Talent Press 2019 – First Texts

Pedro Lemebel, the Mare of the Apocalypse
By Andrea Guzmán
Detours in the Steppe
By Devika Girish
Exhuming the Past
By Hugo Emmerzael
Shooting the Mafia, Out of Focus
By Leonardo Goi
The Unbearable Intimacy of Being
By Narjes Torchani
Funeral for a Friendship
By Poulomi Das
Sympathy for Failure
By Victor Guimarães
Sex and the City: Tamer Jandali’s EASY LOVE
by Wilfred Okiche

Pedro Lemebel, the Mare of the Apocalypse
By Andrea Guzmán

Although he is established as one of the best-known Latin American writers, Pedro Lemebel was a provocative Chilean countercultural icon that caused a lot of trouble and discomfort in his own society. Wild sharp-tongued poet, performer and homosexual activist during a very long dictatorship, Pedro Lemebel was not even well received in the progressive left-wing circles that fought against Pinochet. So he embraced the idea of being an outsider as his great value and transformed his own marginality into a battle cry. LEMEBEL, a loving documentary made by his close friend and collaborator Joanna Reposi Garibaldi, tells the story of this great icon of Latin American subculture from his 1980s start as a street performer with the group “The Mares of the Apocalypse” to his death from cancer in 2015. The feature was intimately and patiently filmed for 12 years but its premiere in Berlinale Panorama comes with a very powerful urgency, at a time when the poet’s work is starting to be banned from being read in a lot of Chilean schools.

Though he is more famous internationally for his writing, with books such as “My Tender Matador” or “Crazy Desire,” LEMEBEL explores another side of this artist, focusing on his disruptive, vanguardist career as a performance artist. Striking in the 80s in Chile, Lemebel problematised the body as a political weapon, taking the physical violence over it as his material, thus transforming the body itself into an artistic living essay. The film accompanies that spirit of transformation in form and content, presenting itself as an intense experimental essay-documentary that mixes formats, historical background, and philosophical ideas. A video collage that includes slides made by the director through the years, archival and new footage, many years worth of very intimate conversations with Lemebel, and street performances made especially for the film. Its great value is not just as a very loving, ethereal presentation of a poetic character but ultimately as a quietly painful portrait of Chilean society.

Detours in the Steppe
By Devika Girish

In the haunting opening sequence of Wang Quan’an’s ÖNDÖG, a car stumbles upon a dead woman in the heart of the Mongolian steppe, its headlights eerily illuminating her naked body. The police are summoned, and they task a young, rookie officer with guarding the scene until they get a larger vehicle to transport the corpse. A local, rifle-bearing herdswoman named “Dinosaur” – the only inhabitant in a 100-kilometre radius – is ordered to keep the boy company and protect him from the wolves as he waits.

It’s a setup that has all the makings of a classic murder-mystery, but it turns out to be the first of the many narrative misdirections Quan’an deploys throughout his elliptical, ethereal seventh feature that is part of the Berlinale Competition. The murder is a digression, resolved off screen midway through the film; instead, Quan’an’s real focus is Dinosaur, and her quiet, unusually free-willed existence in the middle of nowhere. The camera follows her as she tends to some errands at her yurt before returning to the young officer; and it stays with her as she snuggles with the boy in front of a fire, bantering and then having tender sex with him.

ÖNDÖG indulges in several detours like this one. Quan’an sets up dramatic premises – a possible love triangle, a betrayal – only to let them evaporate into the vast horizons of the setting, returning repeatedly to the meat (pun intended) of the film: the fleshly details of Dinosaur’s everyday life. One extended sequence follows her and her friend – in almost real-time – as they slaughter a sheep; in another, the pair painstakingly helps a cow deliver a calf.

