Read Brigitta Wagner's impressions of Berlin's famous film festival.

Brigitta Wagner is a Ph.D. candidate in German and Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. She lives in Germany and the U.S. and has been involved in various areas of the film industry, including journalism, festival work, and production. Her interests include Cold War German film politics, contemporary German film and culture, urban visual culture, and documentary film production. Her dissertation, Berlin Films and the Cultural Politics of Spatial Memory, examines urban representation in the revival and production of Berlin films after 1989.

Festival Fever in Berlin

February 8, 2008

The day before the Berlinale begins, Potsdamer Platz is a mess of cables and festival construction crews. Berliners know the routine. Posters go up along Potsdamer and Stresemann Straßen; red carpets are unrolled; signs are glued and spray-painted; local journalists and film enthusiasts descend upon the square to indulge in early plunder: tickets, the signature messenger bag, and endless papers and pamphlets. The goal? To decide in just 24 hours which films are worth early mornings and late nights, skipped meals, and merciless crowds.

On the first day of the festival, the locals line up for hours and jam the internet in hopes of scoring a coveted ticket. While out-of-towners and first-time visitors battle jetlag and disorientation, the initiated sit back in the plush red chairs of the Cinemaxx smiling as the screen lights up with the festival’s first film. At night Berliners gather outside the Berlinale Palast in hopes of catching a glimpse of a favorite star.

Last night shrieks of “Mick!” and “Keith!” drifted up Alte-Potsdamer-Straße. The Rolling Stones were in town for the premiere of Shine a Light, a documentation of a fundraising concert at the Beacon Theater in New York. To be fair, the film’s director, Martin Scorsese, received a few cheers of his own as the flashbulbs punctured the February gloom. Standing among the Berlin masses, one could easily mistake Potsdamer Platz for the center of the universe.

Sad Cities

February 9, 2008

Cities and films have been allies since the beginning. From the early street scenes of the Lumière and Skladanowsky brothers, film cameras were trained upon the urban experience: traffic, pedestrians, and buildings. Today these films remind us of how cities and their residents once looked. Later films constructed cities from studio sets, lighting, and editing. And still later ones returned to the authenticity of location shooting. Today computer-generated urban environments blend seamlessly with images of real places, and cinematic spaces need not depend exclusively on the world before the camera. There is, however, still a distinct pleasure in getting to know a place through the films made about it.

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin and Thai director Aditya Assarat have each in their way created a complex portrait of cities burdened by the past. In My Winnipeg (2007), Maddin documents the city of his youth, of his life—a place that pulls would-be travelers back to its center. Maddin’s voiceover guides the film—at once documentary and fiction, essay and fantasy, memory and dream—as he (played by Maddin veteran Darcy Fehr), a weary traveler on a train that never leaves Winnipeg, dozes in black and white splendor. As with much of Maddin’s imagery, inspired by silent cinema, past and present seem to blend into temporal indeterminacy. So well does Maddin mimic and contort the idioms of the silent era that the present often seems old, the past new.

With a combination of archival footage, family photographs, contemporary shots, and reenactments of family life, the film sketches a city known inside and out, through personal experience and civic history. If Winnipeg has streets, Maddin explores its hidden alleyways, the snow-filled routes exposing the backsides of houses. If Winnipeg has a new hockey stadium, Maddin memorializes its precursor, a massive turn-of-the-century department store. The city is more than fact and the official record of historical events. It houses spirits: old-time hockey players, frozen horse heads, Ojibwe rivers beneath rivers, a fairground and racetrack that have long since disappeared.

