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Berlin 2006 - Daily reports
Sunday, February 12th
What are you laughing at? Anne von der Goenne reviews Christian Vincent's Quatre étoiles (Panorama Special Screening). 
Men in Drag. Leo Mirani reviews Tomer Heymann's Paper Dolls (Panorama).
Swimming back to Neverland. Laurence Reymond reviews Cho Chang-ho's The Peter Pan Formula (Forum).
Filming the Mind. Tamás Bella reviews Alain Berliner's Wide Awake (Forum).
Israeli Film Asks for Peace. Katie Kohn reviews Udi Aloni's Mechilot (European Film Market).
Iraq ... a country already lost. Soumaya Beltifa reviews My Country, My Country, a documentary by Laura Poitras (European Film Market).
Harmless Creativity. Vera Brazzoni on the Berlin Today Awards.
Eating is Politics. Olya Aylarova introduces Alice Waters, chef, writer, restaurateur and the vice-president of the Slow Food International.
Everything Is Possible. Oleksiy Radynski explains how to get along with a person you really want to meet at a Campus.
What are you laughing at?
Is it funny to clap a girl's ass, when she is walking away? Would you say it´s either macho or witty? That obviously depends on where you come from. It isn't a big surprise that people of different nations have particular senses of humor. Germans are said to have none at all. But what about the French? Did they actually get stuck in the early 1950's as the new racy comedy Quatre Étoiles gives the impression? Besides the ass clapping, it´s considered hilarious in the movie when a woman gets slapped in the face when she refuses to give a man the money he needs. Even worse, it's followed by "You better put some ice on it!". Odd and unsettling might come to mind - the material which is needed for a cheesy drama, but director Christian Vincent is absolutely serious. He cultivates old fashioned role models without any doubts: here comes the weak woman who just got an enormous inheritance (basically the only way for a woman to get rich), and then escapes from her intellectual life in Paris to get nicely tanned and drunk in Cannes. There she meets a busy munchkin and of course falls in love with him and gives the mini player 30 000 Euro. Her only demand is that he has to stay with her until he can pay her back and she even appears courageous when she doubles the amount.
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Vincent's oafish movie is not entertaining at all and nerve-racking at most of the time. With no guts for at least a pleasing aesthetic he puts together as many stereotypes as possible. Of course he places his ridiculous story in the very posh Carlton hotel on the Cote d´Azur, where men are wearing the most expensive suits and women the most revealing dresses. And it gets even more annoying when his actors start to speak. They roar, babble or quack hysterically, but rarely converse. These uncreative dialogues take place mostly over cell phones, which are in constant use and permanently being hung up on each other.
Quatre Etoiles is a movie which impresses by trying to include what is normally necessary for an economically successful movie: Big cars, fit girls, bad boys and a touch of romance. It turns out to be a cheap copy of what we have seen thousands of times in Hollywood movies with a fatal leaning to antiquated views.
Men in Drag
Three Filipino men dressed in identical red kimonos, their faces painted white, stand at the doorway of the TLV, one of Tel Aviv's leading nightclubs. Bowing in welcome as people walk in, they bob up and down, completely out of sync. Depressing yet funny, surreal yet entirely everyday, this is probably the finest moment of Tomer Heymann's Paper Dolls. Unfortunately, moments like this are few and far between.
Paper Dolls is the story of a group of transvestite Filipino men who work in Israel as caregivers. Six days a week, they look after ancient Israelis - they feed them, bathe them, take them for walks and, in most cases, act as their only link to the outside world. On their one day off, they dress in drag and lip sync Hava Nageela at a bar for Filipino men. Their dream as a group was to perform at a mainstream venue - the TLV.
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They're immigrants, they're gay, they're transvestites, they're subject to racism and homophobia, they have to deal with bombs going off around their ears, they spend their days doing what is probably one of the most depressing jobs in the world, and they're harassed by the immigration police. These men, five of whom we get to know fairly well, have a multitude of issues and Heymann has the unenviable task of choosing which ones to focus on. Unfortunately, he chooses them all.
About an hour into the film, one of the Dolls is offering a man a blowjob in a dark alleyway when two suicide bombs go off in the vicinity. This is the sort of moment most filmmakers would give their right arm to get on camera but Heymann fails to use it to its fullest potential. There are no chills down your spine, no mouth agape in horror, not even a sense of irony at this immensely strange sequence of events. Is this a film about transvestites? Is it a film about how outsiders view Israel? Is it, perhaps, a coming of age film for Heymann himself? Heymann, who is also gay, first dresses up as a woman thanks to the Dolls, but that is just another disjointed sequence in a film full of disjointed sequences.
Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Paper Dolls was originally made as a six part television series. Heymann spent nearly five years filming the Paper Dolls and a year and half editing the material. To spend that much time with your subjects and not become close to them would be impossible, which is painfully obvious in the scenes featuring Heymann's interaction with the Dolls. He seems to have left out things that are for him, after the amount of time he's spent with the Dolls, a given, thereby depriving the audience of the connection that is essential to any story about people. Eventually, you end up asking yourself whether you really care what happens to the Paper Dolls. And 80 minutes down the line, when they've all been through their personal moments of triumph and despair, their highs and lows and life changing moments, you find that you really don't.
Swimming back to Neverland
As he introduced his film, Korean director Cho Chang-ho thanked the audience for being there to "share the burden" with him... And indeed, The Peter Pan Formula, despite the title's childhood reference, follows the tragic turn of events in the life of a young man, Han-soo. He is a promising swimmer whose ambitions fall apart when his mother commits suicide and sinks into a coma. Taken from his own experience, the director doesn't try here to explain things with words, but he makes us feel how marginalised one can become through a very sensitive (if sometimes too heavy) portrait of a lost youth.
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Lonely, angry, his desires unsatisfied, facing money problems, and searching for a father who doesn't want to know him, Han-soo finds his life degenerating rapidly into a nightmare. The only person willing to help him, his neighbour, is a woman he's got a crush on but who'll never agree to sleep with him. Trapped in this vortex of despair, he becomes a silent and lonely individual, robbing small shops when money is needed for his mother's hospital bills. And like his character, the film itself is composed of scenes piled up like blocks of silence and stillness, in what has become a new classical style for independent Asian cinema: beautiful images, elliptical narrative, and a fondness for understatement... If The Peter Pan Formula, the director's first movie, evokes other films from this generation of young and talented directors, it still lacks sufficiently strong a personality to mark a real breakthrough.
As it develops, the story of Han-soo's life tends to lapse into a catalogue of life's endless cruelties. And, for the audience, this accumulation of despair may rapidly become stifling. Director Ho Chang-ho may have a great topic in analysing the point at which the process of growing up goes somehow into reverse. He suggests that Han-soo is repeatedly trying to return to his origins, his mother's womb, but the idea strikes one here as mere theory. Han-soo, like a stone, seems destined from the very beginning to sink. Unfortunately, the burden remains too heavy for the audience to share.
Filming the Mind
The truly outstanding value about Alain Berliner's newest feature-length self mirroring documentary about his insomnia, Wide Awake is that it is extraordinarily thought provoking. Throughout the movie, usually underestimated - although very important - questions keep emerging like the one about the role organization plays in creative and everyday life. To that concept, the most hilarious and at the same time fascinatingly instructive scenes are linked: Berliner guides viewers through his working den, showing off his enormous archive of (home) videos, photographs and even sound effects, some of which are placed in drawers and come to life instantly when the drawer is opened. Everything is tagged and catalogued alphabetically. If a useful thought emerges, Berliner jots it down straight away and lets the note scrap lay around on his desk until the idea is realized. Watching these parts, I was carried away by the amusing momentum of this workaholic mind, which, on the other hand, is extremely appealing - to the extent that I started to feel Berliner becoming some kind of role model.
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Another crucial but underrated theme the film brings to your attention is the significance of - mostly undisclosed - brain activities. In a continous self-reflection that luckily seems to avoid any uptight self-consciousness, Berliner tries to observe his mental processes as closely as he possibly can, gaining two crucial victories while doing this. First through shrewdly affiliating commentarial texts about cerebral mechanisms to speeded-up footage of turn-of-the-century American street traffic, creating a memorable and - in terms of metaphoric imagery - pioneering scene. Secondly, he succeeds in presenting an on-the-scene self-reportage of the mentally groundbreaking happening of him drinking coffe in the morning after 31 years of avoiding caffeine entirely, showing the spectacular power of psychedelics in a nutshell.
