Tag: 71st Berlinale

Stop-Zemlia

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

Is there any stronger feeling in the world than the flush of first love? There probably is, but try telling that to a teenager who finds themselves awkwardly infatuated, unable to hide the blushing in their cheeks? Masha (Maria Fedorchenko) is one such teenager, who has developed a crush on the quiet and sensitive Sasha (Oleksandr Ivanov) — in a pivotal scene, simply walking by this boy and trying to say “hi” is a moment of stress seemingly on par with living in a war zone.

A teacher explains how the stress activator in your brain turns on and admits that falling in love can create much the same effect. Stop-Zemlia has a similarly forensic approach to both the psychological and physiological emotions of being a teenager, when your hormones are rampant and your emotions impossible to fully explain. Masha finds comfort in the kind presence of her friends Yana (Yana Isaienko) and Senia (Arsenii Markov), who form a trio based more on platonic love than any potential for romance.

Coming in at an unwieldy two hours, Stop-Zemlia uses a longer-than-normal runtime for this genre to fully explore the contours of teenagehood, dipping in and out of musical sequences, magical realism and intersecting storylines; even allowing Masha’s love interest full autonomy instead of mere idealisation. Fictional scenes are intercut with documentary-style interviews, with characters asked questions by an unseen director, allowing for further development of their feelings and more mature development of their emotions. Characters’ names are almost the same or simply diminutives of their actors (Masha for Maria, for example), blurring the lines between performer and character to excellent effect.

Coming at a time when coming-of-age dramas are so saturated with copious smoking, drinking and shagging — such as Russia’s Everybody Dies But Me, UK’s Skins and USA’s Euphoria — Stop-Zemlia offers a far more thoughtful and sober take on the messiness of growing up. In this respect, it owes as much to recent trends in French documentary-making — the films of Sébastien Lifshitz and Claire Simon’s Young Solitude — than stereotypical coming-of-age films. There’s a great eye for dialogue that genuinely apes that way that generation Z teenagers talk — and not the way that many adults assume they talk — showing off the patient and workshopped approach of first time feature director Kateryna Gornostai.

The fluidity is sexuality is explored here with real sensitivity, showing the rise of a generation far more nuanced and mature than even my generation; in fact, what seems to matter more than sexual expression is simply being honest with yourself and understanding what you want to be. There is the larger context of growing up in Ukraine, one of the poorest countries in Europe, where opportunities are scarce and men have to join the army once they turn 18. In one touching scene, Senia recoils when he attends a class explaining how to load an AK-47, remembering his traumatic upbringing during the conflict with Russia. It’s a difficult place to be an adult, with these teenagers — thoughtful, kind, confused, learning as they go along — under no false impressions about what the future might bring. Stop-Zemlia captures them at this most precarious age with great empathy and precision.

Stop-Zemlia plays in the Generation section of the Berlin Film Festival, running from 1st to 5th March.

Cryptozoo

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

I‘ve pre-booked a ticket for the Zoo in a couple of days. I would never normally go but there’s basically nothing else open these days. Now after watching Cryptozoo — a reverie on mankind’s relationship with exotic animals refracted through the acid trip imagination of the ambitious cartoonist Dash Shaw — I’m going to look at those pandas rather definitely.

Cryptos, misunderstood by the world around them, are mythological creatures living in hiding that span everything from your usual standards like Unicorns and Centaurs, to legendary folkloric animals from countries like Poland, Russia and Japan. This might like the plot for a lame X-Men movie, but Cryptozoo has a far more mature sensibility, opening with two young, horny and very naked adults finding themselves at the wrong end of an angry animal.

Based on the initial scene and early audience reactions on Twitter overplaying the timid sex scenes, you might be forgiven for thinking this is a slice of bizarro arthouse smut, but Cryptozoo actually has far more lofty aspirations. They two horny adults have stumbled into the eponymous zoo itself, a place where, apparently, the cryptos can finally be free from those who want to use their power as bio-military weapons. Fighting against these nefarious elements is army brat Lauren Gray (Lake Bell), who seemingly survives the trauma of growing up in post-WW2 Okinawa, Japan thanks to a cute, purple and blue creature called a Baku that eats her dreams. But this initial black-and-white perspective is complicated once we come to the Cryptozoo, which offers the animals a safe haven in return for providing visiting humans a tourist attraction.

