Who's the Man Who Can Chase the Clouds Away...Shaft

Day 5 - Sunday, 6 August

Hooray! It took John Singleton's latest film and hero, Shaft, to chase the clouds away for a full-fledged, double-feature screening at the Piazza Grande under the twinkling stars of the night. No complaints or added screenings in makeshift theatres at the last moment, as the crowd took over every nook and cranny. In fact, the general public pays the steep price of 20 Swiss francs or close to 12 dollars, indiscriminate of where they sit. Barriers are set up to control all the entrances to the Piazza from 7pm on. Those who made it into a restaurant before 7pm and think they will keep their table seating for the movie had better have a ticket on them; the controllers will be by to collect it. At showtime (9:30pm) Marco Muller came up on stage presenting the jury and the night's movie to the crowd. The true Locarno atmosphere had finally arrived!

As we said yesterday Jean-Pierre Pollet (France) received a Golden Leopard for his lifetime achievement. Laurent Roth, co-screenwriter of Ceux d'en face screening in the Video Competition, filled us in on the film and its director. "The purpose of the film is to find a meaning to evil. Pollet summons us to endure the extremities of evil and not let them debase the value of our daily life, because evil allows us in compensation to perceive more deeply the exquisite beauties of the world. I co-wrote the script with Jean-Pierre Pollet and encouraged him to supply more characters to the story, to pluralize his intimate, contemplative world. Pollet was hit by a train while filming 11 years ago and has been bedridden ever since. It is his faith in cinema that really keeps him alive. His fight for life is something that he gives us in his films." Marco Muller created this Golden Leopard prize for Pollet as a statement of his courage and to instil the fact that he is very much alive and among us.

"The king is dead - long live the king!" Believe it or not, Japanese cinema has its new Kurosawa; he is 45 years-old, deems himself a "quite ordinary man" but has been making extraordinary films for the past 20 years, traversing, hybridising, subverting the conventions of film genre - the very requisites of Locarno's newest film section, Kings of the B's. Ko-rei, his ghost story made for Japanese television, much in a Ring vein, was screened at the FEVI yesterday. Marco Muller, who attended to the press conference held the same day, willingly took the microphone to confess his bewildered admiration for someone capable of making 5 films a year.

"Well, I can shoot 5 and more films a year" answered a mischievous Kiyoshi Kurosawa. "That is a very natural, spontaneous thing for me. As long as there is a budget and a producer, I shoot, most often in Tokyo and with my favourite actor Koji Yakusho. That is in the spirit of B movies, isn't it?" That is right, Mr Kurosawa, and if there is such a thing as a Roger Corman in Japan, he cannot but be proud of you.

Tomorrow' big screen feature will take the audience to Portugal with the Official Competition screening of A Raiz do Coracao from Paulo Rocha.