Tag: Berlinale

Peter von Kant

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Every remake has one central question to ask: why does this film actually have to be made? The answer eluded me throughout Peter von Kant, François Ozon’s tepid French-language remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s classic 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. The genders may be flipped, but it captures little spirit of the original while treading no new ground.

The year is the same, 1972, but the action has moved from Bremen to Cologne. Peter von Kant (Denis Ménochet) is now a filmmaker. In remaking Fassbinder, Ozon essentially recasts von Kant as a version of the great German himself, with Ménochet attempting to replicate his large posture, towering gait and menacing bursts of anger while snorting Scarface-levels of cocaine. He is constantly awaited on by the silent Karl (Stéfan Crépon), a weedy assistant with a handlebar moustache. Suffering from a break-up, the petulant filmmaker is granted a new lease on life by the arrival of Amir (Khalil Gharbia) — both beautiful yet vulnerable, he falls quickly into his hands. But love and art are a dangerous mix, with von Kant’s manipulations quickly descending into petty neediness.

“Great filmmaker, human shit,” quips von Kant’s friend Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), a remark that could be applied to Fassbinder himself, who completed 40 films before his death by overdose at 37. But anyone expecting any new insights into the mighty, taboo-busting filmmaker will be disappointed, Ménochet aiming for dark drama but landing on broad soap opera instead. The supporting actors aren’t particularly interesting either; in fact, it really does just feel like they’re going though the lines.

Talking of the actual words in this “adaptation”, it’s quite remarkable just how rigid it is. Even banal lines such as the proffering of coffee or the booking of flights are kept almost exactly the same; making me wonder why this was staged as a film rather than as a play. And while the set is well-designed — from the film posters on the wall to the beautiful models-blown up Helmut Newton style — and the costumes are typically brilliant from the filmmaker of 8 Women (2002), that same sense of lived-in sadness that characterised Petra’s apartment is sorely missing.

That space was navigated in Petra von Kant with some of the best blocking committed to film, especially within just a single space. And while it would be fruitless for Ozon to replicate the impeccable cinematography from Michael Ballhaus in the original, it would’ve at least been effective for the film to at least give us a similar sense of space. Instead, Ozon prefers conventional filmmaking techniques, such as cross-cutting conversations and inserting reaction shots instead of the languid, moody filmmaking of the former. It undercuts the effectiveness of the adaptation massively — instead of deeply mannered high German drama, we get a micro-dose of French farce that actually feels more artificial than the notoriously stagy Fassbinder while retaining none of the same dark emotion.

Fassbinder looms large over the German filmmaking psyche, a filmmaker unafraid to tackle the norms of West German society through his depictions of sexuality, gender and race. As a result, it’s no surprise that Ozon’s doodle was chosen as the opening film. Not only is this a major step down from his previous Fassbinder adaptation, Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000), but the ultimate tribute: in attempting to re-do Petra von Kant, he reminds viewers just why Fassbinder is such a revered filmmaker. It’s never just about the script; it’s how you adapt it that matters. The notes might sound the same, but the music is completely off-key.

Peter von Kant opened the competition of the 72nd Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK as part of the 66th BFI London Film Festival in October. In cinemas on Friday, December 30th. On an major Platforms on Monday, February 6th.

Censor

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Before spurious terms such as “cancel culture” entered the mainstream, British censors were hard at work “cancelling” content they deemed inappropriate for genuine consumption. This work became the centre of a media storm in the 1980s with the rise of “video nasties — cheap, sensationalist content that toned down on the plot and dialled up the violence, including gratuitous scenes of rape, torture, cannibalism and dismemberment. Think the chainsaw scene in Scarface, but for an entire movie. And just like arguments regarding GTA in the 00s, right-wing voices were concerned that these videos could lead to copycat violence of its own.

Censor evokes the drabness of the 80s rather than its neon-light sparkle, using clips from Margaret Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse to set the “mother-knows-best” tone of the era. It’s in a dark, smoke-filled room we first encounter Enid Baines (Naimh Algar), who discusses removing a penis shot here, a gouged eye-ball there. She takes pride in her work, trying to make the videos just right so they are suitable for public consumption. But there is a sense that something else is boiling under the surface of this self-controlled, persnickety woman, who might be able to change the tone of difficult movies, but cannot censor the difficulties of her own past.

