Director Bakhtiar Khudojnazarov's folk tale about a fisherman's fanatical quest gets the Rome film festival off to a mesmeric start

The city of Rome traces its ancestry back more than 3,000 years, to an iron-age village on the Palatine hill, though in terms of the festival calendar the place remains a stripling – overshadowed by venerable Venice and glamorous Cannes and still struggling to find its feet. Fittingly enough, the seventh edition of the Rome film festival opened in a mood of amiable chaos, like a children's birthday party, with the red carpet swaddled in protective plastic and the delegates pinballing wildly about the site, hunting treasure up steps and down walkways.

Inside a chilly, hangar-like theatre, the festival screens Bakhtiar Khudojnazarov's Waiting for the Sea, the official opening-night picture. The doors bang open to admit late arrivals and then bang open again to release those who realise they should be next door,...