(U.S.A., 1997, 128 min. - Written, directed and edited by John Sayles; produced by R. Paul Miller and Maggie Renzi; based on the novel The Long Night of White Chickens by Francisco Goldman.)

Set in an unnamed Central or South American country, John Sayles’ latest film, Men With Guns, begins with main character Doctor Fuentes performing a manual exploration of the doubled-over Chief of Police’s anal passage. They chat about the forthcoming holidays and Fuentes confesses that he would like to pay a visit to the various students he trained for humanitarian work in the poverty-stricken mountain villages. The police chief warns him off the idea claiming that guerrilla activity in the countryside makes travel there a risky venture. What follows from this understated opening is the doctor’s slow awakening to and discovery of what one could describe as the blocked-up, or perhaps more correctly blocked-out, excrement in his country. Something he had failed to find in his comfortable city surgery.

John Sayles the scriptwriter began his cinematic apprenticeship with American cinema’s biggest maverick of them all, Roger Corman and his company New World Pictures. He wrote lively bone-crunching exploitation with a streak of tongue-in-cheek humor and intelligence, such as Piranha for Joe Dante or Lady in Red for Lewis Teague, before developing into a staunchly independent director who provided audiences with an intelligent reworking of the American teen-movie, Baby It’s You (1983), or the stately political Western parable, Matewan (1987). Men With Guns is no exception to this search for challenges. First and most importantly of all because it is an American film made by an American director but shot almost entirely in Spanish and various indigenous Indian languages. This faithfulness to language lends credence to a film that deals stoically with the horrors committed against indigenous peoples, both by whites and their own kind.

Doctor Fuentes, a magnificently dignified performance from Argentinean actor Federico Luppi, ignores the Chief of Police’s advice and journeys into the mountains only to discover that his students have been successively murdered. As he ascends higher and deeper into the dense jungles, his Western city trappings of car, money and security are progressively taken away from him or destroyed until all he has left to depend on are his eyes. With these he sees what for years his life in the city had blinded him to: the slow destruction of peoples and cultures. But Sayles film does not moralize; it draws the spectator into Fuentes’ journey and makes him the representative of our own myopia. Joined by various characters he encounters on the way, Conejo the boy, Domingo the soldier deserter, Padre Portillo the lapsed priest, and finally Graciela the mute girl, Fuentes becomes more determined to continue searching as he discovers the truth about his country’s death-camps and military atrocities.

The search to learn the truth about what happened to his students has inadvertently become a quest for self-knowledge and there is no turning back. Fuentes and his straggly group of companions head for one final village, the mythical Cerca del Cielo (close to heaven), a famed refuge from the men with guns and the place where his last student was headed. Fuentes does not make it. His eyes have seen too much and his heart can take no more. The film ends with an ambiguous ray of hope but no ambiguity as to its quality.

(U.S.A., 1997, 114 min. - Written and directed by Paul Schrader; produced by Nick Nolte and Barr Potter; based on the novel Affliction by Russell Banks.)

Paul Schrader is probably better known as a scriptwriter - Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mosquito Coast - than as a director. While his own work has at times suffered from an austerity and coolness that may have something to do with his strict Calvinist upbringing, his last two films, Touch and Affliction, both 1997, has seen a more assured Schrader tackling strong literary works by Elmore Leonard and Russell Banks respectively. While Touch was a wry humorous satire of American religious and media mores, and Scrader’s first comedy, Affliction is a darker film dominated by frozen landscapes and emotions and informed by a sharp cinematic eye.

La Jungla founders, Manuel Polls and Gilles Duffaut, had intended to run the Film Festival as a public platform for the best of new European cinema concurrently with the professionals-only Film & TV Market. But the failure to attract funding has resulted in a new section running instead. Entitled New European Talent, which by happy coincidence abbreviates to the catchy NET ‘98, the section will similarly aim to present films made by new European directors but unfortunately will not include public screenings.

Each participating country will be able to select one feature, one short film and one documentary chosen by collaborating film organizations such as the British Film Institute, Slovak Television or Spain’s Plataforma de Nuevos Realizadores. A selected panel of representatives from these organizations will then present the European Lianas awards, which were inaugurated at last year’s Market.

Schrader’s cinema delights in tales of men - and it is usually men - trapped in their own skin and guided by forces and emotions that are at once contradictory as they are inevitable, from Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver to the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ to the life of the Japanese writer Mishima in that self-titled film. Wade Whitehouse similarly lives in the same neighbourhood, although he is closer to the confusion of Travis Bickle than the intellectual discipline of Mishima or the spiritual battle that Jesus faces over flesh and spirit.