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40 maltatoday, SUNDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2014 THIS WEEK CONTINUED FROM PAGE 29 Rot- terdam's outspoken tendency and sensitivity to the documen- tary proves to be far from just a pedagogic exercise ahead of the new MEP elections. What its programmers sought for is a taste of something vital, a living, breathing sense of Europe and not just a paper trace of its issues or political borders. Even in the most direct interviews, it is the monologue of a "guest" at an Italian 'Centro di Identificazione ed Espulsione' (From Allessio Gen- ovese's Documentary on immigra- tion, L'ultima frontiera), that you get a sense of a biased honesty – that is, of a real individual. Likewise in Mama Evropa, a young daughter talks to her grandfather who lived through what was Yugoslavia and evokes the same kind of sincerity in her own speech as they travel to the coast in search of a real border. Between fiction and fact, the belief in a grand European Project and the choice of each direc- tor for Signals' EU-29, The Grand Tour and My Own Private Europe, are driven by one aspect, that the ep- ic history behind our contemporary tales, be they in cinema or literature, now lies in the subtly, patiently un- folding small European stories. A writer and director herself, it was Xiaolu Guo – a Chinese im- migrant who lived in Berlin, Paris and now London – who said these words while entertaining the idea of a second renaissance. Fantastic and lavish as it may have sounded to her fellow Europeans at the festival's State of Europe Debate, her camera work remains a mess, yet the charm of a handheld curiosity is still there. Filmed while walking through the hotchpotch that is East London and Glasgow, her documentary defines itself by a collection of monologues in repetition, characters or rather, radical fragments of the same sys- tem which still aspire to the same fantasy. It is very surprising not to see something like Malta's own role in a catalogue riddled with the personal dialect of so many individuals on the sidelines. As if the endlessly fluctu- ating number of refugees the islands host or our post-colonial history be- tween the coast of Europe and North Africa fails to project a sense of self amidst the rest of the world, and like most, if not any, find a visionary drive to each narrative that make up Signals' My Own Private Europe at the 2014 IFFR. More specifically, whatever hap- pened to the release of Simshar by Rebecca Cremona? Surely it is not as experimental as A House In Berlin (Dir. Cynthia Beatt), Where are you Bucharest? (Dir. Vlad Petri) or Egress (Dir. Knut Åsdam) of which in their limitations, be it with a tighter budget, a smaller crew or 40 minute duration respectively, still manage to successfully engage the individual. Introduced to a number of the press and the public during an IFFR Grand Talk starring the direc- tors, the live debate was easily swept up by issues of identity and history as opposed to simply stopping at each drastic difference in their aesthetic. Feeding off more personal stories shared by a few outspoken Europe- ans, Cynthia Beatt professed about how this fictional character, caught between a neglected Christianity and Jewish heritage, has been in the making for over a decade. Asking about her leaving for Palestine, the audience often assumed that char- acter and herself are one and the same, ready to leave and continue the second part of this "documen- tary". However, Vlad Petri's work was based on a bit more of a lively spark. A cameraman is thrown into the street of Bucharest along with a resurgent crowd looking for a revo- lution. Instead, what is documented is the boiling down of years of unfair treatment into an absurd theatri- cal impulse, almost like a vaudeville circus of what it means to be angry Romanian. Beatt's off-kilter personal history of a British made artist born in Jamaica who moved to Berlin in 1975 has di- rected a story about propriety. Be it that of a nationality, a religion or a history, her character is swept up by an opportunity to be something else, somewhere else through the life of another, that of inheriting a repos- sessed house in Berlin and its own story. Unlike all this political baggage which stretches back to the interwar period, Knut Åsdam chose a gas sta- tion to setup his story for Egress. His leading roles, Girl Y and Girl X, do derive a sensibility off such a neutral- ity but at the same time develop their own symptoms of a "free society" that has nothing specifically Norwe- gian about it. The highway, the ruins and the gas station are only a few examples among the many labyrinths of a Modern Europe that has caught our imagination. Looking back at our monumental past, the curator Tho- mas Bellinck, has on exposition a derelict office building turned into a natural history museum of a ficti- tious European project called the EU. With an eerie sense of forewarn- ing, we are led to believe that the highly optimistic project expired in 2018 and can only be traced through its artefacts; a union traced in pa- per, business cards, crumbling legal documents and a bar serving Palinka at the end of the tunnel – 'Domo De Europa Historio en ekzilo'. Whether it should be recklessly analysed or well researched between the documentary and the kino-eye of a diptych by Claire Simon about the Parisian Gare Du Nord, Gianfranco Rosi's intimacy in Sacro Gra or when Buster Keaton meets the handheld in Boris Lehman's personal diary of Mes Sept Lieu, the search for one's own dialect as something identifi- able despite its history is what seems to be at stake at the 2014 IFFR. In an analogy with the city's own architecture, Heinz Emigholz own words seem to echo the same spirit during his final interview just before taking his leave for the next film Fes- tival in Berlin: 'here' [in Rotterdam] 'there seems to be an urge, to go on building' or in this case, a rediscov- ery of cinema and all it still has to risk. 'Signals': The state of Europe in film "If the politicians cannot generate any new ideas to inspire us, perhaps film can" – Rutger Wolfsonm, Artistic Director for the International Film Festival of Rotterdam Egress (Dir. Knut Asdam) No More Road Trips (Dir. Rick Prelinger) Where are you Bucharest? (Dir. Vlad Petri)