeup she crawls into her makeshift bed (a couch in the living room, one of many apparent homages to Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN), and stares blankly from her pillow.

Kaurismaki uses mise-en-scène to say the things the characters don’t – the textures of the walls, the tablecloths, the lighting tells us about the people in the room. Iris’s one-night-stand lives in a lofty modern apartment with brilliantly white walls and a bright pink couch. He has opportunities, money, and most importantly choices, whereas Iris and her mother are frequently depicted in a dingy, dark, smoke-filled room, looking out the window at the light from outside--hopeless and trapped.

The most valuable information is always conveyed in letters, never spoken, and placed silently on tables by apprehensive hands. Through Kaurismäki’s meticulous selection of songs, the jukebox always plays the tunes that speak to Iris’s melancholic heart and sum up the tragically clichéd bleakness of her circumstance.

The opening and closing of doors and trunks always anticipate the next moment, yet we know that they never lead anywhere, until Iris proves us wrong and makes the most decisive choice. Much in the same way Jeanne Dielman did, Iris triumphs and gets her revenge. Kaurismäki’s characters are from the same world as Akerman’s and Fassbinder’s – a simple, terse breed who subtly seem to acknowledge that they live in an imitation of life. Real people may show up at the hospital bed of someone who has just failed to commit suicide and tell them that they aren’t welcome to come home, but real people wouldn’t then place an orange next to them. And real people who’ve just received that orange wouldn’t immediately eat it. Tragedy is often confronted with the banal and the film’s brilliance is in these bizarre silent moments, small movements, and its way of asking us to simply look – at her face, the orange, the wall as we contemplate all the hard sad things in life. The bubbling angst is at once generic and deeply personal, just the way all our pain is.

Spoiled in our comfortable fluffy red seats at the Potsdamer Platz, we can’t begin to understand what Zbanic’s first impressions must have been like under those conditions, yet we share her deep appreciation of this gem of a film, and thank her for sharing it with us.

In 1995 Hans Petter Moland opened a new chapter in Norwegian film history with his internationally acclaimed ZERO KELVIN (KJÆRLIGHETENS KJØTERE). In his seventh feature, the grotesque black comedy in Berlinale Competition A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN (EN GANSKE SNILL MANN, Norway), he works once again with the actor Stellan Skarsgård and experienced cinematographer Philip Øgaard to strip the characters to their barest state. The greyish blue tonality of the images fits perfectly with the story of the released convict, Ulrik (Skarsgård) who tries to find his place after 12 years of prison.

Ulrik is welcomed by his gangster friend, Jensen (Bjørn Floberg) and Jensen’s clumsy sidekick, Rolf (Gard B. Eidsvold). Jensen puts Ulrik rapidly on the track of revenge regarding his conviction by the denunciator. And again, Jensen helps him rent a dirty basement room with a not-at-all gentle lady owner. Ulrik gets a job as a car mechanic where his boss is not afraid to give him philosophical lectures about life in his own peculiar way. Our main character meets his ex-wife and learns that their grown-up son is married. So Ulrik goes to see the couple. Although he seems to be doing fine after his enforced vacation, he actually just gets dragged along through his new life. Even if he doesn’t like the situations he gets involved in, after all, he is a somewhat gentle man, so he does nothing.

The protagonist is literally framed by the story – which is almost trivial in comparison with the strictly cinematic elements that make up the movie. These essentials are the brilliant work of the actors, their facial expressions and gestures, the scenes, the lighting, the dialogue, the music etc. The most important component of all, however, is the black – in this case rather bluish – humour. The film is practically an arsenal of awkward situations involving various scenes of life: birth and death, eating and sex, family and working. Through exaggerating the environment, characters and atmosphere, the director occasionally shifts the content to surreal realms.

Mastering the visualization of the grotesque through acting, filming and atmosphere, the director manages to bring to life cinema in its purest form. These contents probably could not work through any other medium, and the director finds the best way of presenting them. This is cinema where the delicacies of human nature are made painfully hilarious.

The Q&A after Johanna ter Steege’s speech started off with a jolt as the first question was delivered as a stern criticism that seemed to capture the spirit of much of what the audience was thinking (especially of the many who prematurely took their leave). The Talent said he was disappointed because the actress started off the master class by reading a twenty-minute speech, one which he learned little from. Admittedly her speech was full of platitudes such as: “The relationships between actors and directors is about trust and giving,” or “Making mistakes is a very good thing to do because it’s the only way to learn”, “I feel free when I feel respected and loved”, “Success is nothing but a cold breeze on a hot summer day” – all earnest and genuine reflections on the career of an actor, but clichés that understandably frustrated emerging directors and actors who showed up hungry for more gritty substance.

But if one really listened, there were definitely valuable techniques that ter Steege shared in her talk that actors would find quite helpful. When she is studying a character and script, ter Steege first tries to identify a reliable “super objective” of the character. This is an objective or motivation that fits into every scene, and it can only be altered by a dramatic event in the narrative such as a death, birth, war, or trauma. And she deconstructs every scene into “beats” which are defined by the mood or feeling in a given line or situation that change when the subject in the scene moves on.

One of the key themes in her speech was on disappointments and failures. She told the story of when Stanley Kubrick hired her to be in his next film, and after feeling so flattered and excited to work with him he cancelled the project after the big success of SCHINDLER’S LIST. Kubrick didn’t want to make a film on the same topic the following year. Ter Steege, of course upset, said that this experience at first made her arrogant. She felt slighted by other directors who would reject her after having been selected by Kubrick (“one of the best in the world”). But she learned to accept the unfortunate turn of events and eventually was able to consider it a learning experience – as all life is food for thought for actors. The quality of questions (and answers), unfortunately didn’t improve as the talk continued, but hopefully most left with a couple of interesting anecdotes and a glimpse into the career of the Dutch actress.