This is the debut film of Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond (one more of many debut British filmmakers making waves in the horror scene) yet she shows a maturity of composition that shows off a great confidence in form. The video nasties are expertly recreated with excessive blood and gore in an Academy ratio, while the real scenes are shot in widescreen, making use of expressive, two-tone lights to suggest the conflicted nature of Enid. In one impressive flourish, betraying the ways that both reality and movie-making can merge, the widescreen ratio slowly contracts into the smaller frame, the film tightening its grip as the true horrors finally emerge. Along with Saint Maud, Rose: A Love Story and Kindred, it appears horror is becoming the de facto form for Britain’s up-and-coming directors. I would suggest a crossover anthology film!

Nonetheless, while Naimh brings great sensitivity and complexity to the main role, the supporting cast, including her parents and fellow co-workers, feel lightly sketched in, not allowing for much contrast to her fixed mission. The overarching message is that censorship might be needed in some extreme cases, yet can often achieve the exact opposite effect. This is lost somewhat in the final sequence which doesn’t allow the horror to linger, opting instead for an unsatisfying fantasy flourish. Coming at a time where the topic of censorship in art is being rigorously discussed once again, Censor perhaps needed to be bolder in its transgressions. With that said, this is a fascinating debut from Bailey-Bond, who will likely work wonders with a larger budget. Here’s hoping the same backers, Film4 and BFI, give her the necessary investment she needs to become one of Britain’s hottest horror tickets.

Censor played in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival. On Mubi on Sunday, October 31st.

The Scary of Sixty-First

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

I am not thrilled to say hat the scariest thing about this horror movie is the acting. It’s so bad it brings back suppressed memories of watching student plays in people’s basements. While everyone is forgiven for their first experiments in literature and movie-making, it’s another thing to bring work this terrible to a platform like the Berlinale. While the role of a festival is to provoke and inspire, to put strange and challenging work onto the screen, this film barely registers on an intellectual level either, hampered by amateur dramatics so poor they wouldn’t pass in a panto. It seriously puts into question the credibility of the festival, kowtowing to fake American culture wars that have no basis in the real world.

Whatever The Scary of Sixty-First is trying to do, you have to first be invested in extremely online American pop culture theories to glean any meaning out of its horrors. It’s about billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who died in the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in New York on August 10th 2019. The official verdict is that he killed himself, yet the evidence surrounding his death is so screwy that many people on the internet claim he was murdered to cover up a larger conspiracy involving the likes of Prince Andrew and the Clintons.

The other thing to know is that it’s directed by Dasha Nekrasova, one half of the Red Scare podcast, who say cool stuff like Putin is their “daddy” and that climate change is a “bourgeois eschatology”. Their podcast is pretty sad, containing only minimal interest if all you do is care about in-fighting within tired leftist American politics.

Together its the perfect provocation (for Americans) — but take away the context, focus entirely on the film itself, and what you are left with is a giallo homage that falls flat on almost every level. It starts promising enough, with a rising synth score and a fast-paced survey of New York’s streets that drain it of any charm. But when the characters, odd-ball friends Addie (Betsey Brown) and Noelle (Madeline Quinn) start talking, my heart sunk, both actors talking like they’re just about to pause, swear and ask for their lines again.

They have just moved into a new apartment, which gives off a strong Polanski-vibe, with weird entrances and exits. It’s downright peculiar, confirmed when The Girl (Dasha Nekrasova) turns up saying that it used to be a flophouse where Epstein either raped or killed his victims. Soon the spirit of the notorious pedophile is everywhere, turning the film into an orgiastic feast of depravity and death. At many times, in its writhing, gesticulating, shouting and screaming, it feels like it’s trying to channel the masterpiece Possession (1981). That film starred Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill. This film doesn’t. It shows.

