Pula film festival.

Holding a national and international film festival in a 3000-year-old arena in Pula, Croatia, and let culture replace war cannot but raise attention. The ancient coliseum, has seen many human victims, today this arena still witnesses sacrifices but they are of a financial nature, and for the sake of a film festival, a festival celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, which is quite an achievement for such a small country as Croatia.

In 2003 the festival's special guests were Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich and Goran Bregovic. The festival showed nine films of the official national program of the Croatian feature film industry and ten films for the international music film program. The Golden Arena Award for Best Croatian Film went to a wellknown Croatian film director Zrinko Ogresta for his drama Here. As put in the words of Luciano Delbianco, PhD, Mayor of Pula at the award ceremony.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Pulal Arena shaped the relationship between film and Pula, offering numerous different views of the world, written by the hands of artists that, in the last 50 years witnessed the growth of numerous generations. Encounters of viewers and film artists in the unforgettable and unique atmosphere of the ancient Amphitheater are a special experience and one of the symbols of this town. This year's jubilee 50th festival, like all previous festivals, joyfully welcomes new films and the retrospective of the best works that marked the previous five decades. Along with works of renewed authors and actors of the big screen, we will see works of the young ones it is the energy that will permanently stay inscribed in people's hearts. This is the secret of the festival, of its past and its wished for future."

A year later, Jeremy Irons is acting in Matilda, the latest film by Croatian film director Nina Mimica, on the Adriatic Coast. Also on the cast is a very well-known Serbian actor living in France, Miki Manojlovic. Irons accepted a part in a non-commercial, non-English film directed by an anonymous author. Mr. Irons explained that verbal understanding is not the most important thing in a film. It is also about the talent and imagination of the film director, a meeting between actor and director that happens on a more instinctive level rather than an intellectual one. He is also convinced that making pictures in Hollywood because of the money, glamour and glory is often like prostitution. Matilda is not just a love story but a story about change and recovery, myth and contrast between two mentalities, the Balkan and the Western ways of life. Irons is playing a UN soldier who is a typical Westerner, a man with lost illusions, tired of the fast life, asking himself what he has accomplished. The crucial point in the film comes when he meets a free-spirited girl who lives in a different and isolated world. This world is her defense system from the real world that she is surrounded with, a tragic one, because of the civil war. The film happens in two days and one night and depicts a man experiencing a deep existential crisis.

The most popular guest of Pula's 50th Film Festival was the musician Goran Bregovic. This Yugoslavian artist has had a successful international career. He is an exceptional musician of mixed origins: Serbian and Romani [Romani people are one of the many Gypsy ethnies] brass folk music. Besides his musical solo career. Bregovic has had a very interesting film music career [Arizona Dream and La Reine Margot]. What brought Bregovic to the 2003 Pula Film Festival was the music he composed for the Norwegian film, part of the festival's international film program. In Unni Straume's Music for Weddings and Funerals [Musikk for bryllup oq beqravelserl] Bregovic also plays the role of a refugee from Serbia. As the composer of the film score, Bregovic created an unusual cultural crossover. "Music in the films of now ex-Yugoslavia, has a completely different purpose. [In the past] It was treated as the helpful issue to save a film. Today, film music serves to illustrate the movie," Bregovic commented, modestly adding that film music is not something that he does best. It is then intriguing to know that Oliver Stone hired him to compose the music for his historical film about Alexander of Macedonia. It is also interesting to mention that Stone didn't like it, commenting that Bregovic had a tendency to make music by reconstructing traditional pleces. Goran was surprised to hear that from Stone, not knowing whether to take that as a compliment or a criticism. It was Bregovic's conclusion that a contemporary artist must be a vampire in the food chain of music making.

Goran Bregovic Interview--November 2003

What are you doing these days?

I have so many ideas that need to get sorted out for now. I'm working on the script for the movie titled Bregovic's Karmen with Happy Ending. It has nothing to do with the original opera Carmen. But it will be an opera that is planned to be performed in a restaurant by a real gypsy orchestra. The real ambition for this project is for it not to be a classic opera.

Who is going to play Carmen in Bregovic's Karmen with Happy Ending?

I have some people in mind and I'm still waiting for answers. This role, Karmen's role, is grand, so big. It really needs to be someone particular.

Tell us about about that part you played in the Norwegian film Music for Weddings and Funerals?

