Magnificent7 Diary/ 2
The morning after the opening of the 10th edition of Magnificent 7 Festival in Belgrade. The sky is clear but the wind outside is close to become a hurricane. A constant sound of wind enters the hotel room and is mixed in my head with the sound of ”Leviathan”, the first film of the 2014 selection, a film that brought an almost physical experience to many of us, who felt like ”being there” (as Richard Leacock always said was his ambition with his films) in this case on board a boat where fish of all kind end their lives, a drama it is, conveyed in a visual language that sometimes takes your mind away from the boat into surrealistic paintings and back again with a sound track that sits in you the whole way through this interpretation of Death. OMG, to be working there… we see the brave men once in a while but otherwise – with the words of Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw: … we can see what the humans see – and get the freaky, hallucinatory sense that we are also seeing what the fish see, what the gulls see, even what the ship sees…
We had dinner at the legendary Madera Restoran where Orson Welles, Hitchcock and De Niro have been eating, talking about the film and preparing for tonight, where “A World not Ours” by Mahdi Fleifel is to be shown. Fleifel grew up in Denmark, went to film school in the UK and has had a well deserved success with this film, that will be seen by a lot of Belgrade Palestinians, who have obtained tickets for the screening.
The 10th edition – let me show a picture from the first edition’s first film in the festival in 2005, Thomas Riedelsheimer’s “Touch The Sound”.