It doesn’t help that these characters are also extremely annoying. They’re edgy in a kind of 12-year-old-with-a-big-brother way, saying “faggot”, “retarded” and “cuck” with absolute glee, barely hiding the sophomore smugness of the screenplay. I wasn’t offended — cause there’s nothing offensive in the film, despite its attempts to challenge cultural norms — just tired. Very, very tired.

Ultimately, the film suggests that Epstein is now the new big bad of our modern society. In actuality, he was a sad and pathetic man and very few people will mourn his death. It’s this kind of American-centric view in a world containing leaders such as ‘daddy’ Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, Xi Jingping and Mohammed bin Salman, that make you realise how much of the culture war is a pathetic distraction. And if that was the aim of the film, then I guess it actually succeeded!

It’s fun to delve into and even satirise conspiracy theories: something expertly rendered in the loop shaggy comedy Under The Silver Lake, Adam Curtis documentaries and even Oliver Stone’s JFK. It’s not fun, however, to have Reddit facts quoted to you, along with repeats of YouTube videos that are easily available to the public. It’s a bit like being cornered in party with the biggest boor imaginable, unable to pivot the conversation to something jovial like football or the weather.

Maybe there’s another extra joke layered in there about the nature of easily believing conspiracy theories. Maybe the bad acting is another post-ironic joke. Maybe I missed the point entirely. Whatever it is, I’m not going to waste my time finding out.

The Scary of Sixty-First plays in the Encounters strand of the Berlinale, running digitally from 1st to 5th March.

The World After Us (Le monde après nous)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The conditions that made Paris such a hub for writers in the early 20th century — cheap flats, strong communities, endless time to put pen to paper — have been more or less swept away by the powers of gentrification. Faced with paying €1,200 in rent every single month, Labidi (Aurélien Gabrielli) is forced to come up with some unusual schemes, like low-key insurance fraud and cycling for Deliveroo, in order to meet the bills.

He is a promising young French-Tunisian writer with an award-winning short story under his belt. His agent secures him a meeting with a top literary firm, who enjoy the first three chapters of his Algerian-war focused novel. With only six months to finish the book, this decision is rather complicated by his romance with Elisa (Louise Chevilotte), who he picks up in true Frenchman-style on a Lyonnaise terrasse by asking for a cigarette. He didn’t smoke before; he will now.

She’s a younger penniless student while his home is in Paris; making the move to one of the world’s most expensive places — drained of the usual romantic clichés of walking along the seine or staring at the Eiffel Tower — difficult for the young, loved-up couple, who can barely rely on their working-class parents for help. The resultant film explores the pressures of being an artist in an increasingly capitalist world, existing without a connection to one’s roots, and trying to stay in love amidst the maelstrom of modern life. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but neatly packaged in a smart, bittersweet yet ultimately optimistic package.

With a light, unaffected style with simple yet effective editing, The World After Us effortlessly brings to mind the films of François Truffaut, especially Antoine and Colette, as well as recent ‘novelistic’ French-speaking films like the work of Xavier Dolan, Being 17 and Next Year. While the New Wave is often parodied for its pretensions, it was filled with great humour; effectively communicated here when Labidi interviews for a job at a high-end optician. The comedy diffuses the self-seriousness of similar writer stories, rounding out Labidi as a man who feels like he actually exists off-screen.

As a portrait of a young man as a writer, a genre often tackled in French literature and cinema, The World After Us, partly based on director Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas’s own life, seems unconcerned with the weight of history, using its tightly-written characters and a condensation of time to easily absorb us into Labidi’s life. Aurélien Gabrielli carries his character with a deceptive simplicity, first appearing like a passive sponge before slowly turning into the hero of his own story without exhibiting any stereotypical or groan-worthy moments of growth. Accompanied by a few choice needle drops — “Knights of White Satin”, “Remember Me’ — The World After Us expertly sweeps us through these six months in a smooth 84 minutes. More novella than novel, this is a lovely slice of Francophone auto-fiction.

The World After Us plays in the Panorama strand of the Berlinale, running between 1st-5th March.

Brother’s Keeper (Okul Tıraşı)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

If you like lording over people with less power than you, but you don’t have the tenacity to make it in the army, your second best bet is to work in a boarding school. After all, it’s easy to be a jobsworth when punishing children. Handled badly and these are unique, reactionary places that don’t have to operate like the rest of the world. For example, if there is a snowstorm, the nature of their self-sustaining community means that, while other children in the country can stay home, they will still have to soldier on and still go to all their classes.

