DIFF ’02: Awake on the Downhill Slide (Wrap-Up)

by Walter Chaw I started getting screeners for the 25^th Denver International Film Festival (hereafter DIFF) about three weeks before the festivities began. As I was exchanging some for a few others, Ron Henderson, the creative energy and inspiration behind the first quarter-century of the event, pulled me aside and asked if I’d pick and introduce a film for the annual “Critic’s Choice” selection. At the time, I had been in the Denver market for something like 13 months–the only Internet journalist invited to present in all the years of the festival, I found myself included among Robert Denerstein of the ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS, Steve Rosen of the DENVER POST, Bill Gallo of WESTWORD, Howie Movshovitz of NPR, and Greg Moody of our local NBC affiliate.

I was doubly humbled to see my name included on the printed invitations for a critic’s reception to be held later in the festival–I saw it as a watershed not only for myself and a website to which I’m proud to be affiliated, but for the increasing visibility and legitimacy of online criticism as a whole. I chose Francis Coppola’s The Conversation and presented it on the first Sunday of the 10-day festival to a sold-out audience, 90% of which had never seen the picture. It’s an amazing gift to be able to bring a treasured film to an enthusiastic audience.

The DIFF is a sprawling, chaotic, sometimes-confused film festival. Its roster this year included 150 films over the course of the ten days proper (its opening night is just that, a party and one movie)–locally produced documentaries (and fiction films), C-grade foreign independents, and prestige festival selections (Punch-Drunk Love, Frida, Bowling for Columbine) that may have lost a little buzz this late in the festival season, having already made the rounds at Telluride and Toronto. The result is a devilishly complicated series of logistical problems and technical gremlins that conspired to confound even the roughest of schedules. The weight of being human heavy enough, the DIFF is no place to test the limits of our abilities to rein chaos.

And yet the thing coheres somehow: Almost all of the movies get shown roughly when they’re supposed to get shown; almost all of the disasters, including a volunteer not recognizing Cole Hauser and refusing him entrance to a screening of White Oleander (where he was to serve as Guest of Honor), addressed and rectified; and almost all of the little logistical catastrophes of transportation in a city largely without taxis or mass transit overcome by the preternatural will of a small army of volunteers and their Film Society supervisors. To a one, the Denver Film Society’s permanent staff is amazingly competent, exceptionally organized, and freakishly sensitive to the needs and peccadilloes of writers in general, reviewing press in particular. We’re a strange, prickly lot, and I wouldn’t want to deal with me given the choice.

Opening night of the festival at the 2,834-seat Temple Buell Theater, I spent some time with John Wells, the producer of The Grey Zone, White Oleander, One Hour Photo, and the television shows “E.R.” and “The West Wing”. We discussed at length the resolution of television images, Dr. Romano’s arm getting Ginsu’d by a helicopter tail rotor, and the studio line concerning the last-minute pulling of Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief from the DIFF due to “overexposure.” (I suspect that the real reason we didn’t get to see The Good Thief is because the studio thought a film with Nick Nolte as a drunk and an addict too timely.) I saw Mr. Wells again in the next couple of days as he, a native son, walked along 16^th Street Mall, played with his family, and looked around for the location of a panel on “Salon Cinema” that he was to be a part of. He was always quick with a smile and a handshake. Mr. Wells represents what’s right about the DIFF: a good, creative, powerful man, bursting with energy and vision who could move through the Denver crowds unknown and un-harassed.

What’s wrong with the DIFF is the case of Michael Moore. Mishandled from the start by local publicists, arriving late into town and to panel discussions, receiving death threats from our resident loonies, sequestering himself away at the closing-night party out of sight of paying guests, and turning a screening of Bowling for Columbine (selling out the huge Buell theatre; White Oleander probably sold three-quarters of all seats, centrepiece Frida in the same neighbourhood, Cassavetes Award presentation of Investigating Sex probably one-quarter) into the kind of jingoistic, fear-inspired rally against which his film rails. It’s not entirely Moore’s fault, of course. Most of the stuff is beyond his control, and when I met the man in Telluride a couple of months back, he was the model of courtesy, belying a reputation that, sadly, precedes him. But the fact of Moore–a man who has outgrown his films (even as his films have become more technically proficient)–resulted in an appearance that engendered more ill feelings than good.

Annually, the DIFF gives out a few awards–two selected by audiences, one juried. The audience award for best fiction film predictably went to Phillip Noyce’s outrageously popular Rabbit-Proof Fence–predictably, because festival crowds tend to be an ultra-liberal, self-congratulatory lot and this film, more than almost any other from 2002, afforded them the opportunity to applaud three little black girls outsmarting a black man in the employ of a white man in addition to the white man himself.

It’s hard not to be moved by Rabbit-Proof Fence, and indeed, a simple human story told well has a bounty of merits, but it’s that nagging feeling of self-satisfaction endemic in this kind of audience that wearies and offends. The audience award for best full-length documentary is another crowd-pleaser, Standing in the Shadows of Motown (Bowling for Columbine was not eligible–none of the “special event” films were eligible for any prize), a film that I liked, though Bill Chambers’s trenchant remarks in his recent TIFF coverage have caused me considerable pause. The juried prize, the Kieslowski award for best foreign film, went to China’s Roots and Branches, which was sadly not among the nearly 50 films I screened for the 25^th DIFF. Isn’t that always the way?

For myself, the best documentary at the 25^th DIFF is Pepe and Fulton’s Lost in La Mancha, the tale of how Terry Gilliam’s version of the Don Quixote myth folded just three days into shooting. The best foreign film is a tough scramble between Lynne Ramsay’s brilliant Morvern Callar, Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Springtime in a Small Town, and the best narrative feature the controversial Punch-Drunk Love. The best films that nobody saw are Shinsuki Sato’s The Princess Blade and Gerardo Tort’s incendiary Streeters, and the best party was probably the Critic’s Reception. Besides my being an honoured guest there, it included wonderful shrimp appetizers rolled in filo and my favourite food that I shouldn’t eat: hot wings. The best interview I conducted for personal reasons was with the luminescent Cheng Pei-pei (still wowin’ ’em now well into her fifties), the best interview for professional reasons probably with revered Fifth Generation director Chen Kaige. The most laid-back had to be with Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe.

All in all, a hectic, sometimes frustrating, sometimes exhilarating experience. I’m proud that we were able to provide the most comprehensive coverage of the 25^th DIFF–enough so that I took my wife to a screening of Down by Law and Stop Making Sense on the last Sunday of the festival, the first recreational screenings I’ve taken in almost a year. I’ve hung my press badge on the wall. Thank you to all of the fabulous folks at the Denver Film Society; time for this little black duck to take a nap.