Maddin’s character is more than a citizen, an inhabitant of the city. He is its son—born of the scent of his mother’s beauty parlor and the sounds and stench of his father’s workplace: the stadium and locker room of the Canadian National Hockey Team. The city’s magnetism is one of origins—the joining of two rivers, the Canadian fur trade, and their synthesis: “Mother’s lap.” In one of the film’s rare color sequences, a wrecking ball strikes the old stadium in which Maddin was ‘born.’ This site of memory and local pride resembles the shattered architecture of war-torn cities and fallen skyscrapers—all guts and debris. But with Maddin’s help Winnipeg survives urban change, urban trauma. One leaves the film with the hope that Winnipeg really is a dreamscape, a cinematic vision as beautiful as the one seen from the windows of a train to nowhere.

Assarat’s Wonderful Town (2007) takes place in the Southern Thai town of Takua Pa. The Bangkok architect Ton (Supphasit Kansen) arrives at the sleepy coastal resort to work on the construction of a new hotel complex. At a hotel in town, he meets Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn), its owner. As she raises her nephew and cares for the family business, Ton explores the town—its stillness, its abandoned beach houses. Without insisting too much, Assarat gradually exposes a community ravaged by the tsunami of 2004.

In careful, static compositions, the film lingers on marginal spaces—a stairwell, a rooftop, a clothesline, distant mountains. In this empty city nothing seems to move except the teenage motorcyclists who ride endlessly around the town’s perimeter. Ton and Na are drawn to each other, and their affair eventually provokes Takua Pa’s bored young men, including Na’s brother, to attack the outsider. Though Assarat keeps a distance from the beaches, he includes one long shot of ocean waves swelling and subsiding in a regular rhythmic pattern. Otherwise, the water remains an unspoken off-screen menace, and like Na, the viewer is ‘trapped,’ for the duration of the film, between the ocean and the mountains.

Even Gangsters Cry

February 11, 2008

If 2007 produced an epic biopic of New York drug lord Frank Lucas, is 2008 the year of sensitive European men on a rampage? Doesn’t violence work better when films coach us into the gun-toting hero’s predicament? When close friends and dear ones have been wronged? Lebanese-Swedish director Josef Fares and Turkish-German director Özgür Yildirim explore male violence against the backdrop of European multiculturalism and competing notions of loyalty.

In Leo, Fares (known for Jalla! Jalla! in 2000) traces an average Swedish man’s descent into madness. After celebrating his 30th birthday with friends and family, Leo (Leonard Terfelt) and his girlfriend Amanda (Sara Edberg) are attacked by two Eastern European thugs. With a gun forced into his mouth, Leo looks on helplessly as Amanda is shot in the stomach. She dies, and Leo’s friends Josef (played by Fares himself) and Shahab (Shahab Salehi) must help him grieve. In one scene all three break down in the Swedish countryside-unable to cope. The handheld camera both captures a dark realism in and around Stockholm and underscores the rawness of Leo’s rage. Leo begins to have fantasies of revenge and enlists his friends in a plot to kill his girlfriend’s murderers. But the price for his own bloodlust, is the loss of Josef, and the film ends on a moralizing note of self-sacrifice as Leo walks into his own death—shot by the very man who killed his girlfriend.

Chiko, Yildirim’s ambitious first feature, is set in Hamburg, where the Turkish-German Isa (Denis Moschitto) and his elective ‘bro’ Tibet (Volkan Özcan) dream of making it big in the drug scene—with the honorable secondary goal of buying a kidney for Tibet’s ailing mother. Isa, who goes by the street name ‘Chiko,’ lives by the motto: “If you want respect, you can’t show respect to anyone else.” He has the audacity and charisma that Tibet, a former addict, lacks and manages to work his way into the confidence of the local German drug boss Brownie (Moritz Bleibtreu). When Tibet, concerned with his mother’s health, tries to sell Brownie’s product on the street, Brownie drills a nail into his foot. Isa, who has, in the meantime, fallen for the prostitute Meryam (played by hip-hop artist and Ph.D. candidate Reyhan Sahin, “Crazy Bitch Ray”), must confront the gulf between his own ambitions and his loyalty to Tibet. It is this conflict that drives the film.

