Talent Press 2019 – Half of Berlinale
Muses of Disobedience
By Andrea Guzmán
Phantoms Of Cinema Past
By Devika Girish
Confinements of Perspective
By Hugo Emmerzael
Lord of the Flies Redux: Alejandro Landes’ MONOS
By Leonardo Goi
Intimate Dialogues at Berlinale Talents
By Narjes Torchani
Vignettes of the Great Indian Romantic Hypocrisy
By Poulomi Das
Alibis
By Victor Guimarães
Of Fathers and their Sons
By Wilfred Okiche
Muses of Disobedience
By Andrea Guzmán
Delphine Seyrig may be best known as a Nouvelle Vague acting icon or for her signature role as the subversive housewife-sex worker Jeanne Dielman. Nevertheless, Seyrig was a directress herself, becoming one of the first political video activists from her time through the collaborative work with her friend and one-time teacher, the pioneer feminist documentarian Carole Roussopoulos. This powerful and yet untold story makes DELPHINE ET CAROLE, INSOUMUSES, premiering in the Forum section of this year’s festival, one of the must-sees at the 69th Berlinale.
By exploring the life and work of this creative pair, the young directress Callisto McNulty – granddaughter of Carole Roussopoulos – addresses the feminist movement of the 70s, female collaboration and political possibilities of newly accessible media. Delphine and Carol embraced domestic video techniques as a way of political and creative emancipation; they claimed that women must not just be represented in cinema but take cameras in their own hands. They founded the video collective Les Insoumuses (which means “insoumise” muses) and filmed funny, sharp documentaries that portrayed their generation from a feminist perspective. They also started the Simone de Beauvoir audiovisual centre, archive of feminist media production. They became a pair of true punk legends by traveling through Europe and projecting their material in streets and little local bars.
McNulty avoids heavy rhetoric to explain the context of this historical movement and explores it with a great sense of humour that pays tribute to the films of her grandmother and Seyrig. Here is original footage from The Insoumuses capturing historic movements such as women’s liberation, LGBT protests, discussions about sex work and abortion, and the Black Panthers. Additionally, there is precious footage of radical women of the era: a young Chantal Akerman, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, Angela Davis and Valerie Solanas. The film presents a generous archival work that integrates great moments from national television and film history, into loving humorous storytelling about a rebellious friendship and the subversive possibilities of self-produced media and art.
Phantoms Of Cinema Past
By Devika Girish
“There’s no space for liberty,” says filmmaker Suhaib Gasmelbari about the state of contemporary Sudanese cinema, as we chat over a cup of coffee on the fifth day of the Berlinale. “There’s a just a phantom of liberty. I want to make films in a country where the minister knows I hate him, but he still can’t stop me.”
It is an unfortunate reality that is illustrated over and over again in Gasmelbari’s debut feature, TALKING ABOUT TREES, which screens in Panorama Dokumente. A poignant tribute to the resilience of cinephilia, the documentary chronicles the efforts of a group of retired Sudanese filmmakers – Ibrahim Shaddad, Manar Al-Hilo, Suleiman Mohamed Ibrahim, and Eltayeb Mahdi – to revive a defunct cinema. In 1989, these filmmakers formed the Sudanese Film Group (SFG), an independent collective that was squashed months after its founding when a military coup established an Islamist dictatorship in Sudan. Now, three decades later, Shaddad, Al-Hilo, Ibrahim, and Mahdi continue their fight for Sudanese film culture through informal – and often mobile – public screenings. Ironically, things are not that much easier now: As the filmmakers acquire approvals and file documents, it becomes clear that the language of violent repression has been substituted by the language of censorious red tape.
Despite its historical framework (driven home forcefully in a scene where the filmmakers list all the political upheavals they have lived through, including decolonisation, three democracies, and three dictatorships), TALKING ABOUT TREES is a remarkably joyful film that revels in the movie-fuelled optimism of its protagonists. Gasmelbari was inspired to make the film after he visited one of the group’s mobile screenings. The event was beset by disasters, from car breakdowns to unsuitable weather conditions, but the stubborn dedication of Shaddad and co. impressed Gasmelbari. “I thought, I want to make a film not just about cinema, but also about this capacity to regenerate hope out of nothing.”
