Talent Press 2009: Day 5

Aaron W. Graham: Crocodile Tears and Insincerity
Marcos Kurtinaitis: Bringing Words to Life
Tommaso Tocci: The Mathematics of Love
Sitou Ayité: Crafting Talent
Siddharth Pillai: Jungle Boogie
Eugenia Saúl: Autumn in Winter
Jonas Holmberg: Go Back to Your Goat
Matthew le Cordeur: Beams of Life
Aaron W. Graham: Reha's Cosmos
Marcos Kurtinaitis: Power of Simplicity

Crocodile Tears and Insincerity
By Aaron W. Graham

Dipping his toes into slightly more dreamlike imagery with his second feature Happy Tears, Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of pop art pioneer Roy Lichtenstein, completely bundles all attempts to tie maternal and paternal psychological issues by visualizing them into fantastically-rendered slices inserted magnanimously into situations otherwise mundane or everyday.

For instance, Parker Posey, an ultra-confused and hectic former druggie who's since married rich, sees her shoe salesman as some blue-beaked chicken, just begging her to cough up the $2,000 for chic knee-high boots. Save for several other jarring moments like that one, the bits only serve to jut out as painfully inconsistent with the parade of reality shoved down our throats.

Infidelities, promises of riches by a dementia-crazed patriarch (Rip Torn), the drabby beard to a gay masseuse (Demi Moore), and other tired bits of whimsy and absurdities all figure in Happy Tears. Yet they never combine into something more; there's never a moment of earned sadness for any of the characters, who deem themselves as tragically quirky and incomplete. The sheen of shallowness grows more and more as the movie wears on. And it's surely not instantly cathartic or a character to lie down in a bathtub, sobbing uncontrollably over the duration of a long take; it's not enough.

Thematically, when one of your supporting players is the son of a recently deceased artist not unlike the director's famed father, you're setting yourself up for blatant comparisons. It's as if Lichtenstein has purposely avoided mining his own life for his first picture (the vagina dentate dark comedy Teeth, from last year). This time out, he's decided to scrape together some childish errata as the messed-up son of a celebrated artist, and transposed it onto a composite woman suffering with such an unstable man for a husband.

The title credits even slosh together several painted images, not so much as for comparison with Roy, Sr., but to just have the idea of a film semi-centered on an art world out there. Rubbing up against the images on the soundtrack is a recording of Slim Harpo's "I'm a King Bee", later to be Rip Torn's signature theme as the sloppy, crazed-ridden father Parker and Moore they're forced to take care of. He's the King Bee of frankness, all right: like suggesting his need for oral sex just a few short moments before defecating all over himself. One could say the latter is a tragic consequence of old age, and that's true, but Lichenstein's portrait of this aging man is that he's always been the same: obstinately inconsiderate.  Aaron W. Graham

Bringing Words to Life
By Marcos Kurtinaitis

The Berlinale Talent Campus' Actors Workshop, in conjunction with the Script Station, offered a great opportunity for young screenwriters and actors to jointly exercise their skills. Held over four meetings, the mentors and the group worked on two scripts previously selected from those submitted by the scriptwriting talents: Love, Teresa, a romantic and delicate piece about coming to terms with the past by Colombian Tatiana Villacob, and Voice, a Crash-style, multi-plot, action drama by Carol Castro from Brazil.

With constant supervision and advice by experts, the scripts were thoroughly read and enacted by the actors in the presence of the writers, who constantly reviewed and rewrote their work. For scriptwriters, it was a chance to have their texts read by real actors, getting immediate feedback on what was working and what was not. "It gave me another perspective on my characters," said Tatiana Villacob, after a run-through of her script. "In my head, I know exactly how I want them to sound, but the actors showed me many other possibilities. It has opened my mind a lot," she explained.