Framed against the gorgeous expanse of the steppe, captured by cinematographer Aymerick Pilarski in extreme, saturated wide shots, these birthings and killings seem to take on a quasi-mythical quality, imbuing the film with a cosmic, rather than narrative, logic. But underneath all this lush imagery and grandiose symbolism, ÖNDÖG also emerges as a surprisingly simple and powerful story of female agency. Dinosaur, played with revelatory grit by non-professional Dulamjav Enkhtaivan, is direct with her desires and steadfast with her refusals. At the end of the film, Dinosaur subverts societal (and narrative) conventions to make her own, pragmatic choice – and it’s a picture of joy.

Exhuming the Past
By Hugo Emmerzael

As a student of Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov, Alexander Zolotukhin employs some of his mentor’s strategies in this harrowing, essayistic and critical debut about the worth of the Russian youth, running in Berlinale Forum.

While being immersed in the harrowing trench warfare of WWI, A RUSSIAN YOUTH (MALCHIK RUSSKIY, Russian Republic) also tries to focus on moments of playful tenderness on the front: young soldiers teasingly tickling each other, enjoying a windy drive on the back of a truck or some musical improvisations on the accordion. But ultimately, protagonist private Aleksei (Vladimir Korolev) is still one in the mould of Soviet war classics IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (IVANOVO DETSTVO, Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR) and COME AND SEE (IDI I SMOTRI, Elem Klimov, USSR). Like the tormented kids from these cinematic predecessors, young Aleksei also will be swallowed whole by the fog of war. What is different here is that he is literally shrouded in a fog of blindness.

A vicious German gas attack renders Aleksei permanently blind. Debuting director Alexander Zolotukhin reflects on this sensory deprivation by adding extra sonic layers. The editing by Tatyana Kuzmicheva crosscuts the fiction film with contemporary documentary footage of orchestra rehearsals for compositions of influential Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Musically commenting on the historical drama, the orchestra seems to take on the role of a Greek chorus, with the conductor as their own contemporary army commandant, guiding them through these notoriously challenging pieces.

This juxtaposition between fiction and documentary can disrupt the narrative flow of A RUSSIAN YOUTH, but it’s exactly this rupture of the historic by the contemporary that also showcases Zolotukhin’s biggest cinematic inspiration. The young director (born in 1988) has been supported by the Example of Intonation Fund, founded by Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov, who is credited here as a creative producer. In films like RUSSIAN ARK (RUSSKIY KOVCHEG, 2002) and FRANCOFONIA (2015), Sokurov also merged the historic with the contemporary to construct an essayistic style of cinema that reflects on Russia’s cultural and political legacy. “What is more important, culture or life?” he asked in a 2015 interview with The New York Times. “Or culture, life and the state? For what should we pay with our lives?”

This question also lies at the heart of A RUSSIAN YOUTH. For what exactly does the blindsighted Aleksei risk his life on the front? Unlike Tarkovsky, Klimov and Sokurov, Zolotukhin is generations removed from the Great Wars that hung like a curse over the former Soviet Union. His is the first generation raised in the new Russian republic of president-elects Yeltsin and Putin. By exhuming the traumatic events that were part of Soviet DNA, Zolotukhin raises Sokurov’s questions again, but for a new iteration of a Russian youth. Their grand narrative is obscured, their enemy not easily identifiable. Yet they are still at war, or at risk. Is this what all the Russian youth have paid their lives for?

Shooting the Mafia, Out of Focus
By Leonardo Goi

Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia began photographing Mafia murders on her home turf in the 1970s. Nearly fifty years later, she becomes the subject of Kim Longinotto’s Berlinale Panorama Dokumente entry, SHOOTING THE MAFIA. A largely engrossing portrait of a woman who confronted the Sicilian mob in a way few others dared to, Longinotto’s docu-biopic works best when it pivots on the ethical dilemmas surrounding how, and whether, acts of unspeakable violence should ever be portrayed. Where it stalls a little is when it focuses away from Battaglia’s own introspections, to embark on a far drier overview of Italy’s fight against the Mafia through the decades.