This uniqueness has deadly consequences in the slow-burn drama Brother’s Keeper, set in a remote boarding school in the mountains of East Turkey. With temperatures in the winter dropping to minus 35 degrees, the special school for gifted Kurdish pupils becomes a literal danger zone, with students and teachers alike slowly succumbing to the bitter cold.

The students — who come from poor regions in the country — are told that they should actually count themselves lucky whilst lining up for reception in the freezing snow. Lucky enough to shower once a week, the chaos and embarrassment of their group wash is caught in tight frames by cinematographer Türksoy Gölebeyi. But when a few of the boys are caught messing around, one of the teachers punishes them by making them have cold showers.

The next day Yusuf (Samet Yıldız) wakes up to find that his friend Memo (Nurallah Alaca) can’t get out of bed. Much to his teacher’s annoyance, he begs them to take care of Memo, but to no avail. The teachers are far more caught up in pointless power plays of discipline, making the film feel like a Young Adult makeover of The Death of Mr Lazarescu. Once he finally gets the principal to realise that Memo is in bad shape, the school slowly deteriorates, with the petty priorities of the different teachers finally let loose on one another.

This drama is caught up in the wider context of the film, which plays as an allegory for Turkey’s relationship with the Kurdistan region, a large swathe of which intersects with the Eastern Anatolia Region. This is brought to the fore in a geography class, when a young boy is berated for saying they are actually living in a Kurdish part of the world. After a while, the school slowly resembles a type of colonial prison, escape impossible thanks to the endless pile-up of snow.

To keep this claustrophobic feel, we never physically leave the school, kept close in a 1.37:1 frame. The location is a real estate boarding school, which looks like it’s in desperate need of urgent repair. Combined with local community casting, Brother’s Keeper adheres to a realist style and execution, never losing sense of the wider message in the process, tastefully putting a spotlight on a people lacking both a country to call home or even a family to go home to.

My Brother’s Keeper played in the Panorama section of the 71st Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. Out in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. It also shows at the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Language Lessons

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

A friend of mine told me the other day that he was learning Mandarin online. He said he was also using the opportunity for free therapy. I thought he was joking, but I’m not sure after watching Language Lessons, where online Spanish lessons are used as an opportunity for both of the film’s characters to work through their own personal problems.

Conceived as a project to keep both director Natalie Morales and writer Mark Duplass busy while suffering under lockdown, it uses a simple premise to excellent effect. It starts with a video conversations; one of many that constitute the film’s form. Will (Desean Terry) has bought his husband Tom (Mark Duplass) 100 lessons in immersive Spanish. Costing only a thousand dollars for two years, it’s an absolute steal. Teacher Cariño (Natalie Morales) — based in Costa Rica — is slightly perplexed when the lessons start, but slowly warms to the rich Californian’s affable nature.

Then something terrible happens which bonds both teacher and student far beyond their personal relationship. Over their lessons, mixing Spanish and English freely, they slowly reveal more about the other, providing a reverie on grief, friendship and the power of long-distance platonic love. The way that big events, emotions and connections play out over video call will surely reverberate with many people who have taken to dating, revisiting family and even attending parties virtually due to endless corona restrictions.

Although the film was made and marketed as yet another lockdown project, utilizing the power of video-technology to tell the story remotely, the film doesn’t just load up a grainy Zoom conference and call it a day. Rather, one can see a real measure of craft in the film’s lighting and compositions, using a proper depth of frame instead of merely lingering on Zoom faces. What lockdown projects, especially at full-length, need to remember is that these films can end up replicating the very same sense of fatigue from video-calls nearly everyone is currently suffering. By switching up locations and having characters interact with the screen at different angles, one almost forgets the circumstances of the project and simply starts enjoying the elegantly crafted screenplay.

