55th Annual Edinburgh Film Festival (August, 2001)

Film Reviews | Regular Feature when she described the film as, "an unblinking close-up of ambition under pressure and a guilty pleasure for anyone who has spent the last few years feeling like a wallflower at the dot-com instant millionaire's ball." This description of the film is nearly dead on, except that the "pleasure" in watching Tuzman and Herman go down is not guilty. Anyone whose mutual funds have suffered over the last year as a result of the likes of these wannabe yahoos will take greatpleasure in watching Startup,com. What both of these films show us in the end is that our financial fate is not in the skeletal hands of the Alan Greenspans of the world, but rests with the whims of traders who gamble more than Pete Rose and punk kids who spend our money and run. It's no wonder that Americans have lost confidence in both the stock market and venture capitalism and these films give us reasons to do so. Tim Coleman Thomas Jefferson High School, Los Angeles chacka@pacbell.net 55th Annual Edinburgh Film Festival (August, 2001) Edinburgh's Film Festival began in 1947 as a post war celebration of international documentary film. Since then it has developed into something much more than a showcase for non-fiction filmmaking. This is a festival that sets out to do a bit of everything . The Britishfilm industry is promoted strongly but the range of films screened is genuinely international. As ever, the event attracted some big names, notably Sean Penn, Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson. The last of these seems destined to win some prestigious award or other for her extraordinary performance as a poetry professor dying of cancer, in Wit. However, this festival is less concerned with stardom, awards and industry hype than with discovering new talent andpromoting abroadrange offilms from the popular to the very esoteric. Sadly, some of these are doomed to be shown to a very limited audience. Lizzie Francke, the festival's director, in her final year, describes it as "Cannes without the tears; without the porn merchants and the tacky movies." A feel for what this festival is all about might be given by the fact that a relatively obscure documentary about the chicken industry called The Natural History ofthe Chicken was one of the fastest films to sell out; the most popular film was Amelie, a quirky depiction of Parisian life by Jean-Pierre Jeunet; and yet the traditional "Surprise Movie" was Planet ofthe Apes. It should be said, though, that the surprise movie choice of a smash hit on general release was a bit odd. As for history, there was no shortage offilms dealing with historical material, though all of it was "modern" history of a kind. That is to say that none of the 120 or so films screened dealt explicitly with events that occurred earlier than the twentieth century and where there was an historical focus it tended to be very recent. Conflict and tension resulting from changes in Europe and the Middle East overthe past decade featured strongly in fiction and non-fiction films. In general, though, the emphasis tended to be on the suffering of ordinary people, reduced to poverty and despair or seeking asylum, rather than overtly exploring political events. Promises, in which seven Israeli and Palestinian children reflect on their lives, their sense of history and fate, was an outstanding example of painstaking documentary making. That The Women Live explored how three Bosnian women attempted to come to terms, through therapy, with the horror ofwitnessing atrocities committed against their own families . Kandahar, by Iranian director Makhmalbaf, was a curious fiction/documentary hybrid about a woman's journey through Afghanistan to rescue her sister, who has threatened to commit suicide. The central dramatic tension here comes from the paradox of ajourney being undertaken by a single woman in a country under the rule of the Taliban, where women are not to be seen as well as not to be heard. Even in Alexander Sokurov's film Taurus, about the death of Lenin, historical events as such tended to be dealt with by inference. This is the second of three...