To be sure, Longinotto’s found a most fascinating subject. A preternaturally charismatic eighty-something with a rusty, smoker’s voice, Battaglia is graced with a magnetic stage presence that dons her musings a hypnotic aura. SHOOTING THE MAFIA is a genesis story, and Battaglia’s is one about and against a male-dominated industry that turns out to be just as cancerous as Sicily’s organised crime. Pitted against a deeply patriarchal society that sought to stunt her freedom, Battaglia looked to photography as escapism, and by the time Longinotto finally turns to the start of her protagonist’s career – a whopping 25 minutes into her documentary – SHOOTING THE MAFIA zeroes in on the contrasts between Battaglia’s humanist eye and the glamourized coverage the Sicilian mob had received from foreign media outlets.

It is here, in its excursion into the ethics of her photography, that Longinotto’s documentary offers some of its best material. Unmistakably aware of the moral concerns inherent to her work, there are moments when Battaglia reminisces about the photos she never took as “the ones that hurt the most.” Seesawing between a need to document the Mafia’s barbarities and a reticence to expose them in all their horror, Battaglia’s gruesome black and white portraits of corpses and crime scenes encapsulate the glance of a photographer at once fascinated and perturbed by her subjects. Indeed, there are moments when Battaglia’s reticence teems with awe for the bosses she photographed inside courts, “my hands shaking not out of fear, but for the emotion” of seeing Italy’s most wanted men stare at her camera with an insouciant smile.

Regretfully, Battaglia’s psychological introspection is a terrain Longinotto abandons way too soon. By its mid-point, SHOOTING THE MAFIA loses its biographical focus to embark on a far larger discussion of the impact of the Sicilian mob on the country’s development. The pivotal junctures of Italy’s battle against Cosa Nostra are all diligently flushed out (the barbaric assassinations of judges Falcone and Borsellino; the capture of bosses Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano), but the effect is to watch an engaging biography become a history lesson. As compelling a chapter in Italy’s recent history this may be, SHOOTING THE MAFIA’s second half is far less intimate and engrossing than the biopic the first had patched together.

The Unbearable Intimacy of Being
By Narjes Torchani

The disappearance of a father is like an apocalypse. You walk through a new life, unknown, and your old life is gone forever. The hell of grief has somehow also been a heaven for the Danish-Palestinian director Omar Shargawi, who said that at the moment of his father’s death, he forgave him for everything. Starting from this moment, which occurs in the last part of his documentary WESTERN ARABS, the camera becomes steadier. Before this, the camera movement reflects the inner confusion of the director’s mind, which he uses to express his feelings. Transparency doesn’t seem to scare him, although after watching his film, screening in the Panorama documentary section of the Berlinale, one can’t help but acknowledge his courage in exposing his personal and family life in its darkest corners, as well as the delicacy of the editing that formulates an intimate and poetic narration through a deconstructed structure.

Omar’s father is at the centre of the film. He is the element that chains the director to his Palestinian origins, indirectly causing him to live the life of a wanderer, constantly looking for himself. One of the first subjects that the director talks about is the racism he faced as a kid in Denmark. Still, his main trauma comes from the violent environment he grew up in, caused by this same father and demonstrated through fragmented images of family gatherings and footage from the director’s past films. They mostly end in a violent fight where the camera falls on the floor. These rough images are punctuated by long monologues that Omar Shargawi recites in his car, calmly facing a steady camera. He thus creates and opposes two atmospheres that describe how he sees himself from the outside, and how he really feels inside.

WESTERN ARABS’s director insists that we inherit our ancestor’s traumas. This is expressed through his focus on his father’s constant denial and stubbornness towards his confessions. When his father passes away, the monologues and the family images are no longer opposed. The chaotic structure of the film is meant to reflect a personal alienation and points to the awfulness of our contemporary world, but does Omar find peace? The answer is outside the monologues and the frame of the movie, but filmmaking is wonderfully used by the director as a cathartic process.

Funeral for a Friendship
By Poulomi Das

There is a scene late into Dan Salitt’s Berlinale Forum entry FOURTEEN (USA) where the film’s lead, Mara (Tallie Medel), recounts a bedtime story to her daughter, familiarising her with the origin story of her friendship with Jo (Norma Kuhling). Beyond its innate charm, the scene is particularly revealing in how it tenders a clue for Mara’s devoted – even at the cost of almost being self-destructive – obligation to Jo during the prime of their friendship, a few years ago.

