Films in the future will reflect the world’s greater state of confusion and uncertainty following last year’s September 11 attacks on the United States, a group of European filmmakers said here on Tuesday.
”We are not so sure about our future. … We are now, I think, more afraid of love, than we are desiring it, and we are more afraid of getting involved and committing ourselves than we were before.
”We are not so innocent anymore, and I think this will be reflected in our cinema,” said Norwegian director Unni Straume, who is presenting her film ”Music for Weddings and Funerals” at the Toronto International Film Festival.
”September 11th will affect us (filmmakers) all,” believes Straume, whose 1994 film ”Dreamplay” had been selected for a special Cannes award.
For Spain’s Daniel Calparsoro, known for his work ”Passages” and ”Blinded”, he sees a ”new concept that the enemy is invisible” having a great effect on filmmaking as well as partly contributing to the uncertainty in the world.
”We’ve been always used to this having the good guys and the bad guys and then after the 9-11 this sort of disappears” as many point to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden as the enemy, while some see US President George Bush as one, he noted.
”Even though it (September 11) was a terrible tragedy, the main thing for me is like ‘if there isn’t an enemy, how can you make an action-reaction film?”’
”Probably this uncertainty makes the audience want to search for hope,” and as a result there will be more psychological, emotional and provocative films geared toward that, he said.
Some panelists, like Belgium’s director Lucas Belvaux, suggested that the world has not changed much since the attacks last year, but our perception has.
”I don’t know if world has changed after September 11. I think, first and foremost, that what has changed is the way which we see it,” said Belvaux, during a film festival panel discussion on filmmaking in a time of global unrest.
”I don’t think the world is anymore violent today. It was already very violent and what happened last September 11 was a sort of climax of this violence,” he said.
Belvaux’s ”The Trilogy: An Amazing Couple, Cavale and After Life” are making their world premiere at the 10-day festival, which opened on Thursday.
Calparsoro agreed, saying ”I don’t think it has changed the world. Probably it has changed the way Americans see themselves in the world, but it hasn’t changed how the world has seen Americans.”
The festival, which was interrupted last September 11 after the terrorist attacks, will mark the one-year anniversary by keeping screens dark until 11:00 am (1500 GMT).
Later in the day, ”The Guys,” a world-premiere film starring Sigourney Weaver and Anthony LaPaglia, will tell the story of a fire captain who lost eight men in the World Trade Center towers’ collapse and how he prepared to write their eulogies.
In the evening, ”11’09’01” — a series of short, 11-minute, nine-second and one-frame films created by acclaimed international directors including Claude Lelouch and Shohei Imamura — will make its North American premiere.
Some of the segments in the French-produced series, which shows a variety of perspectives about September 11, have already been labeled as ”stridently anti-American” by Variety trade magazine. – Sapa-AFP