It also really helps that both actors are really good at expressing nuanced emotion, giving the kind of multilayered performance that these calls need to pull the screenplay off. The limitations act as a kind of suppression technique, allowing quite significant emotions to boil right under the surface. Duplass has a knack for expressing pure, unfiltered emotions, while Morales’s use of deflection is extremely impressive. The film plays with assumptions, making us see the characters as they see each other, pulling the narrative rug from underneath us for clever emotional effect; leading up to a simple landing that suggests an expansion of the film’s own form. If only all lockdown features were this good: Language Lessons is a Beethoven sympathy compared to empty experiments like Locked Down and Malcolm and Marie.

Language Lessons plays in the Competition section of the Berlin Film Festival, running digitally from 1st to 5th March.

Dirty Feathers

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

A poetic snapshot of life on the periphery, Dirty Feathers excels in capturing the multifarious nature of life on the streets. Although there are many similarities between the various homeless people the film follows, no two stories are the same, painting a diverse portrait of people taking each day as it comes.

Using his experience working in the camera department for Roberto Minervini, the US-based Italian filmmaker whose movies, blending documentary and narrative, capture rural lives often ignored in the USA, first-time feature director Carlos Alfonso Corral builds upon these portraits with a striking observational documentary of his own. Blending poetic voiceover with light music and stark black-and-white images, Dirty Feathers quietly observes the lives of those in and around a homeless shelter in El Paso — on the border with Mexico — optimistically known as the “Opportunity Center.”

Opportunity and optimism permeate this story, with most of the subjects talking with clear-eyed enthusiasm about how God will eventually provide for them. At its heart is an African-American couple: Brandon and his pregnant wife Reagan. They support each other as much as possible while living with debilitating drug addiction. But Brandon has his own dreams of running a soul food restaurant, methodically laying out his plans to make it a success. Yet Brandon and the many others who make up this film — a Latino man grieving his son, a war veteran, a Trump-hating immigrant — are not followed in a traditional sense, with Corral more interested in poetics than conclusions.

Many of them are barred from the OC for one reason or another, forced to find alternative living arrangements that stress the difficulty of their situation. It’s clear the director has spent a fair amount of time with these people before rolling the camera, allowing for immersive yet unobtrusive frames, capturing light in an almost ethereal fashion. It can be hard to know exactly how much time has passed, yet this seems to be the point, capturing these people as they lie suspended between a difficult past and a tentative future, aptly symbolised by Reagan’s upcoming baby.

It’s scary watching this documentary knowing the twin-horrors that lie ahead: the Covid-19 pandemic and Texas’s ongoing energy crisis. Perhaps some of these characters have already fatally succumbed to state failure. Texas is well-known for its rugged sense of individualism, even within the hyper-capitalist USA, and this theme of self-improvement is evident within almost all of its resilient subjects; nonetheless, without forcing a central thesis upon us, Dirty Feathers shows us the importance of a social state in order to deal with addiction, mental health issues, healthcare (one man talks of a $10,000 hospital bill), post-traumatic stress disorder and homelessness; how people ultimately need some help in order to realise their dreams. The apparent collapse of the social state in these regions (which has no income tax!) has led to an underclass of forgotten people; Dirty Feathers, with its stirring, un-judgemental tone, returns some measure of dignity and beauty to their lives.

Dirty Feathers is playing in the Panorama section of Berlinale, running 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.

Making a guerrilla documentary in ultra-homophobic Chechnya

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

You are unlikely to see a more important documentary made all year than Welcome to Chechnya. A work of investigative journalism depicting an undercover LGBTQ network helping gay men and woman escape from the barbarous Chechen regime, it is a breathtaking, invigorating and necessary work. We sat down with its director David France during the Berlinale, where it played in the Panorama Section, to discuss the making of the film, his thoughts about the region and whether the film may even be released in Russia itself.

Redmond Bacon –How did you gain access to Chechnya? This is a closed-off area…

David France – We had a cover story of why I was in Chechnya. It’s not a place that Americans go to visit or anybody goes to visit. But the World Cup was there so I posed as a wealthy American football fan, especially enamoured with the Egyptian team who had stayed in Chechnya. I hired these people to take me on a tour and they agreed because I was throwing money around. That was our story. I had to study up on football…

RB – What is the atmosphere in Chechnya like?