If Fares’s film unravels with its central character, Chiko sustains the complexity of its character constellation. Denis Moschitto, known for comedies like Schule (2000) and Kebab Connection (2005) displays an unexpected range. In one scene he explodes—a brutal force unleashed on those who would double-cross him. In the next he is small and vulnerable—unable to pull the trigger on the man who harmed his best friend. At one moment he kisses Meryam in silence—reclaiming her from her profession. Later, when his high life is falling apart, he slaps her like the ‘Turkish man’ he promised never to become. Özcan’s Tibet becomes increasingly depressed and begins using again. He attempts to kill Brownie—as much out of jealousy as out of revenge. When Brownie’s men attack Tibet’s mother—in one of the film’s most violent scenes—Isa can no longer disregard the primacy of his bond with Tibet.

If Fares’s Leo meets his end excessively, in a cross-like pose, Isa’s death is inseparable from love. He returns to Tibet at the Muslim community center where Tibet is hiding. The men look at each other, crying. Isa embraces Tibet, who, like Brutus, stabs his Caesar. At the moment when ‘Isa’ relinquishes ‘Chiko,’ reconciliation is too late. Tibet is left screaming and crying over the body of his bleeding friend. And it is not too much.

As the first non-Fatih Akin film produced by Akin’s production company, Corazón, Chiko achieves a rare quality in German cinema: a story that transcends a purely national idiom. Its themes—while in some ways adapted for specifically German histories of migration and integration—are universal. Like Akin’s work, the film looks outward beyond same-language distribution networks. Its clichés—there are a few—function more to unite the film with international cinema than to produce a homegrown imitation. If the film does not play abroad, it should at least open some doors for Yildirim to follow further in Akin’s footsteps.

Heavy Days, Wild Nights

February 13, 2008

For those who do not do it, attending a major film festival sounds like a holiday. Movies. Stars. Buzz. But after a week on the job, the Berlinale journalists become sluggish—stumbling between venues, napping in spurts, fatigued by international trauma in 60, 90, and 190-minute doses, 4 to 5 times a day. From Errol Morris’s Abu Ghraib investigation, Standard Operating Procedure (U.S.), to Döndü Kiliç’s The Other Side of Istanbul (Germany), Natalie Assouline’s Shahida (Israel), Eddy Moretti and Suroush Alvi’s Heavy Metal in Baghdad (U.S.), and Tanaz Eshaghian’s Be Like Others (U.S./Canada/Iran), the 2008 documentaries remind us that the world is far from perfect.

Whether questioning the state of civil rights in the Middle East or the U.S. Occupation of Iraq, these films, more effectively than daily news media, draw attention to the people obscured by regimes and political machinery. They allow the voiceless to speak and festivalgoers to listen and, more importantly, to see. More than any other film in the festival, Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army (2007)—a fiction film based on Japan’s radical student movement of the 1970s—incites reflection on the self-destructiveness of political violence. The film’s three-part structure moves from a documentary-like exposition to a Red Army training camp to a stakeout at the Asama Mountain Lodge in February of 1972. In over three hours, the film follows the gradual breakdown of communist idealism.

Unlike the recent spate of German RAF (Red Army Faction) films, which tend to idealize terrorism and celebrate the cult of extreme civil disobedience (Baader, for example), United Red Army keeps a distance from its characters. No one figure dominates the narrative, and Wakamatsu is careful to limit close-ups, individual plotlines, and other tricks of character identification. Instead he favors washed-out cinematography, long shots, and repetition. In the film’s second act, the Army trainees are holed up together in makeshift shelters in the mountains. Cut off from any real action, they turn on each other. The communist self-critique becomes a death sentence as one after the other is forced to endure humiliation, beatings, and starvation. These ritual killings become ever more brutal—a woman beating herself in the face, a man pummeled by his own brothers—as the film proceeds.