Shaw, in collaboration with animation director Jane Samborski and lead animator Emily Wolver, creates a fantastic world ablaze with colour and ancient elements, where humans and cryptos could live in peace, if only they had the chance. But like Tiger King last year, which pitted big cat exploiter Joe Exotic against “sanctuary” owner Caroline Baskin, Cryptozoo asks the key question: is there any real difference between zookeepers and those they claim to fight against? Or are we all doomed in a world where one cannot survive without making profit?

With Jurassic Park never too far from the back of our minds, Cyptozoo invigorates disaster movie convention with its original style of animation. While the trope of the “gentle-creature-that-only-attacks-when-it’s-wounded” has been done to death over the past few years — most notably, and most confusedly, in the terrible Godzilla: King of the Monsters — Cryptozoo makes it feel fresh through sheer visual panache alone. In fact, the images are so arresting, one only realises how conventional the structure of the film is right at the very end.

As I’m so used to watching animated movies made within the parameters of a certain house style, so even their most glorious sequences seemed sanded-down to fit within the overall aesthetic, it’s glorious to watch something as diverse as this, a strange collage of styles that seems to run the entire gamut of 20th century drawing. While the flat 2D planes can feel a little off-putting, especially when watching otherwise unmoving characters’ mouths move, there is so much to love once you get over the initial strangeness. Zoos will never look quite the same again.

Cryptozoo plays in the Generation programme at Berlinale, running digitally from 1st to 5th March.

We (Nous)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The strange thing about the banlieues that surround Paris is that none of them are technically considered to actually constitute the city proper. Never-mind the fact that the city itself is largely made up of people commuting into the centre from these suburbs each day; popular outskirts such as Seine Saint Denis are counted as their own departments.

Even more curious is the make-up of Paris. Once when coming in from Charles De Gaulle, I noticed that the majority of people on the train were black; but when finally reaching my friend in Montmartre, almost everyone in the famed district was white. There seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the different ethnicities in the city, with the prospect of moving up the economic food chain an almost impossible task.

We examines this interesting make-up of Paris’ outskirts — which still reveal the fault-lines at the heart of French society — using the urban RER B train as a connective tissue between the different people one can expect in director Alice Diop’s hometown. She has Senegalese roots, but her observations are not tied towards one race or people, taking an all-encompassing look at the different types of people that make up the larger metropolitan area.

Stretching from a Malian garage-worker who hasn’t been home since the early ’00s, to young girls teasing each other on a housing estate, to the residents of an old-person’s home, the film is effectively a collection of self-contained portraits in search of a larger picture, Diop a modern flaneur, taking in the panoramic city scene. Traditional stereotypes of the banlieue are completely dispelled here, with the film beginning and ending with rural scenes; first spotting a stag in the far distance, later accompanying affluent residents on a fox hunt. Those who expect Parisian banlieue to still resemble the scenes of La Haine will be surprised by its diversity.

Often the most compelling images are those of her own family; such as her departed mother, glimpsed enigmatically through home footage, and her father, proudly talking of how he traversed from Senegal to make a better life for himself. But these moments, touching in and of themselves, can’t intersect with the film’s otherwise observational approach in a satisfying way.

Additionally, several of the film’s aesthetic choices and elongated scenes test the patience of a digital festival-goer, who may have been more generous in the stringent atmosphere of a cinema screening. With no central thematic point, rather than simply a loose geographical tissue, holding the disparate scenes together, its anthology approach seems to strain its ideas rather than focus them. Coming in at a significant two hour runtime, one imagines the tighter, more effective film lurking within a second or third edit. Diop has a noble aim; to survey that, like her mother, which she feels has been forgotten to the sands of time — notably spelled out during a visit with a local historian — but the execution is often painfully academic. The title We is meant to stand for everyone, but without really honing in on anyone at all, this ‘we’ remains rather vague.

We played in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It shows in October at the BFI London Film Festival.