In the scheduled nine day run, the Marrakech Int. Film Festival truly gets into gear on the first Saturday when the fifteen competing films (having all recently premiered elsewhere) are slowly unveiled to the high brow jury. My first stab at Director General Bruno Barde’s selections was Paradise, a contemporary, Tehran doldrum portrait which was also a double Locarno winner. After that, I was treated to an uneventful press conference for the compassionately generous Bill Murray with the only bit of noteworthy news was his involvement in the new Wes Anderson film.
Later that evening, the festival gives what is an annual Valentine’s card of sorts to one national cinema. This year’s selection is one that I’m all too familiar with. With Atom Egoyan selected as the ambassador, the reel presentation included highlights from Canadiana with a glaring absence of select Quebecois films and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. A delegation of people in front and behind the cameras showed up on stage while Egoyan delivered one heck of a speech — about the commonality between both bilingual nations and how the English and French might have once ruled the day, but that this red & white nation was built on the backs of the aboriginal people. Among the clips, we had two samples from his filmography in Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter – an Egoyan from a different epoque. While I’d consider myself one of the rare moderate fans of The Captive (pure genre exercise meant for laughs) I then found myself stuck in a nouveau trainwreck of a picture in Remember – an overwrought, overly predictable no-stunner “hunt” featuring Christopher Plummer. The film was as perplexing as the Royal dinner that followed.
