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 A French caper based on a fictionalized version of a true
story about the theft of Charlie Chaplin's coffin shortly after
his death in 1977 was shown as another of 20 films in contention
for the festival's top prize, to be awarded next week, and
provided a macabre, touching and often humorous counterpoint.
Eugene Chaplin, Chaplin's son, said at a news conference he had
been sceptical about cooperating on director Xavier Beauvois's
"La rancon de la gloire" (The Price of Glory) because "I didn't
see what could be funny about stealing a coffin". But, after
seeing Beauvois's films, "I thought, 'Why not?'"
American director Joshua Oppenheimer's competition film "The
Look of Silence" is his second documentary based on death squads
that roamed Indonesia in the wake of a failed communist-led coup
attempt and killed as many as a million people. The first, "The
Act of Killing" (2012), was nominated for an Oscar in the
documentary category.
Asked at a press conference on Thursday why the credits for the
new film, which had its premiere on Wednesday night, mostly read
"anonymous", Oppenheimer said the production crew was at risk if
their identities were revealed.
"There is a grave political risk for anybody involved with the
crew in Indonesia if their identities become known to the
authorities, especially to the military and the paramilitary
group that played such a prominent role in my previous film."
He also said that Adi Rukun, a traveling optometrist who meets
with some of his brother Ramli's killers in the course of the
new film, had to move to a different part of Indonesia due to
concerns for his safety once the film was released.
Rukun, who is in his 40s, said he agreed to participate after
seeing clips assembled by Oppenheimer that had showed him the
magnitude and brutality of the killing, and convinced him the
past had to be confronted to assure a better future.
"I only want the perpetrators to acknowledge and admit what they
did and to acknowledge that they were wrong so that we would
somehow be able to actually forgive each other and live
together, that's all I wanted from those confrontations," he
said in remarks translated into English.
"We live in one community which is split by mutual feelings of
suspicion and fear and I really want all of this to end."
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Iranian director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad said she had not had to film
underground in Iran where her film "Ghesseha" (Tales) was shot, at
least in part with a digital camera that with its grainy images
emphasizes the grittiness of life in Tehran.
"The main thing is that the story, the project, needs to be accepted
within the country, it needs to reflect peoples' lives," she said
after the film's first festival screening.
What it shows in a bleak and desolate-seeming Tehran is the lives of
people with barely enough money to survive being made more miserable
by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, unemployment, drug addiction and wife
abuse.
In one case a functionary will not listen to an elderly former civil
servant's plea to recoup crippling medical costs because the
bureaucrat is more interested in taking a call from his mistress.
Also shown are the aimless and drug-scarred lives of young people
who cannot get proper jobs, like a formerly promising university
student named Hamed who was expelled for his political views and now
drives a taxi cab part-time, helping chauffeur people to and from a
center that helps battered wives.
Bani-Etemad, who is one of Iran's best known directors, said that
the film was intended in part to show how the international
sanctions imposed on Iran over its disputed nuclear program have had
a devastating effect on daily life.
"The economic situation in Iran is critical and this is due to the
embargo which actually penalized the people in the country," she
said. "Our children, who suffer from very severe diseases like
cancer and multiple sclerosis, are actually suffering from the
consequences of the embargo."
She urged people at "the international level" to realize that
"international decisions always affect the people".
(This version of the story corrects that Indonesian film is in
competition, changes spelling of last name to Rukun in paras 7-8)
(Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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