theartsdesk in the Ruhr: The European Film Awards

The 22nd European Film Awards closed last night with Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon winning Best Director, Screenwriter and Film. Tahar Rahim was Best Actor for his breakthrough performance as a French-Algerian initiate into a prison’s brutal underworld in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, while the absent Kate Winslet won Best Actress for The Reader. Eric Cantona provided the night’s real star-power as he presented a visibly overcome Ken Loach with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

But with The White Ribbon simply adding to its Cannes Palme d’Or success, and a quizzical Danny Boyle (pictured) also on hand to pick up the People’s Choice Award for Slumdog Millionaire while entering year two of what he called the film’s “annus mirabilis”, you might ask exactly what these awards achieved.

The identity of individual winners, though, and any forlorn hopes the European Film Academy might harbour of rivalling the Oscars for glamour and potency, seemed less important in the end than the wider impact of two  quietly revelatory days spent in the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. These awards are the European Union at its most idealistic, a genuine attempt to find the continent’s cultural connections. In the same spirit the “Ruhr Metropolis”, a sprawl of economically depressed urban centres connected by an autobahn, has replaced the usual glitzy capitals as the Awards’ home this year because it will be 2010’s European Capital of Culture. It couldn’t be more representative of the continent’s virtues and problems.

Friday night’s public gala screening of Loach's Looking for Eric at Essen’s lovely Lichtburg cinema (pictured) again focused on a film that’s been around for months. As usual Loach was in a fiery mood. When one of the grandees introducing Loach mentioned that we were in “the heart of working Germany”, the director hit his impassioned stride. “It reminded me that we used to have an industrial heartland in my country,” he snapped back. “And Maggie Thatcher put a dagger through it.”

Windy questions on the state of the planet followed from the crowd, but Loach couched his answers in inspiring terms, quoting Lenin and bemoaning the “pitch of cynicism” the 1980s bequeathed us. He typically bit the hand partly feeding him, saying European cinema and the EU – “a privatiser’s charter” – couldn’t be connected. He finished with a long plea on behalf of a Western Saharan activist currently on hunger strike. A day later, clearly mortified and moved at the prolonged standing ovation as he received his Lifetime Achievement Award, he similarly spoke at such length on an unnamed, exiled Palestinian film-maker, it was eventually hard to remember he’d won anything at all.

Hanging around the cinema bar before the screening, I was unexpectedly moved myself by the sight of the EFA president, Wim Wenders, ambling up the stairs, curly hair still flopping impressively, and carrying a backpack that made him look like a superannuated student. Omnipresent through the weekend, Wenders is from the region, and set his mesmeric 1970 Euro-road movie Alice in the Cities here. “Essen is gut,” he quoted from that film when introducing the awards the next night. The thought that I was in the landscape its protagonists got lost in, back when Wenders as much as anyone was defining a new, open-ended vision of Germany, Europe and the cinema of both, left me star-struck. Wenders stayed on the stairs talking to all comers, the flaws of his later films melting into irrelevance.

I’d meant to skip Looking for Eric, but ended up enjoying it again, as the Essen crowd easily understood everything about it (though the industrial-strength Mancunian swearing was softened in subtitles). At the party at the cinema afterwards, the courses of food showed no signs of stopping when I left at midnight. Four hours later my night ended in a hotel bar that was the essence of German civility, double-pint glasses of local grossen bier, casual smoking, worldly barmen and conversation with fellow frazzled film journalists making it seem an oasis from the cynical world Loach railed against.

The next morning, I was with Loach and two dozen others, exploring the husk of a Ruhr coal-mine. The trip was laid on to promote the district’s Capital of Culture status, but could have been designed for the director. The Zollverein mine (pictured) was once the noisy, dangerous centre of an industry that employed 400,000 in the Ruhr. Now, the guide Dirk Slawetski explained, it’s a World Heritage site, “like the cathedral in Cologne”. Standing on its roof looking at its giant rust-red machinery, and the way shafts of sunlight made power-plant smokestacks glisten like citadels on the horizon, the comparison seemed fair.

Slawetski, the grandson of a miner, was the most impressive and outspoken guide I’ve had to anything. Loach hung on every word of his politically loaded history lessons, listening to the way miners here have had their livelihoods gently run down over generations, in contrast to the sudden devastation in Britain. Loach had remembered the night before how much support Ruhr miners gave their striking, doomed British brethren in 1984.

“You see, it’s always about money,” the guide mentioned, of the way local “tycoons” prevented the creation of a university in a region of six million people until 1963, as no educated person would go down a mine.

Hours later, the awards began in another converted industrial monument, Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle. In the rafters of its cavernous hangers, hard-hatted “workmen” struck sparks and explosive bangs, a half-hearted, post-industrial performance art. Austere white-bearded Austrian Michael Haneke incongruously signed autographs outside, while in the reception hall, Cantona lounged, tie at half-mast, self-contained and charismatic.

The ceremony itself followed the Oscars in format. German TV comedy star Anke Angelke hosted, maintaining a tone of constant, largely effective irony that sometimes made it seem as if the awards weren’t to be taken seriously, either. As she wandered up to Danny Boyle, seated in the front row, the look on his face eloquently asked, "What is this shit?" He bounded up to collect Slumdog Millionaire’s People’s Choice Award anyway. He was also on hand for Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography award, for the latter’s work on Slumdog and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. With refreshing bluntness, Mantle’s videoed acceptance speech declared: “Lars, it was great when you were there. You weren’t there that often, but when you were, that was a collaboration...”

Ben Kingsley was still stuck in traffic outside Heathrow when he was due to present Peter Strickland with his European Discovery award for Katalin Varga, one of the year’s most praised British films (veteran German director Volker Schlõndorff stood in). There was rarely a sense of occasion, or much being at stake in who won what. But when Isabelle Huppert (pictured right) received her Achievement in World Cinema award, she looked out at us with that challenging, serious face, considered a tear with actorly skill, and in her hauteur somehow managed to embody European cinema’s grandest traditions. Tahar Rahim’s not quite cocky, youthful vim as he picked up Best Actor, and his yell of “Vive le cinéma!” as he strolled off, suggested a flavour of the future.

Wenders was there at the end, red bow-tie wonky and mouth curled in amusement. The night’s vague attempts at grandeur had fallen flat, the awards themselves often seemed incidental, and the atmosphere was modest and resoundingly provincial. That is the EFA’s charm and, in the Ruhr’s deeply localised setting for a pan-European vision, its well-made point.

• More information on the awards at the EFA website.