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FILM FESTIVAL<br />
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The Juniper Tree<br />
Portrait of a Lady on Fire<br />
Cinecity<br />
Around the world in 90 minutes<br />
Berlin Symphony<br />
Cinecity, which bills itself as ‘the South-east’s biggest<br />
film festival’, has been going for 16 years now,<br />
and with screenings on offer in seven different<br />
venues, including the Depot in Lewes and ACCA<br />
in Falmer, it’s never been bigger.<br />
But it’s the geographical range of the films on<br />
offer that’s really striking. Because, once again, the<br />
festival’s strapline is ‘Adventures in World Cinema’<br />
and it offers the chance to watch a carefully curated<br />
collection of fine movies from all over the world,<br />
from Palestine to Georgia, via Afghanistan and<br />
Australia. As well as the best of British, of course.<br />
One highlight – timed to coincide with the 30th<br />
anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall – is a<br />
remastered version of Walter Ruttmann’s influential<br />
1927 documentary Berlin – Symphony of a Great<br />
City, a contemporary box-office success despite<br />
its avant-garde nature, which compresses a day in<br />
the life of the German capital into a beautifully<br />
composed hour. The film will be accompanied by<br />
a new score, performed by musicians Simon Fisher<br />
Turner, Klara Lewis and Rainier Lericlorais.<br />
East Side Story gives an interesting glimpse at pre-<br />
1989 Eastern Bloc culture, examining the world<br />
of big-budget Soviet musicals, with extracts from<br />
classics such as Tractor Drivers (USSR), Holidays<br />
on the Black Sea (Romania) and Stalin’s favourite<br />
movie, which he is said to have watched over 100<br />
times – Volga, Volga.<br />
Rather more enigmatic and serious is The Juniper<br />
Tree, based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, a little<br />
known but highly rated 1990 movie by the late<br />
American director Nietzchka Keene. This slowpaced<br />
black-and-white tale was shot in Iceland and<br />
features the screen debut of a 23-year-old Björk<br />
(pictured above).<br />
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, meanwhile, is a rich<br />
<strong>2019</strong> period piece by Céline Sciamma, set in the<br />
18th Century, with an all-female cast, that won<br />
the Queer Palm and the Best Screenplay at this<br />
year’s Cannes Festival. It stars Noémie Merlant<br />
as a young artist commissioned to secretly paint<br />
a portrait of an increasingly reluctant bride-to-be<br />
(Adèle Haenel).<br />
The festival is topped and tailed with local premieres<br />
of much-anticipated American films, which<br />
have made an impact at Cannes and other festivals,<br />
which you would otherwise have to wait till 2020<br />
to watch. The festival opener is Robert Eggers’ The<br />
Lighthouse, a black-and-white psychological drama<br />
starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as<br />
two men who get to know each other rather too<br />
well while manning a lighthouse on a remote rock<br />
off New England. And the closing feature is Taika<br />
Waititi’s dark offbeat comedy Jojo Rabbit, about a<br />
lonely Hitler Youth cadet, whose best friend is an<br />
imaginary version of his Führer; the lad is faced<br />
with a number of choices when he discovers his<br />
mother is hiding a Jewish girl in the attic. Think<br />
The Producers meets Moonrise Kingdom. For the full<br />
schedule see cine-city.co.uk<br />
Dexter Lee<br />
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