German, Swiss, Japanese and French Cocktail

Day 7 - Tuesday, 8 August

German cinema has its great names, its great actors, its great festivals and it may very well add a new name to the list, that of Philip Gröning. Young director of L'Amour, L'Argent, L'Amour, Gröning came on stage with his crew including lead actress Sabine Timoteo to present his film, which screened to a full house at the Piazza. "It is a film about the coldness of automatons, the coldness of prostitution and the coldness of love, and at the same time looking for warmth," said the director. The film was warmly received by the audience.

Today was also more than ever Swiss cinema day in Locarno, with an award ceremony and a midnight swinging party held in its honour. Organised by the SSA, Suissimage and the Suisa Foundation, the award ceremony held at the Grand Hotel towering above Locarno bestowed prizes to Best Script and Best Score for a feature film. The later prize went to young composer Alex Kirschner for the film Irrlichter by Christoph Kühn, a Swiss/Austrian/German co-production.

Also in attendance at the award ceremony was Hugues Ryffel, a well-known Swiss cinematographer who worked on two Alain Tanner films and also lit the exterior scenes of Microcosmos, the famous documentary of insect life by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou awarded at Cannes and at the French Césars.

Asked about his collaboration with Alain Tanner - whose Jonas and Lila, à Demain is screened at Locarno in the Appellations Suisses section - Hugues Ryffel confessed, "What I appreciate in him is his casual approach to filmmaking, his way of saying 'let's just do it, and it doesn't matter if we have never done it before.' We have chosen each other and we just work together without having to prove that one is better than the other. Alain is a director who knows how to make do with whatever means he is awarded and get the best out of it, with a very human approach. I take a true pleasure in working with him."

Hugues Ryffel is also a very active advocate of his profession through the Association of Swiss Cinematographers which he co-founded 5 years ago. "We felt the need to open up to Europe and belong to the European federation of cinematographers called IMAGO. So we founded this association, which takes part in seminars, discussions and festivals, talking about our profession. In this way, we feel a little bit less isolated, because Switzerland is a small country where cinema is not fully developed. Yet, Swiss cinema has a positive image in Europe and we are trying to expand the aperture to Europe as much as we can."

Laurent Roth, scriptwriter of Jean-Daniel Pollet's Ceux d'en Face and artistic director of the Marseille International Documentary Festival, left Locarno too early to meet Japanese director Naomi Kawase who arrived at Locarno yesterday. Yet, he will certainly be very pleased to learn that the talented director of Mangekyo (screened at Marseille) and Hotaru, her second fiction feature competing at Locarno for a Leopard, had a peaceful trip to Locarno. Two months earlier on her way to Marseille, airline strikes were responsible for her missing baggage and laborious re-routing from Paris to Italy and then back to France. Naomi Kawase, one of the most courted Japanese directors on the festival circuit who deliberately offered the world premiere of Hotaru to Locarno, appeared very alert and lively at her press conference, breathing into her answers the same kind of energy and lucidity which is to be found in her films. The title of her film Hotaru means Firefly. Fans of Japanese animation are already familiar with this insect through Hotaru no haka, Isao Takahata's masterpiece about a boy and his sister trying to outlive the aftermath of the second world war in rural Japan. "Fireflies light up to call each other in the dark," explained Naomi Kawase. Human beings do the same thing in a way, and I found it a very beautiful metaphor of human relationships."

The party that followed the Piazza screening of Philip Gröning's film proved disappointing. Very few actors and directors bothered to come - Jeanne Labrune and Melvil Poupaud were among the few - and though the Cuban orchestra was excellent, atmosphere was running low... until the whole party degenerated into a brawl around 4 am. Who said that Switzerland is a peaceful country? On the way back from the party, the desolate landscape of a garbage-littered Piazza was a sight for sore eyes with the remnants of a whole day and night of eating, drinking and movie watching. It was at that moment that an army of mysterious silhouettes appeared and with great efficiency, these municipal cleaners set to work. They deserve to be the subject of a film shown on the giant screen.

Jeanne Labrune, the screenwriter of Vatel - the film which opened the Cannes festival last May - came to the press conference with Jean Pierre Darroussin, the male lead of her comedy Ca ira mieux demain, which screened at Locarno out of competition. The name of Jean Pierre Darroussin will certainly ring a bell for connoisseurs of French cinema, as he is a regular of Robert Guédiguian's delightful Estaque fables or more sombre dramas.

"The film is born of another film, made in 1998, called Si je t'aime prends garde à toi, a rather dark drama. Inside this film, there was a sequence between Nathalie Baye and Jean Pierre Darroussin, and it was probably the only sequence that had some kind of lightness to it. And it made people laugh, which was some kind of a pleasant surprise for me, because I never felt up to comedy. From then on, I felt that there was a kind of humorous ground which I wanted to tread and explore, and this is what I tried to do in Ca ira mieux demain."

Asked about her post-Vatel feelings, Jeanne Labrune said, "This film did not belong to me from the moment I decided to sell the script. It is Roland Joffe's film, but it is true that I still have the version I wanted to make in my head and it troubles my vision of Roland Joffe's film. Vatel represented 8 years of my life. Looking for financial backing and then not making this film was a sad thing for me, even more so that I felt a furious urge to direct at the time. I will need a lot of time to really know what I think of Vatel as it is now."

With the sun still smiling above the Locarno arena of celluloid games, tomorrow's Piazza night screening is set to be Bronx-Barbès by Eliane de Latour, France's second entry in the official competition along side Baise-moi.