DF – I had never been in a place that is so closed. I felt watched and studied. There’s something in the air that I’ve never experienced before. I don’t even know how to describe it. I have done war reporting in Central American, Lebanon, Occupied Territories, Western Africa, but I never felt the kind of peril that you felt when you were there even though you didn’t really see it. There were no goons with guns and no military infrastructure in front of you, but you felt it anyway.

RB – What filmmaking techniques did you have to use?

DF – The two women who met with Anya were wearing hijabs. One of them was my DP, and she was shooting with a go-pro. I was across the restaurant with a cellphone, taking selfies or appearing to take selfies. It was guerrilla filmmaking.

RB – What kind of emotions did you feel? Did it feel dangerous?

DF – Not really. We had prepared very well with our security team. But we were detained briefly as we were leaving. That’s the scene in the film where they are reaching for passports. They were reaching for my passport and I had my cellphone between my legs and I was shooting that way. And when they called me out the car I just dropped the phone and walked out. I had a second cellphone that had all of my football fan tourism on it and they were shocked by the story we told them about me needing to come and see the Egyptian football in Chechnya. Eventually they were like: “this guy is way too crazy”. We were heading in the right direction out of the region anyway, so they just threw us back in the car.

RB – Can you talk about the danger for your documentary subjects? For them, this is life or death...

DF – It was especially dangerous for them. That’s why they wanted me there. The video would present an alibi if needed. “What are they doing there? Are they kidnapping this girl? Who are they? Is she consenting?” All of these questions would be disproved by whatever video we were shooting. In a way we were functioning as a failsafe for the activists and the work they were doing.

David France

RB – How did you initially establish contact with the LGBT network?

DF – I had read an interview with Olga Baranova, who is running the main shelter in Moscow. She had spoken publicly about her work. I was introduced to her and proposed that we make a documentary. She was interested at first, but there were the questions of security and protecting the identities of people within the shelter. We worked that all out quickly. Within three days I was there shooting.

RB – How did you come up with the idea to obscure their faces digitally while still allowing the audience to see their emotions? What was the rationale behind it?

DF – I had to make the argument to people who were on the run that we needed to see their faces in order to generate empathy. I needed to know what it was like to be them, to have been tortured so terribly, to have barely escaped, to be so dislocated from everyone, even your family, and to know that even your family has joined the hunt for you.

I promised everybody I would disguise them in some way although I didn’t know how yet. And yet they still agreed to let me do this. I had in my release form a question asking if they needed to be covered, or if they needed their voices to be disguised. And they would check those boxes and everybody on the run checked those boxes. I promised that I would return to them with my solution for their approval. I think they realised it was going to be a breakthrough film in this respect.

Once we began the work of research and development to find ways to cover them we began to worry very seriously that we had a movie that we would never be able to release.

Thankfully it worked and it’s been recognised as major new tool for documentary filmmakers. It gives back the power to people to tell their own stories. It gives them back their humanity.

RB – Did you worry that the film may have blown the network’s cover?

DF – They had a trade-off that they were weighing and that was their need to get the world to pay attention to what they’re doing. This was also the reason for the activists to appear with their real faces. Due to the increasing physical risk to them and to their safety, they believed that their notoriety from this film will add to their level of protection. David Isteev, for example, expects to do his work in some way. Of course, he’s not going to travel in and out of Chechnya after the film comes out. But he does believe that after passing that torch to others, he will be able to continue living the life he had before.

RB – What can Vladimir Putin do to successfully intervene in Chechnya? The region is volatile, and known for its two wars with Russia…

DF – Putin could tell Ramzan Kadyrov to stop it and Kadyrov could stop it just like that. Why isn’t he telling him? Because I believe that what’s happening in Chechnya is the extension of Putin’s policies for the last ten, fifteen years.

He has been systematically rolling back a cultural acceptance of the LGBT community in Russia. He did it by passing only one law. And that’s what they call the anti-gay propaganda law. This law makes it illegal to say anything in the presence of a minor that might be construed as suggesting the normalcy of LGBT folks.