Well this role I just couldn't refuse. The director of the film came to me, after my concert in Italy, saying she had a script that had been written much before her meeting me. It was the story about a refugee from Serbia, during the civil war. That man, whose character I'm playing, is making music for weddings and funerals in Scandinavia for real now. It was just too much coincidence to refuse it. But, I'm not good enough an actor. I'm not good at repeating something a hundred times, a technique that you can only learn in school. But I'm very pleased that I played this part. This is one small and intelligent film [...] but I'm not an actor, acting is a serious business.

What about composing for films, any plans or desire?

Well, there was a period in my life when I was doing lots of film music. That was the only job offered to me in Paris, when the civil war in ex-Yugoslavia started. Purely accidentally, I was doing film music out of friendship. Most of it was done in the first two years of the civil war. Then I stopped composing for films. During those years in France, I was doing so many things, some worse, some better, commercial ones as well. But in the last five to six years, I have only worked for one short film a year, such as this Norwegian film Music for Weddings and Funerals.

What is the story behind the music for the film about Alexander the Great by Oliver Stone?

I really liked the idea. To compose for a film about someone as famous as Alexander the Great is intimidating. But I'm not the right composer for Oliver Stone, not the right man for such a commercial film industry. Up to now, I was lucky to compose for films that are not too demanding. I think that music composers like myself are really not needed in the commercial film industry today. I think that I'm not a good illustrator. It was different when film was the greatest art of the twentieth century. But when it comes to the film industry today. I simply don't have such a desire to work for it. When you are fifty, you constantly have this strong feeling that you are wasting your time. I'm not that good for feature film music, still, once in a year. I write music for a small international, non-English, out of the big industry, film. Last year it was that Norwegian film, the year before was Gruzzian's film, in 2000 it was a French film ... I'm only working for small films where what I do with music is still possible.

What about La Reine Margot?

That was a good film, one of the rare historic films that is not stupid. It is hard to make a historic film that it's not stupid. The director of this film, is one of the most talented people in Europe. I was so pleased to work with him.

Tell us something about your working process?

My working process is the same as any professional composer's. I work eight hours a day, as I would do in any other job. I don't believe in inspiration, not in such things. I believe in hard work, eight hours a day. All artists that I like work eight hours a day. I believe in the eight-hours' working method.

What contemporary composers do you admire most?

There are a couple. Agon Perth, the Polish composer Gorecki, is one: Giuseppe Tartini writes very well too. I also like new Gypsy music, a Gypsy music that is not that known to the urban Gypsies, a music from all over the Balkans, only played in Gypsy ghettos. I believe in local Balkan music. [...] I've sold five million records in the last ten years; the world's audience is not idiotically watching TV, as sorue people might think. That's not true. The world is curious, there are many unknown composers. I'm not the only one who is extraordinary for the Western market. There are many other extraordinary, not commercial composers/musicians, who are well received in the world. My records are very well sold in lceland, in Korea, Greenland ... just the same, [...] My music is for a mature audience, most of the time young, but mature audience, an audience that listens to different kind of music, from modern to jazz or some ethnic music; music that needs some research and digging out, something that is not offered by everyday MTV. [...] I have also been to Japan, Australia ... It is not true that people from the USA or Europe want to listen to commercial music from MTV. I lived in the U.S. for 6 months and I realized that under the visible coat of commercialism, there is one completely different, a curious America. Curious for art, endlessly curious. Below that visible show business, there is a huge market of films that are not in the commercial movie theaters, music that is not on MTV. And that's a world that feels nice, not as ugly and morally catastrophic as we might gather from the current policy of thinking.

Most of the good things that I've made as young man, strayed from original folk music, while the plain commercial music I wrote was never that good or popular to survive and be remembered through time. Now, I feel like I'm doing the same kind of music I have done all my life, I really believe in that little initiation. Stravinsky, Bartok, Lennon and so on, they all started from their local music, from where would they be starting otherwise then? From their original backgrounds of course. Now I have more self-confidence than before and therefore I don't have to pretend to be somebody else. Today, I might write fewer and fewer songs. But I write different forms of music. I do symphonic music, classic music and different stuff all the time.

How do you like to work best?

I like to have commissions, with schedules and deadlines. I like the old-fashioned way. I need to have limited space and time, because otherwise, with too much space and freedom. I cannot focus. Only when I get assignment with a deadline can I work efficiently. Last year I composed for a big concert for 8 cellos and then I composed for that big liturgy in Paris. I do different kind of music all the time.

The 51st Pula Festival is scheduled for July 2004.

RADMILA DJURICA is a freelance art critic in Serbia.