If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Thessaloniki

At last count, I have been to a thousand film festivals in a hundred countries. Or maybe it just feels that way.

Whatever the number is, it’s a lot, and only a fraction of what’s out there. Film festivals have become the tourist attraction du jour, their growing numbers just part of the continued scramble to pull in dollars, extend the “season” at already hot spots and bring cultural cachet to otherwise intellectually drought-ridden areas of planet Earth.

But what delights me to this day is that, in my job as a film critic, festivals have force-marched me to places I might never have seen on my own--and some of my favorite memories are of the things I saw outside the theaters: the breathtaking Notre-Dame basilica in Montreal, for example, which I visited while killing time between screenings at the Festival des Films du Monde. Or the awesomely autocratic efficiency and chewing gum-free ambience of the Singapore subway system. Or the Goteborg Symphony Orchestra accompanying Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” on what had to be one of the coldest nights in Swedish history (we were inside, but still . . . ). Or the arid majesty of the New Mexico landscape around Taos.

The festivals themselves can be ordeals, frankly. There’s a shortage of accommodations but no shortage of traffic, packed restaurants and volunteers who seem to think they’re working at a correctional facility rather than a cultural event. And crowds. Don’t even get me started.

Then there are the films themselves. Now, it must be emphasized that the United States has no exclusivity vis-a-vis filmmakers good or bad, and there are many splendid living filmmakers who hail from outside the U.S.--Canada has David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan; Greece has Theo Angelopoulos and Pantelis Voulgaris; Thailand has Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Iceland has Fridrik Thor Fridriksson and Baltasar Kormakur.

But it’s fairly common knowledge that there are certain national cinemas that are stinkers. All countries make bad movies. Some countries make worse movies.

And no matter where it’s happening, festival programmers, often under pressure to showcase their country’s cinema, are selecting from a catalog that is nowhere near as

deep as that of the United States. In a single year, America makes enough movies that if we had only one film festival, the projector would turn on in January and still be running at Christmas. Foreign festival programmers, on the other hand, are forced to dip into teen comedies, underbudgeted action flicks and wobbly social satires that would never be scheduled at a U.S. festival.

Still, I like the idea that when I’m at a country’s film festival I’m seeing how it perceives itself, no matter how flawed the cinematography or writing or acting. It makes seeing their real world--the historic sites, the natural wonders, the bars and restaurants and hangouts--that much more complex. Besides, sometimes you just need to get away from the throngs, the film culture, or one more copycat of an American movie that you wouldn’t have seen in the first place unless the filmmakers were holding your family hostage.

Thessaloniki, Greece

Thessaloniki is not the Greece of the travel posters: It sits gray and majestic on the sea wall of the Aegean. It also serves as home to one of the world’s more ambitious film festivals, held in November and usually overlapping Thanksgiving in the U.S. It is a place where Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien, or Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai, or Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami are treated to lavish retrospectives, and where the seafood is exceptional and the sense of cinematic mission is palpable.

The catch?

Greek movies. They’re like the little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead. When they are good, they are very, very good. When they are bad--like some films out of Canada and Israel--they are horrid.

So off we go into the countryside. The Thessaloniki International Film Festival, in what might be interpreted as an act of charity for the long-suffering filmgoer, organizes bus trips to the tombs at Vergina, which were uncovered in 1977 and thought to be the final resting place of the assassinated King Philip II of Macedonia, father of Alexander the Great. (Archeologists dispute whether the skeleton found there is Philip’s, but the goodies probably were.)

His tomb is that of a Macedonian Tutankhamen. The gold and splendor are luxurious; the reverence for death is strong. Hidden from grave robbers under what looks like a simple mound of earth, the tombs, which date from the mid-4th century BC, are watched over by guides who speak any number of tongues.

One of the nicer things about festivals is their informal atmosphere and the ease with which you can run into the famous and quasi-famous--and they run into you. On the bus to Vergina, I met Michael Snow and his wife. Snow, the renowned experimental filmmaker, was being given a full retrospective at the festival as well as an installation at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art. We all had a wonderful time. And, apparently, we had all needed a break.

