By Oliver Bradley in Berlin
The 72nd edition of the Berlinale ended Sunday with a Crystal Bear for Best Documentary Film going to Columbian filmmaker and social activist Clare Weiskopf for her film “Alis”. Screened at the festival’s Generation 14plus Section (young-adult coming-of-age themes), “Alis” documents ten young women living in a foster-care residence on the outskirts of Bogota, Columbia.
Each protagonist is asked to picture Alis, an imaginary friend, and to bring her story to life in a creative dialogue with the filmmakers. Like the interviewees, Alis used to live on the streets of Bogotá. This imaginary companion is the seed for an extraordinary documentary format, serving as a reflective and delicate point of entry to the protagonists’ own stories. Alis becomes a surface for the projection of past traumas, or the travails of companions who fell by the wayside, and also for life visions and desires for the future. The imaginary friend is a blank slate for exploring individual ideas of freedom, as well as battles that have yet to be fought.
The jury of the festival’s Encounter’s Section awarded its Golden Bear for Best Film to Austrian filmmaker Ruth Beckermann for her experimental film “Mutzenbacher”. The films shows Beckermann engaging with men between the ages of 16 and 99 on the topic and language of the texts of a scandalous novel published in 1906 – “Josefine Mutzenbacher, or the Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself” – which, as this film confirms, continues to be the subject of passionate and controversial discussions about desire, even today. What might be world-class pornographic literature for some is seen by others as an abusive depiction of child sexuality. In an intelligently arranged, experimental setting that permits analysis, emotion, reflection and intimacy in equal measure, these men transcend the boundaries of literary debate, opening up insights for us and for themselves into the cosmos of eroticism and sexuality – both within and beyond the confines of male fantasy. A cinematic experiment poised between imagination and identity that neither negates nor invokes its central taboo. For this reason, it tells us a lot, not least about “#Me” as well as #MeToo. Although published anonymously, the novel has been attributed to Felix Salten, the Hungarian-Swiss author of “Bambi”.
The Teddy Award, for best documentary with an LGBT theme, went to prize winning Swedish director Magnus Gertten for “Nelly & Nadine”, the story of two Belgian women who fall in love with each other on Christmas Eve in 1944, in the Ravensbrück concentration camp – having been deported by the Nazis because of their secret missions as agents and helping refugees to flee to safe countries. Although separated in the last months of the war, Nelly and Nadine manage to find each other again after 1945 and spend the rest of their lives together. For decades, their love story was kept secret, even from some of their closest family members. Now Nelly’s granddaughter Sylvie has decided to open the unseen personal archive of Nelly Mousset-Vos and Nadine Hwang, which contains numerous letters and writings as well as extensive and well-preserved film footage.
Films with Jewish relevance premiering at Berlinale that did not take home a prize:
Popular French actors Alain Chabat and Léa Drucker play a couple facing an unusual challenge in Quentin Dupieux’s “Incroyable Mais Vrai” (Incredible but True) – a satire about the couple’s new home, its cellar, a secret and the quest for eternal youth.
Maggie Peren’s “Der Passfälcher“ (The Passport Forger) is based on the true story of Berlin-born artist Cioma Schönhaus who, by forging documents, found the means to help himself and other Jews escape deportation during the Second World War. German actor Louis Hofmann portrays a happy-go-lucky Cioma. However, at no point in the film is the protagonist portrayed with any kind of worry or anxiety about his own parent’s deportation east, not even when the Gestapo enters the family home to inventory and seize his deported parent’s property.
During the film’s press-conference, director Maggie Peren told EJP that she believed that Cioma Schönhaus might not have grasped the true danger of deportation, or that he would have preferred to focus solely on positive images – making her point by making reference to his autobiography. This claim, however, was countered by Cioma’s son Sascha.
“The relationship to his parents was indeed my father’s main thought during his time in hiding […] also when writing the book”, Sascha Schönhaus told EJP in an e-mail from his home in Switzerland. “If you read the original book, you will be aware of this from the start”. According to Schönhaus, the changes he proposed for the screenplay went unheeded by the film’s producers. “We criticized several parts of the screenplay, but the production company just took it all out, which left the movie impoverished about the actual tragedies happening to Jews during the war”.