The hands-on training also provided the actors an excellent opportunity to practice their acting skills with a script still in development, discussing aspects of their roles and lines directly with the author. "It's exciting for me to be able to help the writers bring their words to life," said Rupak Ginn, a 26-year-old actor from Los Angeles. In just its second year as part of the Berlinale Talent Campus, the Actors Workshop is seen as great news. "It is a very good thing that the actors also have their own specific program during the Campus", says Eleftheria Gerofoka, 28-year-old actress from Greece. Nonetheless, the fact that all the Actors Workshop's activities were connected to those of the Script Station, was seen as something that could be improved, with more time being devoted to the actors sharpening their skills with gestures, body-language exercises and acting for the camera. "Since it is attached to the Script Station, the practical aspects of the acting craft are a little overlooked by the workshop", said 28-year-old London-based Norwegian actress Ingrid Berdal, clarifying that this minor criticism did not take away from the marvelous and gratifying experience. This years' Campus initiative that won high praise by the acting Talents was the panel "Embodying the Character", presented by Jean-Louis Rodrigue. All in all, a great workshop to hone acting and film writing skills. Marcos Kurtinaitis

The Mathematics of Love
By Tommaso Tocci

Rudolf Thome, director of Pink (Germany), thinks that "a movie without a woman is not a movie". Such a bizarre belief should put his latest effort — shown as a Berlinale Special — on the right track, since it entirely focuses on the eponymous character of a young poetess.

Instead, Pink is a linear mess in three parts, focusing on the girl as she struggles to make up her mind about which man — out of the three she is simultaneously in love with — should be her husband. Since God has spoken to her, she must now put a stop to her openly overcrowded love habits. Believing that love is the mere product of "systematic proceeding and cold logic", she goes on to determine the algebraic sum of the three men's qualities (and wealth, of course). It's clear from the beginning that she won't get it right the first time, and that we'll get to see each one of the lovers in action.

The film doesn't lack an underlying surreal flavor, mainly due to the absurdity of the three men's willing participation in the contest, as well as the overall portrayal of the poetess, who evidently writes awful poetry yet is hailed as a genius by her audience — even by those who don't want to marry her. If we weren't certain that Claude Chabrol's new film had already shown at the Berlinale, we would have initially mistaken some of the pretentious upper-class mannerisms and irritating intellectualisms for the work of the French director, whose recent efforts have indeed featured lots of women — presumably to Thome's delight — but lack cinematic substance (A Girl Cut In Two).

What is chiefly vexing is that the central character is essentially a child: the script does a good job of showing this, yet the director's intent of making Pink both childish and powerful doesn't amount to an even split; she only comes out as powerful when she threatens to shoot someone — or when she actually does — while the rest of the time her powerfulness seems only a result of the other characters' poor writing.

Stylistically neutral and boasting an elegant but stiff soundtrack, Pink appears to be pretending that nothing ever came after the 60's — hereby joining Chabrol in that protest. The narrative development is so disarmingly uncomplicated and straightforward that its final act almost comes as a plot twist in its simplicity, thus marking the only time in which the film actually works.

And if you're asking yourself why the poetess' name is Pink — and why she very maturely expresses her feeling by splashing pink paint all over her partners' houses — that would be because "pink" was printed on the covers of the director's scriptwriting notebooks. Tommaso Tocci

Crafting Talent
By Sitou Ayité

Christophe Honoré, Rie Rasmussen and Til Schweiger are multi-talented experts in film who shared their experiences with the Berlinale Talent Campus Talents. The session, organized in cooperation with the Panorama section, was moderated by Ben Gibson.

Christophe Honoré is a French novelist, critic, playwright, children's book author and a director. A sample of his film Love Songs (Chansons d'amour) was screened. It is a romantic, musical comedy divided into three parts: departure, absence and return. The director revealed that death in the film, related to a personal story of the death of his father when he was 15. He felt that the distance between "speaking for others as a critic" and "speaking for oneself as a director" was not so great. For him, "switching roles is like sexuality. Some people change their partners and some don't." According to Honoré, there was no special competence for doing what he did; the important thing was to be able to create the right impression.

Danish actress Rie Rasmussen, who replaced actress Julie Delpy who was unable to attend, is also a director, producer and writer. Her short film Thinning The Herd was nominated for the Golden Palm for best short film at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. She is also the director of Human Zoo, presented in the Panorama section this year. For Rasmussen, movies are our generation's folklore. They are our pop culture and our reference point. She explained that her passion and love for the movies guided her on how to present a character by mixing elements of various performances that inspired her. Her future plans include directing movies, as well as acting.

For Til Schweiger, a German actor, producer, writer, editor and director who has won many international prizes, the best advice to talented people was to start their own projects if they were confident of making a good choice. Switching roles came from discovering an inner craft, he observed.