Wakamatsu’s aesthetic of detachment on one hand inures the viewer to the lives of individual figures and, on the other, exposes the senselessness of their deaths. But at no moment is the film exploitative. Rather, it is as if Wakamatsu, a friend of Japan’s student movement, is completing his own self-critique—a filmic one.

Not every day at the festival includes the relief of a good comedy. Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky received enthusiastic applause from the press as much for its strong screenplay and indefatigably cheery lead Poppy (played by Sally Hawkins) as for its placement in the mid-festival line-up.

If the days are filled with human drama, the nights provide countless diversions: parties, receptions, and word-of-mouth invitations. Last night I found myself at promotional events for Taiwanese Cinema and Location Bosnia. But perhaps the most enjoyable evening was a ‘trailer’ party for first-time director Tarek Ehlail’s Chaostage, about Germany’s punk scene. After watching the trailer twice at top volume amid Berlin’s mohawked, pierced, and tattooed elite, I felt rejuvenated, ready for another day on the job.

A Time to Mourn

February 15, 2008

Andrzej Wajda and Lance Hammer are at opposite ends of the Berlinale spectrum. One is the Polish master, veteran of a fifty-year career that began with Eastern European New Wave classics such as Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958). The other is a graduate of the 2004 Berlinale Talent Campus, the festival’s development program for gifted young film professionals. If the competition for the prestigious Golden Bear Award includes the work of established filmmakers and Berlinale alumni Yoji Yamada, Amos Kollek, Errol Morris, and Wang Xiaoshuai, festival director Dieter Kosslick and his team are always careful to reserve a few spots for truly fresh faces.

If Wajda’s historical drama (screened out of competition) takes on one of the most controversial events in Poland’s World War II history—the 1940 murder of Polish officers by the Soviet Army in the woods of Katyn—Hammer’s Ballast is a more modest portrait of the lives affected by one man´s suicide in an economically depressed region of the Mississippi Delta.

There is nothing modest in Wajda´s mission to reclaim Polish history for a free Poland just at the moment when the country has attained membership in the European Union and when its border with Germany has been opened. The film portrays the Katyn massacre from the perspective of those left behind. During the war, the Germans blamed the Soviets for the deaths while after the war, the Soviet Occupiers not only accused the Germans of the war crime but also shifted the date by one year. The film reinvents the past in ways that serve the present—much like German cinema of the Holocaust. Rather than accepting repression, silence, and intimidation, the film indulges in fantasies of resistance—a strain of idealism that would survive two dictatorships. By unearthing the bones of the dead and their possible stories, Wajda attempts to speak up—60 years too late—for those who did not, could not, would not.

Ballast will not revolutionize the way Americans see themselves. Rather its mourning is quiet, restrained—focused on three individuals who could be anywhere. As if taking a lesson from Germany´s ´Berlin School,´ the film provides only minimal clues to the death of Darius. His identical twin brother survives as do the son he barely knew and the woman he left long ago. The cast of non-actors barely speaks. Lawrence (Michael J. Smith, Jr.) tries to kill himself, but then develops a relationship with his nephew James (JimMyron Ross), an occasional drug user caught up in the wrong crowd. James´s mother Marlee (Tarra Riggs) struggles to provide for her son and when left with Darius´s house, adjacent to that of Lawrence, the three form a makeshift family. Lol Crawley`s cinematography (already awarded at Sundance) emphasizes the blues and grays of rural flatlands and desolate highways—places of placelessness where lives have nowhere to go. The story pieces itself together and ends without clear resolution—just a vague sense of hope.

In seeing these films on the same day, I am reminded of the role of a good festival: to pay homage to the greats while discovering new talent. If Ballast is any indication of the Berlinale´s commitment to young cinema, we needn´t mourn the festival´s glory days just yet. In a year of uninspiring entries, excellence stands out. Perhaps one day it will be Hammer, whose well-tested oeuvre guarantees him a spot on the roster.