In many ways, TALKING ABOUT TREES is a follow-up to Gasmelbari’s doc short SUDAN’S FORGOTTEN FILMS (2018), which centred on the two men striving to preserve the country’s national film archive. Prior to the making of TALKING, Gasmelbari played a crucial role in acquiring the films of the SFG from the various basements and university archives in which they lay gathering dust. He (along with producer Marie Balducci) also helped secure a restoration deal with the Arsenal Institute of Film and Video Art. Clips from the restored films are interwoven into TALKING, providing a gorgeous illustration for its protagonists’ reference-rich banter about film craft.
By a happy coincidence, several of these films, including Shaddad’s THE HUNTING PARTY (1964) and Mahdi’s THE STATION (1989) are also playing in the Berlinale’s FORUM EXPANDED section. Gasmelbari appreciates the cross-generational poetics of unveiling TALKING ABOUT TREES to the world along with the lineage from which it arises. Honouring the work of the SFG filmmakers allows him to redress the erasure they have suffered over the years – not just from the authorities, but also from his own generation of filmmakers. “They want to appear as if they’ve come from nowhere,” he says, “so they kill their parents.”
Confinements of Perspective
By Hugo Emmerzael
Russian director Alexander Gorchilin captures the aimlessness and alienation of Russian youth, but offers a too limited perspective to lead the way himself.
At its best, ACID (KISLOTA, Russian Republic) captures what it is like to be a young man in Russia right now. It conveys the thrilling randomness of the protagonists’ lives: aimless twenty-somethings Sasha and Pete, riling against themselves, their families and society at large. Disappointingly, debut director Alexander Gorchilin fails to include the other perspectives required to contextualise the inner turmoil of these emotional young men.
He does lovingly portray Sasha (Filipp Avdeev), an aspiring musician plagued by adolescent anxieties regarding his body and sexuality. He draws inspiration from his best friend Pete (Pyotr Skvortsov), a more outgoing party animal who is always looking for ways to make life more interesting. Their intoxicated adventures through the Moscow nightlife are spiked by psychedelic drugs. ACID fittingly integrates the lucid and kaleidoscopic qualities of this substance in lavish party scenes. The sounds and visuals distort, reverberate and echo from trip to trip.
Suddenly, Sasha and Pete become aware of the faults in their own lives when their best friend Ivan (Pyotr Skvortsov) commits suicide during an acid trip gone bad. However, the way they subsequently fail to process their feelings of guilt and sorrow is illustrative for the millennial generation they grow up with. Instead of expressing them, they choose to obscure their emotions in a haze of drugs, parties and sexual encounters. In these moments of hedonistic escapism, Gorchilin most noticeably showcases his directorial skills with intense sound design, infectious music and sensual cinematography.
It is the outside world Sasha and Pete try to escape from that Gorchilin is unable to portray in an effective manner. A lot of the plot of ACID has to do with the family quarrels of Sasha and Pete. These are simplistic at best, and problematic at worst. The boys are allowed a deep interiority, while their mothers, girlfriends and lovers are confined to the role of one-dimensional nags. Authoritative institutions like the state and church are depicted with a similar bluntness.
This is a shame, because Gorchilin touches upon poignant issues and themes that should be universal. ACID tries to depict the sensation of a generation overwhelmed by contrasts, possibilities and expectations. This resonates especially in Russia, where this generation of millennials is the first to be born in the post-Soviet capitalist era. By commenting on the effects of this complex societal shift from the confinements of his own perspective, Gorchilin misses the opportunity to make more profound observations on behalf of his misunderstood generation.
Lord of the Flies Redux: Alejandro Landes’ MONOS
By Leonardo Goi
The teens at the centre of Alejandro Landes’ electrifying survivalist saga MONOS live in a foggy landscape suspended above the Colombian Andes. They go by aliases that echo childhood memories and action films (Smurf, Rambo, Bigfoot, Boom-Boom), though the weapons they bear are real, and their mission is no game. They are child soldiers recruited by a mysterious guerrilla group known as “The Organization,” stranded in a parentless and hyper-violent world that has abandoned them to their own fate.