In his audio-visual documentary “1341 Framim Mehamatzlema Shel“ (1341 Frames of Love and War) Israeli filmmaker Ran Tal portrays the life work of Magnum photographer Micha Bar-Am. Like the best films about photography, “1341 Framim” makes a simple but crucial choice to put cinema in the service of still images, poising itself on the line that separates documentary from the much less frequent form of the still image film, between the evanescence and persistence of a frame. The career of Israeli photo reporter Micha Bar-Am, born in Berlin in 1930, thus becomes an assembly of iconic snapshots, enlargements and contact sheets which serve as the score for two voices: Micha, who is struggling with his memories as some remain while others fade, and his wife Orna, the assiduous curator of his archive and custodian of the memory that he is losing in his old age. However, forgetting is also a choice, given the events and atrocities Bar-Am immortalized by documenting the history of Israel including Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961, the Six-Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982. But whether they’re confronting the horrors of war or moments of family life, his pictures always reveal his ability to turn photography into a refined language of the gaze and, in the background, as the constant protagonist, a land without peace.
In “Iosi, el espía arrepentido“ (Yosi, the Regretful Spy) Argentine filmmakers Daniel Burman and Sebastián Borensztein have created a television series that delves into a truly dark chapter in the history of their native Argentina. Inspired by real-life events, they tell the story of a young secret agent named José who infiltrates the Jewish community in Buenos Aires from the mid-1980s onwards under the code name of Iosi. Unbeknown to him, he was paving the way for two devastating terrorist attacks: the bombings of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA building in 1994. Years later, eaten up with guilt, he tries to bring the real masterminds to justice.
Greek filmmakers Christos Passalis and Syllas Tzoumerkas aim to reconstruct the dramatic history of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community in their film collage “I Poli ke i Poli” (The City and the City). Nicknamed “the mother of Israel”, the Greek city of Thessaloniki was for centuries home to a large diaspora of Sephardic Jews until the outbreak of the Second World War. In the winter of 1943, the Nazi regime dispatched Eichmann’s deputies to Greece where they quickly and rigorously carried out their programme of ghettoisation and deportation which led to the extermination of more than 90 percent of the city’s Jewish population.
The Panorama Section’s screening of Idan Haguel’s “Concerned Citizen” portrays a gay Tel Aviv couple whose desire for self-realisation begins to narrow their worldview, bringing deep-seated prejudices to light. Without taking Israel to task (a rarity at the Berlin Film Festival), this is a deftly told parable about the mechanisms of gentrification, immigration, homosexuality, police brutality, alija and racim which, with a hint of satire, raises an uncomfortable yet universal question, namely: exactly how tolerant are we?
In her documentary “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power”, American filmmaker Nina Menkes uncovers patriarchal narrative structures that lie behind supposedly classic set-ups and camera angles. Making use of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s theses on the objectification and sexualization of the female body, Menkes shows how aesthetic decisions such as camera movement or lighting influence the perception of women on screen, and how shot design functions as an instrument and a mirror of power relations. In doing so, she determines a connection between established film language and a culture of misogyny that leads to the abuse of women beyond the screen. Her individual analyses of scenes from 120 years of film history demystify many a cult film in the independent canon – because the film language that has been shaped by the patriarchy pervades more than just Hollywood cinema. This film is a must-see for those of us who have not understood the #MeToo movement.
“Normalität 1-10”, by Austrian director Hito Steyerl, is a series developed from short videos that were created at a time where normality had come to stand for violence, at the 10-year anniversary of German reunification. Desecrated Jewish graves foreshadow anti-Semitic comments on German chat shows, while the same defilements in Vienna flow into shouted expressions of solidarity with Austria in Berlin on the election success of the far right FPÖ. A bombing in Düsseldorf that targeted Jewish immigrants ushers in a whole series of attacks on refugees, migrants and foreigners across the country. The news ticker on the Hannover U-Bahn reporting on one such attack gives way to the empty promises of the World Exposition and people of color in Germany mobilizing against racism and capitalism. From the vantage point of now, such normality might seem far away, but there’s always a new normal.
On the one hand, a dirndl is just a pretty, colorful dress with an apron – the typical folk costume worn by women in the German-speaking alpine region. On the other hand, Wilberg Brainin-Donnenberg’s short film “Dirndlschuld“ (Dirndl Guilt) shows us that the dirndl can also be contaminated, politicized form of clothing. The narratives constructed around the dirndl are constantly changed and adapted by private family histories and historical circumstances – and with each generation, a new reading is superimposed on these layers. This Super 8 film dives deep down into the idyll of Austria’s Lake Grundlsee to reveal the chasms that lie beneath. Who would have known before watching this film that the Nazis actually banned Jewish women from wearing the dirndl?