It is as if FOURTEEN insists that the audience contemplate on two threads of a similar thought: Is it possible to be emancipated in an intense friendship? And, is it selfish for someone to prioritise self-preservation over a friend’s needs? Mara would have been grappling with these questions sooner had she not been emotionally babysitting Jo (Norma Kuhling), her volatile and self-absorbed best friend for over a decade. Mara’s functional life – she is financially secure, good at her job, and exudes warmth – exists to mainly dilute the dysfunctionality crowding Jo’s days.

Perhaps that is why the film’s most tender moment sneakily arrives in one of its final scenes. At 12:40 am on an uneventful night, Jo lands up outside Mara’s door after flaking out on her hours ago. Even as Jo breaks down in front of Mara, demanding affection, she recognises Mara’s right to preserve herself in what seems like the first time during their friendship. “Should you be drinking this beer?” she asks her when Mara casually announces her pregnancy minutes after lashing out at Jo’s selfishness – aware that Jo’s propensity to become the centre of attention might reduce her life-altering announcement to a footnote. But in that affecting exchange, Jo infuses her concern with a sentimentality that allows Mara the luxury of being the friend who is cared for instead of being the one who perennially does the caring.

Returning to filmmaking after seven years, FOURTEEN’s director, writer, and editor, Salitt (THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT, 2012) is preoccupied with painting a universal portrait of an intimate although emotionally unbalanced friendship and its aftermath. In fact, by taking an elliptical approach to uncovering the penultimate years of friendship between these two women, he unspools the collateral casualty of time: the disintegration of desire to invest yourself in a friendship.

For the most part, FOURTEEN achieves in making the audience sense – and connect with – the distance creeping up between Mara and Jo, riding on the back of existentialist writing, a curious gaze that strives to understand female friendships instead of defining them, and two extraordinary lead performances that retain their world-weariness. The narrative’s unpredictable jumps while unfolding time – its pace increases in the latter half – wears the changes in Mara’s life on its sleeves.

Although by the end, it is impossible to not question the lack of physical intimacy between Mara and Jo in FOURTEEN (they make physical contact just once during the film’s runtime). Even if the idea was to mine its absence to imply that Mara and Jo’s friendship was long over before its death became apparent, the simmering hesitation and tension in their bond might have benefitted from stunted physical awkwardness. Yet it gains from its ability to fully realise the arc of Mara’s emancipation by playing it out in a pace that frustratingly resembles quotidian life: It takes Mara 10 years to discern that it’s impossible to be there for anyone else if you aren’t there for yourself first.

Sympathy for Failure
By Victor Guimarães

From the credits, the dispositif of Jean Gabriel Périot’s OUR DEFEATS (NOS DÉFAITES, France) is explicit: in Ivry-sur-Seine, the suburbs of Paris, exactly fifty years after May ‘68, a group of high school students re-stage fragments of some of the greatest films of so-called militant cinema, made mainly in France in collaborations between filmmakers and workers around that mythical month. The dialogues between strikers in gems like LA REPRISE DU TRAVAIL AUX USINES WONDER (1968) encounter the contemporary bodies of these teenagers, and the complexities of historical distance are felt through their acting.

But unfortunately, the re-enactments are not allowed to shine through their own materiality. Initially, there is an interplay between re-staging and behind-the-scenes footage, but eventually the film shifts to mostly interviews with the students. The filmmaker poses questions that start as a commentary on the remake, but soon begin to seem like a poorly formulated sociological inquiry: What is politics to you? What is a revolution? In ten minutes, we already know that most of them – with conveniently highlighted exceptions – don’t seem to relate with such big leftist words. But the film insists on exploiting the constraining silences, the discursive inability, and ultimately, their apolitical personality, always with a cynical hint to the viewer, as if suggesting: “See? It’s all about the decay of the May ‘68 ideals”. What the film seems to neglect is that if Chris Marker or Bruno Muel posed the same questions to the workers at the Peugeot factory around May ‘68, they would probably get insulted as a bunch of narcissistic ‘petit bourgeois’. Additionally, instead of confronting the students’ frustrating responses (he only does it once), the director prefers the comfort of the editing room, where he constantly reaffirms the device – even though it leads nowhere but to its own self-reinforcement.

