Notes from the Strasbourg Film Festival

Sept. 22, 2008

The Strasbourg Film Festival which ran from Sept. 12 to 21, was meant to be a showcase of "creative, edgy, out-of-the-box and maverick filmmakers of all genres including experimental and avant-gard as well as more traditional dramas, thrillers, romantic comedies, daring documentaries and wild ride animation," according to the festival Web site.

Unfortunately, the general consensus of most of the filmmakers to whom I talked was that the whole affair was pretty poorly organized. I was in town to hawk my mom's short documentary Dinosaurs and Rocketships (See earlier post). However, despite my efforts, only a handful of people showed up for its international debut.

There was practically no advertising for the festival. None of the locals I talked to even knew there was a film festival going on in their city. And there was no information pamphlet or schedule of events printed up. To find out what was going on, you had to practically stumble by chance into one of the venues when a film was showing.

Despite all that, I did see some pretty wild films and made some good new friends. Among my favorite films were two shorts by Canadian filmmakers, one called Tumbling After by Bryan Skinner, a mockumentary about a misfit burlesque troop, and the other called Birthday Girl by Erin Laing, a dark comedy about a 12-year-old girl who plans her own funeral for her birthday party.

I also watched a feature film called Last Letters from Monte Rosa. The World War II movie by American filmmaker Ari Taub told a story of battle from the perspective of soldiers in a Nazi defense unit who are joined by Italian reinforcements. The film was interesting in offering a view of the war from the side of the enemies. Mr. Taub said the picture was supposed to show the humanity of the soldiers and their hopes and fears which are universal for nearly all men. Needless to say, Mr. Taub who is half-Jewish, said he received some flack from the Jewish community in his hometown of New York.

The dialogue was entirely in German and Italian and translated with French subtitles, so watching the film was an interesting experiment for me. But my comprehension of French has improved so much over the past few weeks, and the subtitles were simple enough that I pretty much got it.

After the film premier, Erin Laing, Bryan Skinner, Ari Taub and some of his actors and his producer went out to dinner with some of the festival organizers. One of the actors, an Italian American named Carmine Raspaolo, mistook me for one of the film fest organizers and asked why my English was so good.

"Because I'm from Connecticut, baby," I said.

"Oh man, I live in Long Island," he said. "We're neighbors."

Mr. Raspaolo is recognizable from tri-state area television commercials and from a recurring part on season one of The Sopranos. I find it kind of weird that I'm meeting so many actors on this trip.

I spent another night in Strasbourg before hopping on an early train back to Paris last Friday. I had fun in the city, but it was too cold and too small for me. Though pretty with lots of medieval and Swiss-German influenced architecture, Strasbourg center reminds me of a big, expensive outdoor mall. Every street is lined with dozens of clothing and shoe shops and beauty parlors.

And there are teenagers everywhere. Inexplicably. They just hang out in their hipster clothes, talking and laughing loudly, not sullen so much as too cool for school. I felt like I was in high school again and unable to find a table to sit at in the cafeteria. Screw that.