Being amused in an astute way and brought to profound thoughts are the two key merits of this unusual piece and for them, I dearly thank the filmmaker. However, these positive qualities do not make me forget that the movie, despite having an interesting theme, is entirely unfocussed. No part of the intellectual area that this rambling film touches on is explored or analyzed in depth. It keeps tossing up ideas, visual gags--most of them chop-cut footage from Berliner's home archives associated with the concepts of the voice-over--but it does not go anywhere. And when reading the credits, which begin with "produced, filmed, written and edited by Alain Berliner" I suddenly realized that, in the case of this film, all of these words basically refer to the same thing: the genesis of the documentary itself. Although shrewd and entertaining, Berliner is unable to avoid the usual snare of his own genre, namely that the act of filmmaking itself banishes even insomnia from the limelight.
Israeli Film Asks for Peace
In his last film, Local Angel, artist, writer and amateur intellectual Udi Aloni "borrowed an angel" from the prose of the eminent German literary critic and Jewish mystic, Walter Benjamin. The eclectic documentary incorporated Benjamin's reflections on history, divinity and time against a background of Israeli pop music, Palestinian rap and interviews ranging from Yasser Arafat to Aloni's own activist mother. This cinematic mosaic piece was dubbed, "political and theoretical fragments" and in the individual pieces, one could see the West Bank broken by centuries of personal and political loss, an introspective Jerusalem struggling with its religious capital and a tumultuous Tel-Aviv populated by the angry and empathetic alike.
In his latest film, Mechilot (which in Hebrew means both "forgiveness" as well as "catacomb") Mr. Aloni once again reflects upon those shards of history, memory, religion and identity which compose the fragmented enclave of Israel/Palestine. This time, Aloni abandons the disco ball like structure of "Local Angel" and attempts to assemble a semi-coherent mirror through narrative.
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Born in Israel and raised in New York, David (a stunning new talent, Itay Tiran) is as confused about his beliefs as he is desperate for conviction. His father is a holocaust survivor who fled to the arms of America and classical music and never looked back. David, however, finds a way both to rebel against his father as well as find that faith that is so elusive in hip, downtown Manhattan: he joins the Israeli army. Things only get more complicated for David though, and he soon finds that the whether facing peaceful Palestinian activists in Union Square or Arab families with menial jobs in Israel, his moral conflicts follow him wherever he goes. Then one day, a trigger is pulled and a mental misfire sends David off the deep end. He winds up in a mental institution, occupied by survivors of the holocaust and built upon the mass grave of a Palestinian village slaughtered by Zionists. Needless to say, things don't get easier for David and resolutions, if they ever exist at all, are not simple.
Aloni is not out to temporarily cover our collective wounds with a cohesive narrative scab, but he is not a provocateur either, exploiting controversy or franchising politics the way some filmmakers (who shall remain nameless) do.
With Mechilot, Aloni seems now to be borrowing his provocative ideas from Freud. This story of David reads like a dream: intelligible but metaphoric and often rich in meaning but strange in appearance. This "opera of the unconscience" as Aloni calls it, asks if healing necessitates repression, if forgiveness demands sacrifice, and if forgetting means losing one's identity or worse, sanity. His lens judges neither the ennobled violence of Zionism or the embittered cry of Palestinian grief, but in true opera form, aims to capture the emotional truth rather than the political one.
Where Mechilot fails is not in its philosophical intention or dramatic power, but in its presentation: in other words, not in the film's soul, but in its body.
Mr. Aloni is a student of the human experience and has at his disposal all the tools for understanding that experience such as psychoanalysis, religion, history, mysticism and art. What he has not yet mastered is the craft of professional filmmaking. Ingenious and inventive as the editing, style and certainly sound production is, Aloni is not yet fluent in the language of filmmaking.
That said, Aloni does not seem to care much about producing a slick and streamlined film; he is more concerned with producing a message. Many times, the film seems to be a mere vessel for the meaning Aloni hopes to release into the ether. Both the film and its philosophy suffer from this imbalance, as often a continuity flaw, obtuse acting and less than transparent production, can distract from the often shiver inducing power of the uniquely allegorical script.
Mechilot is necessary viewing for the cerebral, political and poetically minded, but those who crave technical form over philosophic nourishment may be blind to the film's value.
Iraq ... a country already lost
My Country, My Country, an uninspired documentary film by Laura Poitras, describes the first "democratic" parliamentary elections in Iraq through the day life of a Sunni-Muslem doctor named Riyadh.The story begins six months before polling day, and gives a fairly comprehensive idea of the situation before, during and after the elections. Dr. Riyadh was also a candidate of the Iraqi Islamic Party in the January 2005 elections.