It is legal to be gay in Russia. There are also no laws against gay sex in Russia, but there are no protections either. But Putin’s campaign in the last fifteen years is to create an appetite for traditional values and to rebuild the role of the Church in society after the collapse of communism. What he has done is weaponised homophobia to consolidate his power. And the logical extension of that is what’s happening in Chechnya, Dagestan, North Ossetia, and numerous other republics in the South and creeping throughout Russia. We’ve seen other explosions of extreme anti-queer violence in Russia.

What shocked me the most is the fact that I didn’t think that homophobia could be weaponised again the way it was in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. I thought that would be impossible. In almost every society we have celebrities who are queer, we have politicians running governments who are queer, we have people who are out in the industry and we have people marrying left and right.

But we also currently have the first place and first time since Hitler that a top-down government-sponsored campaign exists to round up LGBTQ people for execution. This hasn’t happened since the 30s.

RB – How challenging was it for you to show these shocking images? What was the reasoning behind them?

DF – It was not a hard decision at all. This is an ongoing crime against humanity that no one is paying attention to.

Without knowing what this persecution looks like, it makes people in the shelter’s journeys dismissible. We wanted to show the grotesqueness of what is happening there and what they are escaping.

RB – Can you talk about the film as a work of investigative journalism. After all, reporting out of Chechnya is scarce.

DF – The biggest failure is the failure of the news media. It was a Russian-based independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, that broke the story.

They’re the only paper in the world that’s been aggressive about reporting this story. The news cycle throughout the world, and throughout the West especially, has become inexcusably shallow. The economy is not there to continue investigative research and reporting, especially the way we knew it in the past. I’m an investigative journalist myself, I came to filmmaking through that. This film is a piece of investigative work of the sort that newspapers should be doing.

The idea for the movie is to get the story back in the headlines. Then people in the news media can amplify a call for justice from the audience, which will put pressure on governments around the world to bring effective pressure on Putin. Currently the only global leader who has taken him to task on this is Angela Merkel. There’s been nothing out of the United States.

RB – I’m so glad the film also shoots scenes of the refugee Maxim Lapunov and his boyfriend together in the bath and then playing by the beach. Because those are such tender, lovely moments in a film which is mostly very harrowing. Did you feel that you needed to include those love scenes?

DF – I’ve realised very early on that this is a film about love. Not just romantic love, but love in a much larger way. I thought I was making a film about hate but having spent time in the underground network I saw a remarkable expression of love.

I spent so much time with those guys that we, as filmmakers, disappeared. We were able to watch them really without them having any sense of us watching them. But yes, when I crawled into the bathroom they did notice.

RB – Will it play in a few independent cinemas in Moscow or St Petersburg perhaps?

DF – We are in genuine conversations with people at the Moscow Film Festival, and there are additional conversations with another festival in St.Petersburg. We believe that we will be invited there. But in Russia, in order to show a film, it needs a license by the Kremlin.

So whether the Kremlin give a license for this film is certainly an open question. I’m not the one negotiating these deals. We have an agent for foreign sales, who did tell me last night that they are deep in conversation about official commercial distribution in Russia. Will it happen? I don’t know. But I would love to see it happen.

The picture at the top of this article is from David France at the 70th Berlinale, where this interview was conducted, while the other two are from ‘Welcome to Chechnya’

Uppercase Print (Tipografic Majuscul)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Two films in one. In the former, we learn of Romanian Mugur Călinescu, who, upon listening to messages from Radio Free Europe in 1981, writes pro-democracy messages on walls in chalk. In the second, Radu Jude presents archival footage from the time. The propaganda scenes, however staged, are exciting and filled with life; the reality, however true, is artificially staged and alienating. They form a curious dialectic: Romania as it really was, and Romania as it presented itself on television.

It starts with a quote by Michel Foucault: “the resonance I feel when I happen to encounter these small lives, reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down.” Starting mid-sentence, it is typical for the Romanian director, who likes to present things to you piecemeal, expecting the viewer to fill in their own details.

This quote is more apposite considering the way the stages are set up. Arranged in a circle, they resemble his famous panopticon, and stress the all-powerful surveillance scheme of the Securitate, the secret police force of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.

