CMU Film Festival looks at the ‘other’

Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival

March 22 to April… Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival

March 22 to April 15

www.cmu.edu/faces

Every year, the Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival has a new “face.”

The collaboration between CMU and Pitt kicks off its seventh year with this installment’s theme, “Faces of Others.” The 16 featured films from all around the globe will embody the theme that director Jolanta Lion said highlights the humanistic aspect of the event, rather than a general topic.

“It emphasizes the focus on the individual. It puts a human face on very global issues,” Lion said.

The concept of “Other” has a variety of meanings, all of which stem from personal perception. Someone who is separate, a stranger, is considered to be an “Other,” and this take on the term easily falls in line with the international perspective of the festival.

To be presented at various locations throughout the city, this year’s festival contains 16 films collected from across the world. Each film embodies an aspect of the theme “Faces of Others.”

Since the festival’s commencement in 2006, it has had a unified premise. Beginning with “Faces of Democracy,” the festival has since explored a variety of other topics before landing on this year’s broader theme.

Because of the multicultural components of the International Film Festival, this year’s theme allows the films to focus on individuals who represent different ways of thinking. The camera acts as the literal lens through which the audience views a new perspective.

Nicole DiMascio, the managing coordinator of the festival, explained the benefits of having a broader theme with more variety.

“In the past, the festival has had a lot more narrow of a focus,” DiMascio said. “This one opened it up. We can include a lot more stories from around the world.”

For this CMU junior, the “Other” is anything that exists outside of an individual. Everyone has the right to express themselves, despite the differences it brings to light between individuals.

Lion traveled to the Amsterdam Film Festival in November 2011 to preview films and make selections to bring back to Pittsburgh. She focused primarily on the films’ artistic merit, as well as their levels of correspondence with the festival’s theme.

The films all have a high level of artistic quality and are internationally acclaimed as award-winning, Lion explained. “Putin’s Kiss,” a film about Russia’s former Prime Minister and current President-elect Vladimir Putin, recently won the 2012 award for Best Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival. This film is just one of the 16 that has received acclaim.

Olga Klimova, coordinator of the Polish component to the festival and a Ph.D. student at Pitt, stressed the importance of featuring three films from Poland in order to represent a lesser-known Eastern European area.

The Polish selections consitute an example of a group of films that demonstrate a non-Western point of view. Because Poland is the “Other” to many countries, the festival’s theme directly includes these three Polish films, she said. It gives audiences a chance to see the differences in a specific culture.

One of the three films will be the only component of the festival that has its screening at the AMC Loews Waterfront 22 theater. It will play on March 25. “Battle of Warsaw 1920” by director Jerzy Hoffman is the first 3-D film created in Poland and required the technologically advanced screen of a larger theater.

In addition to the film screenings, Lion made sure to include a variety of activities for participants in the festival. Skype sessions, speakers, receptions and a short film competition for students will occur over the course of the festival’s span of almost four weeks.

But all of the films in the festival, despite their differences in materials and origins, still comply with the general theme and will help viewers to experience different cultures on the screen.

“The International Film Festival does a good job of bringing people together and getting to see other cultures. Pittsburgh is a really diverse town, and it’s bringing more diversity to the city,” DiMascio said.

Because the films are from different countries, their variation exposes audiences to different ways of thinking across countries and cultures. The collection of films is one that expresses the separate perceptions of the world through assorted societies, directors and people.

Lion’s central goal for the festival is to humanize the global issues that each country faces and illuminate them on an individual basis through the subjective characters each director portrays in the films.

“The global issues are explored through different angles,” she said. “What the films are trying to do — and what is great about these films that we are bringing — is that they are focusing on an individual, on a human.”