MONOS, Colombian-Ecuadorian Landes’ third feature (following his 2011 PORFIRIO and 2007 documentary COCALERO) and shown in Berlinale Panorama, trails behind them as they plunge into a spiral of unspeakable violence. In a world where adult figures only appear for flickering moments, it zeroes in on a group of boys and girls as a synecdoche for humanity at large, to question the de-humanising character of war and its effect on a community untethered by rules and conventions. Its answer, on par with a novel it bears an overt allegiance to, William Golding’s “Lord of The Flies”, is a world where guerrilla warfare teems with sheer anarchy.
A dozen of barely teenage kids, the eponymous Monos spend their days patrolling the mountaintops of Northern Colombia, a cloud-shrouded landscape cinematographer Jasper Wolf renders via spell-binding vistas, working through widescreens that capture the Andes in all their belittling immensity. Tutored by a harsh older militant by the name of Mensajero (Wilson Salazar), they are killing machines tasked with looking after an American captive nicknamed Doctora (Julianne Nicholson) and a milk cow by the sobriquet of Shakira. But even Mensajero only shows up sporadically, and the grown-ups from The Organization remain distant presences, their muffled voices croaking from a radio and walkie-talkies. Left to their own devices, the stunted adolescents seesaw between training sessions that echo the raw physicality of Claire Denis’s BEAU TRAVAIL – bodies grinding against one another in topless war dances – and more intimate exchanges, where the unforgiving environment makes room for sporadic intramural effusions.
A curious gender fluidity permeates the community; part of the pleasure in watching MONOS is to see the kids inhabit a post-apocalyptic world were gender roles seem to have relinquished – if only momentarily – their sway. “Here’s to my father who called me a whore,” shouts Perro (Paul Cubides), wielding an assault rifle while sporting a mini-skirt and stockings. It is not the only instance of cross dressing, nor the only moment when same-sex tensions within the group become explicit. But if MONOS’ preamble seems to conjure a post-binary utopia, as the group eventually leaves the mountains to settle in the Colombian jungle, breaking down in the face of a fratricidal conflict, the gender syncretism falls apart too.
Wars do not quite simply claim lives, they also fashion subjectivities that are necessary for their continuation. What MONOS so accurately understands is that a conflict as long and complex as the one Colombia just ended with the FARC guerrillas – for which Landes’ work serves as an allegory – pivoted on the construction of hyper-violent and heteronormative masculinities, which the Monos come to embody to a visceral, chilling extent.
Intimate Dialogues at Berlinale Talents
By Narjes Torchani
The filmography of Argentinian director Manuel Abramovich has been quite a journey. The “Better be careful: Intimate Dialogues” session of the Berlinale, moderated by Dutch film critic Dana Linssen, focused on his cinematographic approach and the relationship he has with his protagonists during each shoot. Author of three short films and three feature-length documentaries, Manuel Abramovich has a lot to say about dialogues. The questions asked by Dana Linssen, and the director’s transparent answers, highlighted the different approaches to dialogues both on screen and off.
The first layer of dialogue that Abramovich establishes with his protagonists is to live with them, share their everyday life and “just go with the flow”. “I play with the limits of reality and I always tell my protagonists that what I show in the film is only a version of them, that it is a construction”, says the director. To him, this goes with filming them without judging them. His first short film LA REINA (2013) is about a little girl participating in a beauty contest. When he noticed that the girl is always silent and the women surrounding her (her mother, aunt and grandmother) speak a lot about her, he made the choice to film her face in close shots, with voiceovers by these women, and to divide the sound and image. “It is like the camera is in dialogue with the girl’s face”, notes Dana Linssen.