In conclusion, Ms Rasmussen summed up three qualities important for the ability to switch roles: prolific, expressive and evolutionary. Sitou Ayité

Jungle Boogie
By Siddharth Pillai

For thirty-four years the images and sounds that make up the electric revelry in Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's documentary Soul Power (USA) languished in a vault, first under a civil suit and then as outtakes from When We Were Kings, the Oscar-winning documentary. While When We Were Kings focused exclusively on the now legendary boxing match "Rumble in the Jungle", slugged out between Ali and Foreman in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), the footage that found no place in the final film came mostly from the parallel event "Zaire '74", a historic three-day music extravaganza bringing together the greatest of African-American and Southern African musicians. Levy-Hinte, obsessed with these images and sounds ever since he was forced to bin them during the editing of When We Were Kings, took it on as a passion project. The resulting film, Soul Power puts an end to three decades of the deprivation of soul.

It is a movie that can hardly go wrong. The original crew that captured the footage included no less than the likes of Kevin Keating (Harlan County USA) and the iconic Albert Maysles (Salesman). The camera plays fly-on-the-wall, and reality is captured with an intuitive poetry. Even the footage filmed on the streets gives the sense that much of life is music and rhythm. There are luminous quieter scenes like the one where the camera circles and then drifts away from a street band playing soulfully on cheap and broken instruments, instinctively provoking a melancholic comparison with the decadence of the concert. Elsewhere in the film, Levy-Hinte tries to suggest a similar comparison by consciously editing the footage, which is far less effective.

The build-up to the concert features the regular last-minute worries and scenes featuring the musicians goofing off or waxing eloquent on the significance of their trip to Africa. And then there is Muhammad Ali, charismatic and verbose as ever. The concert itself is a hallucinatory spectacle where BB King goes fluid on the guitar, Celia Cruz and the Falia All Stars stir up a frenzy, Bill Withers reaches deep for the blues, L'Afrisa International go sensual and hypnotic, Big Black's fingers blur over his drums and finally, James "Dynamite" Brown, whose composition has inspired the title, howls out pure music-energy all over the stage and blows it apart.

Levy-Hinte avoids gazing retrospectively at the film. Instead he edits the footage in a way that recreates a vibrant sense of time and space that has long passed, making Soul Power a music documentary that fits as a minor but laudable entry in the canon, alongside Gimme Shelter and Woodstock. Siddharth Pillai

Autumn in Winter
By Eugenia Saúl

If there's one thing of which every true movie buff dreams, it is to be able to revisit those films that marked history and are in many people's top five list of the best ever made. And although it is a small part of the huge Berlinale program which has sold 270.000 tickets halfway through, a great many buffs had had their dream come true this week with the screening in 70mm (aka "Grandeur format") of the restored copy of 1964 John Ford's western Cheyenne Autumn in the Retrospective section. The selection also included other jewels like Jacques Tati's Playtime and Gene Kelly's Hello, Dolly. The late night screening gathered a full house in the imposing old International theatre at Karl-Marx-Allee, a beautiful example of socialist style cinema built in 1963 and located in what used to be East Berlin. That is 551 people.

"You were there? I couldn't get tickets!", "You're so lucky, how was it?" and "I'm so jealous" were some of the commentaries heard the morning after and the days that followed. And, truth be told, it was exactly as good as we expected. At ten thirty, half an hour later than scheduled, the doors of the theatre opened and the big crowd got in. Beer in hand (another special detail to be remembered), everyone sat there, eager for the movie to start.

After a brief introduction that started with the words "This movie doesn't really need an introduction, because if you're here, surely every one of you must have seen it", it was explained to the audience that the restored copy contained a few gaps, that some frames had been lost. Right after, in a very old fashion way, while introductory music filled the interval, the heavy curtains parted giving place to the red opening credits and its first legend: "Shot in Panavision". The movie, needless to say, remains as good as ever with Richard Widmark, Carroll Baker, Dolores "Spanish Woman" Del Rio, and funny Sal Mineo portraying the beautiful, sad story of the Cheyenne Indian tribe's journey. But the experience of seeing it again in the prestige picture and sound format of the time certainly gives Ford's legend a whole new magic. Eugenia Saúl

Go Back to Your Goat
By Jonas Holmberg

As the hub of the Berlinale is the Potsdamer Platz area, an architectural celebration of a post industrial economy, The Eagle Hunter's Son might be a useful reminder to the festival goer that there are still places where the dream of an urbanized future lies in coal mining. What might be disturbing, though, for the postcolonial analyst, is the rather conservative moral of this German-Swedish adventure in Mongolia.