When the title appears again, as if the film were about to end, a different date (December 2018) leads to a re-staging of a contemporary Internet video of police brutality within an occupied school. Périot interviews the same students, but now they speak energetically about their own engagement at school. What began as an epilogue (or, if we push it a little further, a self-compliment on the success of the process) is in fact a symptom: the material points out that the movie should start over, but instead of embracing failure and diving into the vivid political process they’re living, Périot decides to keep his highly conceptualized, perfect flop untouched.

When Jean Rouch made THE HUMAN PYRAMID (1961) at the Lycée Français in Abidjan, the only way to do justice, not only to those teenagers, but to the energy of the film, was to radically change its path. The failure in Rouch’s film becomes movement, desire, experience. For Périot, it is not a problem that the film spends more than an hour as a self-evident washout. Today, failure has become a trend – if not a commodity. If the dispositif is conceptually consistent enough, it is even better if it fails.

Sex and the City: Tamer Jandali’s EASY LOVE
by Wilfred Okiche

Opening the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section of this year’s Berlinale, Tamer Jandali’s feature length debut, EASY LOVE, is a hybrid documentary-fiction experimental foray that blurs the lines between fiction and reality. From the get-go, Jandali declares his agenda, prefacing EASY LOVE with the mantra “No Actors, No Scripts, No Fake Emotions”.

Jandali follows seven mostly heterosexual adult individuals navigating the limits of sexual behaviour as they constantly negotiate ideas of romantic relationships. There are no rules to the game and within the context of their individual lives, the characters meet cute, fall in love, break up with, hurt and brutalise each other.

A couple seeks to convince themselves (and the audience) of the merits of opening up their relationship to accommodate other sexual partners, a homeless man resorts to trading his body for a bed to spend the night, a young lady takes up transactional sex and clashes with her more conservative mother, and a couple engages in a same-sex relationship whilst living in a tiny apartment. All of these stories have merit of course, but Jandali appears to be under the impression that the gimmick of following his real-life subjects around for a period of months gives his project enough impetus. Because of this approach, Jandali’s film is, at its core, a semi-controlled study of contemporary urban adult living, but what makes EASY LOVE potentially more interesting, due to the slick, fly-on-the-wall camera style and “convincing” performances of the actors, is that anyone coming in with no preconceived notions is likely going to think of it as a fictionalized account of the sex and mating rituals of a cohort of privileged German adults.

Jandali’s camera is voyeuristic as it follows the characters using sharp cuts and snappy edits. The characters largely exist within the confines of the same city and the homogenous composition sometimes makes it hard to keep the stories separated. But the film’s lack of narrative urgency ensures the arcs never really overlap even though they are all united by themes of sexual frustration and unrequited romantic attraction.
These mini stories may be forward thinking and certainly attempt to push the button just a wee bit – same-sex mentions, multiple graphic sex scenes and normalisation of fetishes – but there is little that is particularly novel about them as they cover issues and themes that have all been dealt with on film comprehensively and in more interesting, diverse ways elsewhere. The British/Polish independent film, MY FRIEND THE POLISH GIRL for instance, which debuted in the Bright Future category of the International Film Festival Rotterdam last year, is more ambitious, confronting similar style and themes, but venturing into more ambiguous territories of exploitation using the camera, plus the ethical limits of documenting the lives of human subjects.

This premise might make Easy Love stand out from the pack of films screening in Perspektive Deutsches Kino, a sidebar dedicated to upcoming German filmmakers, but the entire experience would be more rewarding if EASY LOVE had anything convincingly new to add about the state of modern relationships.