After a hard day of sightseeing, hunger becomes an issue, and as any frequent flier knows, eating is not just an essential joy of travel but a way of immersing oneself in a culture. Patsas soup, a staple of Greek cuisine, contains many of the items we associate with Hellenic cookery--eggs, lemons, lamb--but its principal ingredient is tripe. Recoil if you will, but if you want to virtually ingest the soul of Greece, patsas is a recommended route.

Sodankyla, Lapland

“Hello, front desk?”

“Yes?”

“Can you tell me what time it is?”

“It is 3 o’clock.”

“Thank you.”

You realize upon hanging up just how embarrassing it’s going to be calling back and asking: “Is that a.m. or p.m.?”

The Midnight Sun Film Festival in Finnish Lapland is slightly paradoxical in its premise: Go to a place where the sun never sets (not in June, at least, when the festival is held) and watch movies in dark rooms. But given the propensity of the Finns for serious partying, screening rooms are one of the few sanctuaries available from the life-shortening excesses of Arctic social life.

Founded by the filmmaking Kaurismaki brothers, Aki and Mika, the Midnight Sun Film Festival is held in Sodankyla, about 75 miles above the Arctic Circle. It pays annual tribute to great directors from around the world, shows both classic films and new international cinema and presents silent movies with musical accompaniment.

It is also a disorienting experience: Because the day, at its darkest, is only as dim as an L.A. winter afternoon, the effect on the body clock is appalling--one imagines the hands on that clock twirling wildly around, looking in vain for a reference point.

And Sodankyla itself isn’t blessed with what one would call aesthetic splendor.

“Why is everything so, uh, new looking?” you ask. “Because the Nazis burned it all,” you are told, with typical Finnish brevity.

Arriving for a party at a remote farmhouse, I am greeted at the door by Mika Kaurismaki, who hands me a blue cocktail and asks, “You want a sauna?”

Down the muddy hill I slide to the sauna house, a medium-sized structure the color of creosote, where a small battery of Scandinavians and Finns are submitting themselves to skin-peeling temperatures, all the while drinking beer. A few engage in the Finnish-Russian pastime of beating each other’s backs with bundles of brush; standing outside in 50 degrees Fahrenheit, wearing only a towel, feels as refreshing as a splash of after-shave.

It gets better. Being a guest--and having raised the surface temperature of the skin to untold heights--one must do in Sodankyla what the Sodankylans do, and jump in the icy river.

The plunge makes me feel like a short-circuiting electrical appliance. I’m in and out in a matter of seconds. The Danish guys are splashing around like ducks.

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Success is giving 32-year-old Lejla Hodzic a guilty conscience. “Every day I’m lying to people,” says the Sarajevan clothing designer. “ ‘Tomorrow I’ll have it,’ I keep telling them. It’s terrible.”

Not so terrible. In the midst of the Sarajevo Film Festival, an increasingly popular destination every August since 1995, Hodzic is holding court in her showroom--called Showroom--halfway between the bridge where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, thus setting off World War I, and the Holiday Inn that was shelled during a more recent war. Hodzic is a longtime figure in the contemporary art scene that once distinguished this city. Now it is a city occupied by more than a few ghosts, some of them still breathing.

As if acknowledging those who know Bosnia only as a place of war, tours are arranged to the former front lines with an ex-general as your guide; day trips are also available to the recently reconstructed Mostar bridge (originally built in 1566 and blown up in 1993).

But the true Sarajevo is found on the streets and in the cafes. Lacking funding--or museum space not occupied by foreign artists--the creative community of Sarajevo has found alternative outlets: genre-bending music, “liberated” gallery space and, in Hodzic’s case, fashion. Her clothes, inspired in part by Japanese designer Issey Miyake, defy conventional description: Arms seem to jut out of waistlines, collars the size of canoes drift away from the garment. On the body, however, it all makes sense.