The film starts off with some beautiful tourist shots of vast plains, mountain silhouettes and a group of herders taking care of their goats. Bazarbai is there riding his horse, fetching a lost goat by leaning down from horseback and snatching the goat's leg. He is only twelve years old, but already a skilled herder.

But his restless nature makes him unable to find satisfaction in the slow-paced nomad traditions. And when his father — who is actually not an eagle hunter (as the film's title might make you believe), but a loving keeper of a pet eagle with a small leather hat — tells Bazarbai that his older brother Khan will change the nomad camp for urban thrills in Ulan Bator, Bazarbai loses it. Disrespectfully he slaps his father's eagle's face.

From Ulan Bator, Khan sends photos of him smiling in front of a modern motorcycle, pretending to enjoy city life, though he actually spends most of his days in a dangerous and dark coal mine. Bazarbai doesn't know the unwashed truth of working conditions for Ulan Bator newcomers, so he can't wait to join him.

When his father's eagle flies off after an eagle competition, Bazarbai gets his chance. He runs away following the eagle, and via a hostile railroad circus and a helpful girl he finds his way to the capital, only to find his brother half dead after a mining accident.

Punished for their dreams of urbanity, the brothers head home and ultimately find happiness in traditional values.

The Eagle Hunter's Son is potentially pedagogic concerning the limits of the globalization. But when West European filmmakers go to Mongolia with the moral that young rural Mongolians should not yearn for modernity, but stay in the plains and take care of their goats and eagles, it is difficult to read as anything but an unfair projection of their own post modern nostalgia for a rural past they would hate to inhabit in real life.

In the final scene Bazarbai lets the eagle fly away towards the horizon. I think the filmmakers could well have spared the adventurous boy the merciless dismissal of his own flying attempts. Jonas Holmberg

Beams of Life
By Matthew le Cordeur

Raw reality of lives beaten into the ground — with emotions as bankrupt as the wallet — is no easy feat to pull off in a film. My Only Sunshine (Hayat var) works like an existential trip in telling a harrowing tale of death, survival and growing up under the worst of conditions. It is a saga which is not easy to watch at times. But, that's not to say this Turkish film by Reha Erdem is bad; quite on the contrary.

Set on the banks of a river in Istanbul, poverty and negligence make the transition from a child into an adult a huge challenge for Hayat (played by the adorable but silent Elit Iscan). Her crooked father (Erdal Besikçioglu) supplies ships waiting to enter Istanbul with booze and women as a way to keep his family alive. Hayat's grandfather, Dede (Levent Yilmaz), is tragic yet comic, spending his dying days breathing out of an oxygen tank and getting Hayat to buy drinks and cigs. It is these three tragic figures that play out their self-centered lives, bargaining with one another, but not taking much interest in each other's miserable lives and personal struggles.

This is the sadness, the loneliness and the tragedy that makes watching My Only Sunshine so difficult. But the flowing pace of the well-shot film and the various characters that bring relief — and sometimes more pain — keep the intrigue, as we wait to see if the problems find a remedy.

Erdem, who was a part of the Berlinale Talent Campus session "Imaging Istanbul", uses water as a reflective, powerful form of symbolism. The flowing rhythm of people's lives, no matter how good or bad, are just the same as the current of a stream, a river or an ocean. Water is all around Hayat, starting with the daily trip on her father's motor boat among imposing tankers; or seeing her distorted image in the toiling water; and, in darkness, as she watches dreamingly over the dangerous open sea. Water's healing ability, as well as it's destructive and ever changing force, makes it such a powerful device.

Sirens blast. A fast-paced hand-held camera scans a forlorn park. There Hayat lies. Face down. A broken woman obsessed with Hayat appears. She picks her up. There is blood running down her leg. These things happen, Hayat is told. And so the film goes on. The rape is not dealt with. There is no one to deal with it.

Erdem uses sound in a repetitive, annoying way, which adds to the uncomfortable nature of the film. Hayat hums the baritone hoot of the tankers throughout the film, while her red teddy starts singing every time she pushes a button on its paw. A synthetically sung "You are my sunshine" and the words "I love you" are a sense of comfort to her. The only bearable sound is that of Hayat's mystery stalker, who sings of love and broken dreams.

