Fan Fare

Daytime therapist, nighttime filmmaker captures Soviet life

He’s a physiotherapist by day and a filmmaker by nights, weekends and everything in between. Semyon Pinkhasov has captured facets of Soviet life that rarely get shared beyond Russia’s borders, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

(For story, click on http://r.reuters.com/qac34m)

The self-taught, self-financed, award-winning amateur documentary filmmaker has seen his films shown worldwide at festivals and on Russian and English-language television channels. Focused on the arts and the sport of fencing (U.S. Olympic Team Coach in 1984), he tells stories about Grigory Fried, who has run a music appreciation club in Moscow for 45 years without taking a kopeck; Tikhon Khrennikov, the first and last secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers; and Boris Efimov, perhaps Stalin’s favorite cartoonist.

One film about German fencing legend Helene Meyer, whose half-Jewish heritage provided Adolf Hitler with political cover to stage the 1936 Olympics, won for best screenplay at the 2009 International Festival of Sports Films in Moscow. But what drives someone with no background in film, journalism or the arts to dive into movie making? Roll the video:

Photo: Documentary Filmmaker Semyon Pinkhasov is shown in his Manhattan apartment on June 21, 2010. REUTERS/Daniel Bases

Pfeiffer ‘felt like an alien’ until acting came along

Michelle Pfeiffer said she felt like “an alien” before discovering a home in acting.

At another one of the Berlin Film Festival’s notoriously entertaining news conferences with all sorts of unusual questions and answers (who can forget George Clooney calling one journalist a jerk for criticising his film at one press conference a few years ago), the American actress also revealed she only bothers taking care of her appearance when she’s out of the house but otherwise doesn’t really care what she looks like.

“I once heard an actor give this bit of advice to young people: If there isn’t anything else in the world that you would be good at and want to do, then yes, go ahead and try to be an actor. But if there is any other choice you can make … For me, there was no other choice I could make. The first time I walked into an acting class, I felt at home. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like an alien.”

Pfeiffer appeared to blush when asked by a young woman from a German television network managed to remain attractive at the age of 50: “What’s your secret?” the German reporter wanted to know.

“Um, when I’m working I take good care of myself. When I’m not working I stay out of sight and, like everyone else, I let myself go. I eat very well and exercise. The fact that I’m happy and enjoy my life really helps too. And I have good genes. I stopped smoking when I was 30 and that helped.”

Pfeiffer, who plays an ageing courtesan who falls in love with a far younger man in “Cheri”, said turning 50 last year was easy: “If you think hitting 40 is liberating, wait until you hit 50. I was surprised how liberating it was. The anticipation is always much worse than reality. There is the anticipating of turning over that big number, then you turn 50 and go ‘okay’. If anything, it makes you more grateful for what you’ve got.”

Too much ‘escapism’ at Berlinale?

“Escapism”, we were warned, was going to be a recurrent element of many of the entries in this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the world’s first major cinematic barometer since the global financial meltdown began. People are yearning to escape for a few hours from the economic gloom and doom, the film experts were saying before the Berlinale’s curtain went up.

Yet even knowing that, it was still difficult to predict how far French director Francois Ozon (“8 Women”, “Swimming Pool”) was going to take viewers on a most bizarre journey out of our depressing little lives in his newest film “Ricky“, which made its world premiere in Berlin.

(Spoiler alert - if you’re one of Ozon’s few non-French fans and plan to see the film, you might want to stop here — otherwise bon voyage) A struggling French woman meets a Spanish co-worker at the factory, they do what they always do in French films, and she gets pregnant. After their healthy baby boy is born — and about half way through the rather ordinary 90-minute film, it takes an extraordinary twist — the baby suddenly starts growing wings out of his shoulder blades. Yes, giant, powerful wings. And before long, he’s flying around his room. And not long after that, shortly after he turns into a media sensation, the baby boy simply flies away.

“You’ve answered the question yourself,” Ozon told a journalist at a news conference after the premiere when asked if he thought his film was an antidote for people craving an escape from the financial crisis. “Going to the cinema is part of our lives, to imagine living in a different, imaginary world. When you go to see a film, you want to see something different. This film is like a fairy tale.”

Are moviegoers looking for so much escape? And is a baby boy suddenly growing wings what they want to see?