Hodzic is of an age group whose war experience is quite specific. “You have a lot of people here around 30 who never finished university,” she says. “You had to cross a bridge to get to class, and there was the risk of getting shot.” Her friend and fellow designer Naida Begeta, 25--who, with two other designers, operates Kao Pao Shu, named for a female martial-arts movie director--finished high school in Olympia, Wash., as part of a wartime exchange program. They share an aesthetic and work ethic, partying at night, sewing in the early morning and selling their designs--each one of a kind--in the latter part of the day.

“I don’t have professional sewing machine--I have a 30-year-old Yugoslav sewing machine,” Hodzic said. “I have to improvise everything I do. It’s not like you can sit in your studio and dream something up and produce it. You find things. And then you make something else.”

Bangkok, Thailand

It used to rain every afternoon during the Bangkok International Film Festival, just in case you didn’t find September steamy enough in that part of Thailand. The festival is now held in the climatically clement month of February, but whatever the season the traffic is always overwhelming--tiny cars being harassed by tiny tuk-tuks (motorized rickshaws). There’s a sense of impending madness, because it simply can’t be this hot and this noisy and this crowded all at once.

The theaters, of course, are refrigerated. How people don’t contract pneumonia by the end of the national anthem (everyone must stand, because the king’s picture is on-screen) is a miracle.

Bangkok, which for the Westerner remains a city of exoticism, enchantment and a true sense of strangeness in an increasingly homogenized world, is a metropolis of extremes. At the bustling and fragrant Chatuchak Weekend Market, one can buy everything from blue jeans to live chickens; at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, luxury bordering on decadence can be had for about $440 a night. Sex tourism, Bangkok’s best-known secret, is no secret at all, and while the Westerner can sometimes overlook it, there are few major cities where the juxtaposition of luxury and poverty seems so incongruous. Throw a champagne glass out a window of the Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel and you might bounce it off a shantytown roof.

You can always leave town, which we do. A bus ride about 50 miles north of the city places the traveler in Ayutthaya, the onetime (1350-1767) capital of Thailand (known then as Siam). The Buddhist structures there were stripped of their gold by the conquering Burmese in the mid-18th century. After a vendor lops the end off a coconut, you can sit down, sip through a straw and consider the vagaries of history.

Another must-see is Bang Pa-In, the summer palace of the kings, which is the Versailles of Thailand. Daily bus service runs regularly from Bangkok’s Northern Bus Terminal for a trip that takes 1 to 2 hours. Coming back, however, ride the boat down the Chao Phraya River. It takes about three hours and includes lunch. And when taking breaks during the ubiquitous Asian crime movies, you can snack on French-fried grasshoppers, which are available on the streets of Bangkok at any time.

East Hampton, New York

Most festivals seem strategically scheduled to extend the peak season of the destination in which they are situated. This is particularly true of seaside locations. Take the Hamptons International Film Festival. Do you want a film festival taking place there anytime between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when the two-lane roads are in perpetual gridlock? No, no, no. Do you want a peak-season festival in a town like East Hampton, which has countless multimillion-dollar homes and limited hotels? No, no, no. Do you want to see any of the movies at the Hamptons International Film Festival? No . . . well, it depends.

Coming out of a screening one night of a movie we’ll call “Four Seconds,” I ran into the publicist for the film and was about to say, “I lasted only three . . .” when he said, “I’d like you to meet the director.” Ooops. On the other hand, when the war clouds were clearing from the Balkans, programmer Howard Feinstein put together a “conflict and resolution” section of films from the former Yugoslavia that people are still talking about. So you never know.

Given that it’s late October, the prime reason for hitting the Hamptons is not the beaches, even if you have access or know the location of the single one available to the public. There are other things to do, an increasingly popular destination being the local wineries, which may not be up to California standards but are said to be improving. There are also pumpkins. Late-season tomatoes. And, for a few days, movies.

The Hamptons festival is both a symptom and a victim of the craze for movie festivals that has swept every ‘burb from Temecula to Bangor. The more festivals, the shallower the pool of available films. It’s like major-league baseball: Every time an expansion team is added, the quality of play diminishes. It can’t help but be such, especially when you’re bidding against something like Sundance, the New York Yankees of film festivals.