Another interesting dialogue is the one Abramovich had with Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel when he made his documentary ANOS LUZ (2017) about her film ZAMA. The challenge was that she was not used to being the protagonist and did not want to be one. Exchanging roles and shifting from one territory to another made Manuel Abramovich more aware of his protagonist’s point of view. The experience was even more challenging with the main character in SOLAR (2016), Flavio Cabobianco, who wanted to take control of the shooting and direct some scenes of the film himself. He even asked for the rushes in order to make his own edit and his own version of the documentary. During the “Intimate Dialogues” discussion, the director said that he is thinking about accepting this proposal. He nevertheless claims his role as a director and his right of having a point of view and a construction of reality in his film. The poster for SOLAR reads: “A film by Flavio Cabobianco”, but the name of the protagonist is barred and under it is the director’s name! This says it all.
Vignettes of the Great Indian Romantic Hypocrisy
By Poulomi Das
There is an inceptive sequence in Ritesh Batra’s PHOTOGRAPH that reproduces the chasm between force-feeding traditional biases and brandishing a somewhat performative modernism that cosmopolitan India invariably struggles with. The film – which has its European premiere in the 2019 Berlinale Special Gala section – opens with a telling moment. A middle-aged, upper-caste father fishes out his phone to take a photograph of a public billboard that features the face of his topper daughter – a progressive move in a country that still chooses to rear women as domestic employees. But in the contrasting next scene, his daughter, Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), out shopping with her mother and aunt, is made to stare unblinkingly at the mirror while they fuss over a “kurta” (a traditional tunic) for her. Even though there is an illusion of Miloni being able to make up her own mind over something as quotidian as her wardrobe, her family does not deem it necessary to wait for her decision – in a matter of minutes, they decide that pink suits her. Miloni’s expressionless face nods in delayed approval, crafted in such an organic way that it will resonate with Indian women who are made to look at their diminishing agency over their own body as a way of life.
PHOTOGRAPH’s predominant preoccupation – and in a way, its central conceit – is the chance meeting between two contrasting parts of Mumbai: The lower-class Muslim Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a photographer making a living by clicking tourists at the Gateway of India and Miloni, a submissive girl sheltered in an affluent yet conservative Gujarati household. It is easy to assume that Batra would mine these two misfits and treat us to the lush, gentle portrait of longing and courtship from the prism of human intimacy like he did in LUNCHBOX (2013) and OUR SOULS AT NIGHT (2017), but PHOTOGRAPH boasts of probably the oldest – and most abused – romantic template: star-crossed romance. What sets PHOTOGRAPH’s rendition apart is how it exposes its futility in the Indian context that puts societal stratification on a pedestal.
It is precisely this irony – which can feel unrewarding at times – that Batra subtly extends in PHOTOGRAPH: The abject class hierarchy in a city that romanticises its thriving multiculturality through an unusually tender rendering of a dispiriting courtship trajectory. Both Rafi and Miloni lead almost robotic lives for others, have zero agency over their aspirations, and yet Batra takes his time to gently reveal that their lives are not designed to find solace in each other. At one point, Rafi’s roommate echoes this thread when he doubts that Miloni is really interested in him, “She is fair, urban, way above your league; who will believe that she chose to be with you?” Batra’s interpretation of the quintessential doomed lovers template plays out in an intriguing non-linear and slow burn approach that culminates in a flashback ending that is as audacious as it is critical of the expected mainstream narrative. Like PHOTOGRAPH convincingly posits, in India, star-crossed romance is a victim of class segregation, never an outcome of agency.
Alibis
By Victor Guimarães
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s first feature-length essay film MOTHER, I AM SUFFOCATING. THIS IS MY LAST FILM ABOUT YOU (Lesotho/Qatar), part of this year’s Berlinale Forum, creates a space of intimacy for the viewer. The narrator’s voice, soft and rough, fuelled by a confessional sound design, constructs a suffering protagonist struggling to escape from painful attachments. While we see black and white, slow-motion highly stylized depictions of poverty and sorrow in Lesotho – not so different from the esthetics of Sebastião Salgado’s photography – the muttering speech reinforces the desperation of someone trying to get away and begin a new life somewhere else.
The monologue is addressed to a mother figure, but gradually we understand that it is a metaphor for Lesotho or Africa in general. Allegorical images such as a woman carrying a cross or an angel walking down the streets of the country share space with animalistic depictions of the inhabitants, such as a man emulating sex movements in a crowded street or a bunch of people slaughtering a sheep and fighting for its pieces. The protagonist constantly tries to distance themselves from this infernal imagery, and we soon learn that the narrator now lives in Berlin, where fortunately, for them, there are only a few occasional traces of the motherland.