The sense that Hayat will not be able to overcome the way she lives becomes ever more intense, until events ensure she has to make a decision: To remain a part of the destruction beset in her life, or to make a childish dash for love. The only hope is that the water is forgiving enough to allow her this freedom.

My Only Sunshine is a moving tale of overcoming poverty and despair through a style of filmmaking that engages on a different level, where pace is set by mood and realities by a struggling realization that change is possible. Matthew le Cordeur

Reha's Cosmos
By Aaron W. Graham

Long before Istanbul-born, France-educated Reha Erdem called the shots behind the camera, he well understood the importance of a well-versed history in film. This only goes to further prove that you just can't argue with a cinematic education in Paris, watching the American classics while studying the trajectory of French cinema in such a stimulating time as the early-to-mid 1980s. "I began in the sound department, and later worked with cameramen, after my studies were completed. So I had a good understanding of what went into feature filmmaking", Erdem said during a brief chat before his panel, "Imagining Istanbul", held as part of day four of the Berlinale Talent Campus.

Erdem's 1988 debut, A Moon (A ay), would pick up an award at the 1989 Nantes Three Continents Festival, but even with the winning film, it would be exactly ten years before Erdem had the chance again. "It was a difficult time to be a filmmaker in Turkey", he simply states today of the whys of such a large gap in-between projects. "There wasn't a movement to be a part of, so it was difficult to make inroads on your own."

A Run For Money (Kac para kac) would emerge in 1999, a France-Turkey co-production, but for the next several years before My Only Sunshine (Hayat var), playing this year at the Berlinale, Erdem would have to be satisfied with viable commercial work. This includes the only other two pictures of his œuvre: Mommy, Are You Dead (Insan nedir ki?) and Times And Winds (Bes vakit).

Thankfully, a cloud has parted in his nation's cinema, and even though Erdem is more comfortably situated commercially thanks to those recent works, the success of his countrymen does ensure a quicker length of time before films. In fact, he's already set to shoot Kosmos, which he's also written, only two weeks from now. "I'm sort of nervous — it'll be the first film I've shot that wasn't directly in Istanbul. It's more on the eastern part." Would he hope to screen it at the Berlinale next year, or would that be too soon? "I would absolutely love to", the affable, salt-and-peppered hair director declaratively said. Aaron W. Graham

Power of Simplicity
By Marcos Kurtinaitis

Three very interesting, different shorts by young German filmmakers were presented at the Berlinale in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino. First in the program, Polar, by Michael Koch, is the story of a young man visiting his father in the mountains and discovering he has a new wife and son. The father-son conflict is presented in a stripped-down and distant manner, with no soundtrack, clean cinematography and no effort to enhance the drama. The cast delivers credible performances, and the situations are very natural. In his third short film, Koch shows real talent, especially in directing actors and letting the story unfold without stylistic interventions. But everything is so flat, cold and inconsequential, that the movie fails to engage. Too much subtlety ends up creating an insurmountable distance between the audience and the characters. The result shows an artist is still in the process of finding his voice.

Directed by Martin Busker, Roller Coaster (Höllenritt) is another take on father-son relationships, but from a totally different perspective. It is about a young boy whose parents are just divorced and is eager to join a club called "Dads Are Assholes". The action takes place during the first week-end the boy has to spend with his father and his new family, during which he does everything to drive the father away. If Polar was perhaps too subtle, the problem with this one is precisely the opposite: from the massive use of visual effects to the background music punctuating every dramatic moment, everything in Roller Coaster is hysterical. The film is always telling us what to think and feel. There are some really interesting ideas and good moments of humor, weakened by completely improbable situations and ridiculous jokes. By the end, it feels like a gigantic cotton-candy: colorful, funny, sweet, but excessive and insubstantial.

The final short Gitti came as a refreshing experience, with likeable, well-developed characters and witty dialogues. The second film of Anna Deutsch, it is a "documentary" portraying a lively, 69-year-old divorcee who puts out an advertisement to find a new mate, but rejects most prospects. Apart from two external shots, the film remains within her apartment and has a very basic structure: the woman talking straight to the camera, chatting with friends, talking over the phone or meeting her suitors. Shot entirely on a DV camera that never moves, Gitti is as simple as it is effective. Its strength and humor come from the protagonist's delightful personality. A complete natural, she gives hilarious and original insights on the sentimental life of elders. In a context where the old age is usually portrayed in a reverential or even depressing manner, this is no small contribution. Marcos Kurtinaitis

top