Sarasota, Florida

Back in the early ‘90s, the Sarasota French Film Festival was a decadent little event; you saw two movies a day and dragged cases of Mumm’s out to the beach at night, where revelry and hilarity ensued. Since the French bailed out, the festival--now the Sarasota Film Festival--has had a tough time. Two years ago, the jury opted not to give out awards, deciding the films were too uniformly bad to recognize. (“If they’d burned the film,” said one juror, “at least they would have produced heat.”)

Last year, however, the quality of the films at the late January/early February festival was first-rate and the organization was top-notch. There’s still too much money around to avoid the suggestion that dilettantes have taken over the projection booth (or are at least breathing heavily outside it), but good film gets shown despite the mall location and the fact that the locals are going to see movies they otherwise wouldn’t watch at gunpoint.

Sarasota is a golfers’ and boaters’ paradise, and while museums are a vacation cliche--and there’s probably a joke to be made about film festivals being circuses--the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art is a diversion worth taking. Established on the 66-acre estate of the Ringlings of Ringling Bros. fame, the museum holds treasures from the couple’s own collection as well as traveling exhibits. “Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites” is a recent installation. It also houses the Circus Museum, a trove of memorabilia that includes Howard Tibbals’ “American Circus,” a model re-creation covering 3,800 square feet.

Cannes, France

Judging a film festival does not necessarily come down to a question of good or bad. It’s like a therapist, or a bra--it’s all about fit. One person’s mousse au chocolat is another person’s Hostess Sno Ball. Consider two of the biggest festivals in the world. They couldn’t be more different. But then they serve at different altars.

The Monday after the Sunday that ends the annual Festival de Cannes, the famous little town on the French Riviera suggests something out of “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” The masses have pulled out, the overpriced restaurants (not so overpriced, considering the food) seem bereft and the streets have been hosed down. Then, usually, it begins to rain. The most fashionable film festival in the world has come to a close, again, and Cannes has to revert momentarily to being a somewhat sleepy little port city that began the millennium by supporting Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The fact is, very few come to Cannes for the pleasures of the city, although it is a gloriously beautiful place, the weather is generally sublime and they have the best pizza in the world. But for those festival days in May no place is more chic. No place is more congested with stars. No place is the focus of more flashbulbs.

Which may explain why the biggest stars don’t stay there during the festival--no, they stay at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, which, depending on traffic, is a 30-minute or four-day drive from the Croisette in Cannes. This often requires journalists to make the schlep to see Nicole, Clint or Lars von Trier, should they be lucky enough to have been granted an audience. Sitting on the terrace at sunset--which any visitor can do, provided they purchase a cocktail--is something not to miss.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Consider Amsterdam the anti-Cannes. Few cities are such gems of Western civilization, with a concentration of world-class art, world-class people, world-class pot laws (one can get high just walking down the street). Yes, there are problems--the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a militant Muslim in 2004 is often cited as evidence that Amsterdam can no more elude real-world horrors than can any other place. But during the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, held this year in late November and early December, the low-glamour content is balanced by the elegance of the city itself, the seriousness of the films and the enthusiasm of the people.

And their sense of humor. Visiting the Amsterdam Historical Museum, where a survey of the city’s art was being held two years ago, I collared a curator who was very helpful in directing me to the Anne Frank House. It was only a few blocks away, but it seemed, via Dutch street signs, to be light years away.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “if you get lost, ask anyone for directions. Everyone speaks English.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to be blithe, “it’s like New York: Everyone there speaks Dutch.”

“Well,” he countered, “at one time that was true.”

I laughed as I walked off to Frank’s house, and thought that, unlike Cannes, IDFA is a people’s festival. And that is perhaps the most crucial distinction to be made among film festivals: Are they held under circumstances where the business of film eclipses both art and humanity (as it often does at Sundance or, especially, Cannes)? Or do they celebrate film and people, and do so in a place where one would just as soon be, even if the cinema had never been invented?