Searching For Youth in Turin – and Finding Queerness

In the epoch of TikTok, streaming, bingeable series, and a general excess of cultural events, an international film festival seeking to relaunch itself should take care of its USP (unique selling point), which cannot be anything less that its history and the specific profile it may have developed. For a festival to sharpen its profile, to dare to become even more specific than before—with shrewd concessions to its local audience, of course—should be reasonable aspirations. This is why it was quite shocking for me to witness to the profusion of sequins at the Opening Ceremony of the event that began its life as the Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovani, with many emissaries of one single protagonist, Mister or Miss Hollywood (gender-fluid terms still constitute woke nominalism there), and a devoted officiant, the new festival director Giulio Base (performing on stage quite professionally indeed). I have nothing against the amusing folklore of red carpets but I don’t believe that the younger generation cares much about Hollywood – and the younger generation of cinephiles even less. I thus won’t be surprised if this exclusively Hollywoodian celebration would have come across as nostalgic, or somehow old-fashioned to them. But Base employed the right word for his opening discourse: inclusion! Yes, let’s include this minority of Hollywood fans from the old cinematic world, why not? (I say this with a smile.)

A second shock then came to soothe the first: the international feature competition that I watched in its entirety, in accordance with my FIPRESCI jury obligations, effectively celebrates the younger generations, with world and international premieres selected by a completely new group of six programmers, all of whom are between 21 and 33 years old (!). Speaking with Davide Abbatescianni and Veronica Orciari, for example, the enthusiasm was palpable, and not without an astonishing level of competence and international connections. All the unknown filmmakers on the programme seem to suggest the festival’s new status as a talent scout and launch pad into the magic world of cinema exhibition. (Here I have to smile again…)

Traditional structure for complex topics

If there is still someone out there who listens to critics—and in a last bulwark of high culture like Turin there probably is—the FIPRESCI jury has launched Chiara Fleischhacker’s Vena, and could not avoid unanimously agreeing with two other titles awarded by the collegues of the feature film competition: Wannes Deestop’s Holy Rosita and Abdelhamid Bouchnak’s The Needle (L’aiguille). The first thing that stands out with these three movies is their solid, traditional structure, linear storytelling, and naturalist representations, even if Holy Rosita plays explicitly with documentarist tropes. Should we finally disrupt the prejudices of young filmmakers necessarily breaking the rules and bringing new forms or filmic ideas? In any case, at least for Chiara Fleischhacker, it’s simply a pleasure to see how masterfully Vena is written, edited, and performed, thereby letting a broader audience—if such a thing still exists—follow the powerful story and letting the cinephiles enjoy the wonderful details.

Not a mere detail, and also not traditional, instead, is the common element of these three films, that is the specificity and difficulty of the theme: should a girl with an active addiction (Vena) or a disabled young woman (Holy Rosita) be granted guardianship of their children? How far should a state intervene in helping or separating a mother and her child? How should two parents choose (or not choose) a gender for their intersex child (The Needle)? How much importance should they give to the ruling patriarchy around them? Hard questions, which these movies have the rare ability to answer while exploring the complexity of the choices at stake and in describing the psychological dramas related to them, rather than falling into romantic dichotomies where love and the individual will always eternally triumph over rules and “the people.” Yes, we are definitely not in Hollywood (hopefully!), but in Germany, Belgium, Tunisia… The three mothers still play the role of heroine, but they are sometimes portrayed as bad Antigones, and the Creons of the stories often appear as affectionate and sympathetic. It is obvious that, for such complex explorations, a traditional form can be of some help to a movie.

Queerness and the maximalist way

I actually counted eight films with pregnancy as a central theme out of the sixteen in the competition: is this a stronger element, rather than the filmic form, to use as a means of speaking to the newest generation? Parenthood is certainly a door to adulthood, and of a concrete dialogue with society, in part because a child is necessarily also a child of the society. But more than the responsibility of taking decisions in life and the classical coming-of-age genre, the secret common thread of these films is the emergence of ambivalent positions, or the necessity of imaginative compromises. In a word: the common thread is queerness. I mean that literally but also as an attitude: queerness as state of mind. Its physical embodiment as a scandal in The Needle is therefore probably the paradigmatic, almost didactic model of such, thanks also to the assumed stylistic minimalism of the film. Nevertheless, if the form would follow content, would queerness find good expression through minimalism and its sharper formal choices?

In fact, the Turin feature film competition has not been stingy with maximalist movies. Maximalist in its dramaturgy, Esteban Arango & River Gallo’s Ponyboi tries to approach the rare case of intersex persons, but with a flood of clichés that turn maximalism into redundancy. Jacøb Moller’s Madame Ida is maximalist in the psychological characterisation of the three main protagonists, who are able to conceal incredible layers, through which the film also accumulates non-credible coup-de-scènes. The brilliant performances from homeless people in Eleonora Danco’s n-Ego are maximalist in their theatrical ideas, but appear as a pedantic series of exercises insofar as they are dis-integrated through unfilmic refrains made of nihilist affirmations. Maximalist in references is Stanislav Gurenko and Andrii Al’ferov’s historic drama Dissident, whose obscure plot is no longer a burden, but only if we start to see the film as a single impressionistic tableau that conveys a purely emotional atmosphere of general mistrust in the political resistence against a regime.

This impressionist character is also dominant in what is probably the most convincing of these maximalist films, at least to my eyes: Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s Tendaberry. Here, an intense-then-suspended love story causes the protagonist’s life (Kota Johan) to turn in circles, where the constant camera movement and the fast editing deliver deeds and words—sometimes quite poetic—in a crowd, with the result being a feeling of immobility. It is the immobility of the “here,” so often repeated by the voice-over, meaning a way of being blocked in youth, in life, in indecision, or probably just in a queer in-between. Is the perfect form of maximalism going everywhere, being capable of everything, yet finding nothing more than the hypnotic wisdom of a here-and-now, in-between, queer? Is this the open secret of youth?

Giuseppe Di Salvatore
© FIPRESCI
Edited by José Teodoro