In the entire film, there is not a single image that problematises the depiction of Africa as a land dominated by human beasts and fated to ruin – exactly as in all those white fantasies that constitute the crux of the colonial project, from the so-called African corpus of the Lumières to Hollywood fairy tales of racial reconciliation. Although it was directed by an African filmmaker, it is difficult to imagine a more hardcore neocolonialist plot: a European multicultural city as a paradisiac place of salvation for a desperate person that has succeeded in escaping from African hell. At the same time, it is virtually impossible not to identify with the authentic suffering of the protagonist. The authenticity of the subjective speech – convincingly constructed through a formal arsenal of self-representation, reinforced personal pronouns, intimate sound design – creates an almost mandatory identification with the poetic persona, which eventually becomes a rhetorical alibi against every possible criticism towards the film’s ideological perspective.
The problems in this work recall the words of the great Brazilian art critic Gilda de Mello e Souza: “The intention of the creator is precarious in the face of the uncontrollable autonomy of forms”. Building a contemporary neocolonialist fantasy of Berlin as a welcoming paradise for all the misfits of the world is probably not the intention of Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. But we are dealing with forms, not with ideas. And especially when we think of where it is being shown for the first time, it is hard to think of a more suitable film to consensually please well-intentioned audiences, whom we can imagine leaving the theatre with tears of empathy in their eyes, while surreptitiously reassuring the myth of European supremacy.
Of Fathers and their Sons
By Wilfred Okiche
In THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND, the stirring directorial debut by British-Nigerian actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, an interesting moment arrives in the final quarter when the hero, William Kamkwamba (Maxwell Chimba) learns to stand up to his father, the representation of an all-present figure of authority in his life.
The farming dependent Malawian village of Wimbe in which William was born and raised is suffering through a heavy famine period occasioned by climatic change circa 2001. William believes he has the crude scientific solution to the problem. He just needs total cooperation from his father Trywell, played with a sneaking propensity to overact by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who has resisted at every turn to help the boy. It is at that moment that the dynamic in their relationship shifts and Trywell, an impoverished farmer hanging on to crude, ancient ideas, begins to see that perhaps it is time to let the old ways die.
This complex and constantly evolving relationship between fathers and sons is a strong thematic concern of THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND, the astonishing real-life story of William Kamkwamba, the teenager who through a combination of curiosity and ingenuity was able to solve an acute-on-chronic problem. Ejiofor adapts the story from Kamkwamba’s 2009 autobiography of the same title – written together with Bryan Mealer – and tells a pretty conventional, but no less rousing story that celebrates the capacity of the human spirit to triumph against the odds.
Produced by Andrea Calderwood and Gail Egan, who worked with Ejiofor on the forgettable HALF OF A YELLOW SUN, another adaptation set in Africa, THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND is a surprisingly confident debut by Ejiofor, one that places a young boy at the centre, but does not fall into the overly sentimental trap that usually lies in wait for filmmakers telling these kinds of stories. Ejiofor’s direction manages to rise above this treacly drenched safety zone, opening up to accommodate darker themes such as the Malawi government’s role in the food crisis of the early 2000s and the valid connection between desperation and crime. THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND on a deeper level considers the age long tensions of conservatism versus the modern as well as much more contemporary issues of environmental sustainability.
The cast is led by newcomer Chimba, who emerges as an engaging wide-eyed presence, able to capture both his character’s innocence and increasing awareness of his place in the world. The film was shot in the same village as the real-life events, with characters switching from English to the local Chichewa dialect. Dick Pope’s sweeping, glossy cinematography comprising wide open takes of dusty earth and clear skies adds layers of authenticity to the material. The desolation in Wimbe is conveyed clearly in crisp images of barren lands and fallen trees but not at a level that fetishizes the plight of the people. Ejiofor does not exactly flip the script in terms of how these stories are told but if THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND has anything distinct going for it, it is the layers of earnestness and poignancy that both cast and crew infuse into the story.