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Poitras especially focuses on the Sunni and Kurds who represent the minority, and and whose opinions are poles apart. She also shows the United States military's nation-building division, the UN electoral assistance division, and the private security contractors. In 90 minutes we get almost as many opinions as we do diverse characters (a journalist, Dr. Riyadh's family members and friends, the US military, a UN controller). The hand-held camera makes you feel a part of the action. You feel as if you are in Iraq, stressed and powerless to intervene - it's a strange feeling of utter weakness.
The film is split into various time frames that allow viewers to follow certain events, which in effect are transformed into a kind of televised "show". Beginning with the love-sick song of Kadhim Al Sahir, an Iraqi singer well-known in the Arab countries, and continuing to the news on TV and radio stations, and ending with all the military and non-military preparations.
This documentary makes you think about American democracy in the Middle East. How can we speak of "democratic" elections while there is no country, when people haven't even a minimum of freedom? When you are afraid to go out because you might be killed, kidnapped or arrested by US soldiers! Since the US invasion, as this mediocre if well-meaning documentary underlines, Iraq no longer belongs to the Iraqi people.
Harmless Creativity
Saturday the 11th of February: the Talent Campus has started at full steam. Tonight the Berlin Today Awards are going to be presented: the contendents are three short films about Berlin and how the town is seen with the eyes of another culture. Their directors are former Campus Talents who submitted their ideas for a short film to the Campus establishment last year and that were selected to turn their project into features to be presented this year.
First of all, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs, introduces the spirit of the Berlinale with a speech centered on cultural diversity and tolerance; of course the recent trouble caused by Danish cartoons about Islam is the protagonist of this speech: Steinmeier insists that all real creativity must be born in co-operation between different cultures and civilizations. Then Dieter Kosslick, Director of the Berlinale, takes his time to make another speech, equally centered on the issues of collaboration, intellectual stimula stemming from the mixing of cultures and trust in the youngest generation. What is amazing in Kosslick´s speech is his sympathy and prankster-like jokes: his spirit is not what you could expect from such a VIP and gives an aura of freshness to the whole Berlinale.
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At the end, the three films in competition for the Berlin Today Award are screened. The first one, If you need me by Macedonian director Darija Andovska and Bosnian Mladen Djukic, is a comedy that features a mix of live footage and digital animation, and tells the story of a man whose car breaks down in the center of the city; he is desperate and calls an angel for help. Immediately, the big golden angel watching over Berlin from the große Stern is materialised in an ugly and sarcastic cartoon that comes down on Earth to help the guy; the two start talking about faith and modern values. The film is not bad and the digital effects are properly achieved, albeit the script and the actors´ performances are amateurish.
Then comes BerlinBall by young Brazilian Anna Azevedo, a documentary about a Brazilian kid living in a slum and dreaming to go to Berlin to play football with his hero Marcelinho (an actual Brazilian footballer who plays in the team Hertha Berlin). Unlike the previous one, this film can be moving and interesting, even though it is easy to touch the audience´s heart with a story about Brazilian poor kids and their dreams; anyway, it is well done and the interviews to the kids are quite interesting.
The last film, Under These Wings by Dutch Harrie Verbeek, is the most beautifully crafted and shot film, but also the most pretentious, slow and mannerist one. The plot tells the story of a woman whose life has crumbled down, but she seems to find hope in an old friend she had met on the night the Berlin Wall was destroyed. Interesting, but it would have needed a more humble director. The sense of gratuituous intellectualism conveyed by the slow pace and the many technical show-offs such as useless changes of focus, fake virtuoso camera movements or desaturated photography cannot be saved by effective acting and a very good last shot.
Generally speaking, it seems that all the directors did not really dare shooting strong and impressive material; it is not an accident that the prize, a beautiful butterfly sculpted in ice, went to the Brazilian film because it was the only one that could raise some emotion. Nevertheless, in my opinion the audience can hope for stronger stances and aesthetics; creativity must not be constrainted by kindess of heart or political correctness. This would probably contrast with Kosslick and Steinmeier ecumenical speeches, but would be healthy for cinema.
Eating is Politics
Alice Waters, chef, writer, restaurateur and the vice-president of the Slow Food International, is one of those rare people that continually strive for a better world according to Dieter Kosslik, the special guests of this year's Berlinale Talent Campus.