An adaptation by the documentary play by Gianina Cărbunariu — which was assembled through police transcripts and secret recordings — these scenes are deliberately alienating. Characters recite their lines with little passion, meticulously explaining the events around Călinescu’s illegal pro-democratic writings and how the Securitate came into contact with them. They are framed against bright pink and purple lights, with giant tape recorders and televisions in the background, deliberately making everything feel artificial.

Uppercase Print

If these scenes are carefully calibrated, the propaganda is far more chaotic. Ranging from the obvious pageantry found in a dictatorship to songs about children being the future to people being fined for honking their car horns illegally, these scenes form a strange and bewildering counter-narrative. What makes it a disorientating experience is that the links between the two clips are not obvious, forcing the viewer to work through their own connections.

Radu Jude makes active films as opposed to passive ones. You can’t simply sit back and enjoy a film like Uppercase Print; you have to bring your own intellect to bear upon Jude’s, making them challenging cine-texts. Nonetheless, for those patient enough to tackle them on their own terms, they can be immensely rewarding.

If there’s a through-line between this and Radu Jude’s previous film, the more stylistically diverse I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians — which tackled Romania’s shameful role during WW2 — it is the sad fact that people don’t know or reflect upon the mistakes of history.

The entire film comes together in its final moments — which jolt us back into the present day, showing that little has truly changed. One of the men justifies his surveillance tactics by invoking Cambridge Analytica; reminding us that constant surveillance is hardly a concept novel to communism. By analysing Romania in such forensic detail, the film opens up to the world, reminding us that these issues can happen anywhere.

A truly difficult work, its not one I can say I enjoyed as much as I found intellectually stimulating, like listening to a fascinating yet over-long lecturer from an intermittently charismatic professor. Nonetheless, it remains a convincing reminder that Jude is one of the most unique directors working out of Eastern Europe today. I want to see everything he’s made.

Uppercase Print played in the Forum section of the Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. Watch it online for free in December only with ArteKino

Varda by Agnes (Varda par Agnès)

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

In Agnès Varda’s new documentary essay, which premieres today at Berlinale, the director returns again to a theme that has run throughout her work: herself. Varda by Agnès is a feature-length keynote with the French New Wave pioneer, who takes the audience on a journey through her films, stylistic choices, and changing themes.

It’s also a person reflecting on their 60-year career, from beginnings as a photographer, through successes and failures, her marriage to Jacques Demy who she loved very much, and her willingness to explore alternative mediums. It’s a mighty rejoinder to the Nolan/Tarantino shoot-on-film-only freaks that one of cinema’s great formal innovators is so open to adapting to new technologies, to see how they can bring her closer to the world.

It’s a primer for those who have discovered her work since Faces Places (which, along with her iconic image has made her an online darling). Varda has always been a master of controlling her own image, of exploring how people see and are seen. She muses on her production of the Jane Birkin film Kung-Fu Master (1988) alongside Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) about what it meant to create portraits of another person which were also portraits of herself.

Part of why she’s such a source of fascination is that she’s never depicted herself as a tortured artist or intense genius, as so many writer/directors do. She’s self aware and good humoured about her work, but its this view of the self as only separated by the camera lens, so her films always feel like a trip directly into her interior monologue.

Part of me wondered if this film is a response to the increasingly memed version of her – a cardboard cut out likeness that toured along with Faces Places (2017) and became a must-selfie-with item, for example. She reclaims her own image and recycles it, which is effectively what Varda by Agnès is. Varda says as much herself in the section on one of her greatest films The Gleaners & I (2000). In that film, she realised that through following gleaners that she was herself one, recycling the stuff of life for film. Varda by Agnès is doing just the same with her own cinema, punctuating her life story with choice movie moments.

It’s expertly done, and it is a joy to revisit one of the greatest and most consistent filmographies in the history of European cinema, but if you are already familiar with Varda’s work this doesn’t tell you much that you don’t already know. As another capper to cement an already certain legacy though, we should be thankful for Varda Par Agnès as we are for the woman herself.

Varda by Agnès premiered at Berlinale, when this piece was originally written. On BFI Player, Mubi and Amazon Prime in May 2023.