The Kids Are Alright

Last year in Cannes, I had the honor of serving as a member of the festival's Camera d'Or jury, charged with the task of awarding the best first feature film shown in any of the festival's sections (including the independently-curated Directors Fortnight and Critics Week programs). Then, there were a total of 18 films in the running. This year, it's up to a whopping 29, with almost half of them in the Official Selection (comprising the main competition and the Un Certain Regard sidebar) — a provocative statement that says, after years of being perceived as a haven for new works by world cinema's reigning Old Guard, Cannes is now seriously committed to discovering and promoting the next generation of moviemaking talent.

In his introductory essay in this year's special Camera d'Or program booklet, Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux remarks, "This number reassures us: the cinema is alive and bursting with energy." Just how many of those 29 names will still be on the lips of festival-goers by the time of Cannes comes to a clse ten days from now remains to be seen. But on Thursday, things got off to a promising start with the Un Certain Regard screening of Paraguayan director Paz Encina's Hamaca Paraguaya, which unfolds in the mid-1930s in a remote jungle region, where an elderly married couple go about their daily business — washing clothes, gathering wood and often just waiting, feeling the time pass, as they ponder the fate of their son, who has gone off to fight in the Chaco War against Bolivia. As a series of striking, static compositions play across the screen, a voiceover narration that switches from the man to the woman and back again takes us into the characters' shared past, until after scarcely more than an hour of screen time, we're left with a rich sense of these ordinary people and their quiet dignity. Admittedly, not much else happens in Encina's minimalist and exceptionally delicate work, which quickly generated comparisons (not all of them favorable) to everything from Samuel Beckett to the recent films of Gus Van Sant. But the 35-year-old Encina possesses a poetic sensibility that is uniquely her own and which, luck willing, will soon be seen again.

The above description may not immediately call Mozart to mind, and yet Hamaca Paraguaya is in fact the first in an ambitious series of feature and short films commissioned by the acclaimed theater director Peter Sellars and London-based film producers Simon Field and Keith Griffiths, to be presented together this fall in Vienna on the 250^th anniversary of the composer's birth. Grouped under the banner New Crowned Hope and reported about in these pages before, the films are not meant to be directly about Mozart or his work, but rather, per Field and Griffiths, to take up themes common to Mozart's late work (in the case of Hamaca Paraguaya, requiem for the dead) as they apply to the world at the dawn of the 21^st century. In additon, the New Crowned Hope films will all be made by directors from the developing world, and to that end Hamaca Paraguaya is not just the first movie from Paraguay to be shown in Cannes (or any major festival), but also, per the Internet Movie Database, one of less than 100 feature films and shorts ever to hail from the poor South American country. That in itself is a fairly remarkable achievement.