In Alice Waters' opinion, every time you eat, you vote. Where did your food come from? Did the grains your food is made from grow in the fields of your country or were they shipped from a developing country by some big corporation using underpaid labor? These are the questions that Alice Waters wants everyone to think about. She is sure that cinema is one of the best ways to bring this idea to the minds of people.
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Alice Waters says, "when the Talent Campus invited me to Berlin, I felt some hesitation. I didn't know if people were really interested in what I could tell them. But then I thought that it was my obligation to encourage young filmmakers to talk about food in the right way and tell other people about it in their films."
Her natural food concept is shared by Dieter Kosslick, who, while a student, was the first member of the Slow Food Movement. While speaking to young filmmakers about the relationship between films and food, Ms.Waters had the chance to learn as well. She is thinking of making her own film that would teach people how to cook delicious food no matter where they live. She says, "I think it is fantastic to do a film that would include 20 lessons on cooking. It will be one of those simple yet unexpected ideas."
As a natural food advocate, an amateur of cinema and a regular to film festivals, Alice Waters truly believes in the power of food and films to change people's lives. "If you combine those two together, you can get an amazing result!"
Everything Is Possible
There are two ways to get along with a person you really want to meet at a Campus. The first one is common - you can surf the Berlinale Talent Campus web resource, study profiles, search by countries, sexes or professions. The second way is called Global Speed Matching. It looks like a breakthrough of a vital reality into the world of schedules and time organisers. All you need to do is sit in front of a totally occasional person, smile and say, for example, the following: "My name is Oleksiy, I´m a film critic from Ukraine. And you?"
- My name is Stefanos Sitaras. I´m the youngest Talent on the Campus. Besides, I´m a celebrity in my homeland Greece.
I have enough reasons to stare at him silently.
- I´m sixteen, I´ve directed one full-length movie and a few shorts. Actually, I shoot historical movies. The latest one is about the war between Greece and Turkey in the 1920's. It tells a story of a family which is forced to move from its place...
I only manage to ask him how it all began.
- I made my first movie when I was thirteen. In Greece, if you bring your script to the studio and they like it, you start shooting. Everything is possible in Greece. If you want to shoot a movie, you should come to my country.
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Loud sound signals the end of my delight. The point of Global Speed Matching is - you never have enough time for a conversation, so you need to find a way to continue afterwards. I´m lucky to get a place to sit so the endless chain of global speed matchers moves from my left to my right. You´re still shaking hands with the previous partner when a new conversation starts.
- I´m Dani Rosenberg, I come from Israel. It´s my second time at the Berlinale. Last year my film was in a short-length competition and was awarded a special mention of the jury.
Dani proudly shows me a DVD with the Berlinale sign on it.
- It´s a five-minute version of Cervantes' Don Quixote, set in Israel.
This place is a treasury of surprises, I say to myself. Exchanging contacts takes the rest of time given to us by the invisible moderators.
- I´m Elan Gamaker, a filmmaker from South Africa.
In a few minutes me and Elan find out that our ancestors come from one area in the Eastern Europe. It seems to me that soon I´ll loose the very ability to wonder.
- My name is Byron. I´m a set designer from London.
I nearly forget his name when he tells me he worked on one of Winterbottom´s recent movies. In Winterbottom´s case you can never be sure which of his films is the latest - that is the conclusion of our talk.
- I´m Pia Muller, I come from the extreme West of Germany. I´m a video artist.
Moderators start being cruel. The fifth person is sitting in front of you in five minutes - and no chance to have a break! The process of communication is becoming more and more complicated. Still, the wonders continue.
- Ukraine? Really? I´ve recently been to the US, and when I told someone: "I´m from UK", everyone considered me to come from Ukraine, complains Claire Fowler, London-based writer and director.
Campus participants pass away as confidently as time does. Maja Vukic and Mirta Puhlovski are opposites in everything but two features - they both are producers, and they both come from Croatia. Natacha Feola from New York tries to create movies as dark as her hair is. During the talk with Zambian screenwriter Rhoda Kawinga we found out that film industries in our countries are approximately the same. Director Miso Kocic from Bosnia confesses that he would like to leave his country. Don´t do that, man. Remember what the Greek prodigy said. Everything is possible. Global Speed Matching makes you believe that.
© FIPRESCI / Berlinale Talent Campus 2006
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