Tag: fear

Fear (Strah)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Svetka (Svetlana Yancheka) is rugged, raspy-voiced and blunt widow around 50 years of age. She lives in a pauper yet fully functional wooden house on the Bulgarian coast. Her interactions with neighbours are limited to the little occasional banter. She spends long stretches of time in the cemetery with her husband. One day, she comes across a “negro” in the woods. She is scared of the unusual alien. He explains in English that he’s a Mali refugee, bit Svetka only speaks Bulgarian. Their verbal communication is extremely limited.

Svetka locks the stranger in her shed and seeks advice from the mayor, who suggests that she ties him to a tree and hands him to border force the next day. Gradually, the calm and polite black man breaks the ice. He’s called Bamba and he lost his wife and children in a war. He fled in order to avoid almost certain execution. Svetka buys an English dictionary and Bamba begins to learn a few words in Bulgarian. A gentle romance is beginning to blossom.

The rest of the community is less enamoured of Bamba. They feel threatened by his mere presence. They assume that the African is insulting and conspiring against them. In reality, the locals are the hostile ones. One neighbour does eventually grow fond of Bamba after the foreigner – who turns out to be a doctor – helps to treat his fever. This plot has similarities to Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (1974), but there is also a very significant difference. In the German film, an old woman marries an African immigrant, and her community refuses to accept him. They eventually embrace him as they realise that the immigrant could be useful. In Fear, the community – bar this one neighbour – is intrinsically racist and xenophobic. They reject integration, instead demanding a succinct “Bulgaria for Bulgarians”. They even resort to extreme intimidation measures, including breaking window, graffiti and violence.

Despite its interesting premise, Fear doesn’t work as a comedy. The jokes are preposterous and puerile: a child announces to a group of refugees that “there is shit in the bathroom, but it’s from the heart”; Bamba jumps and wails after eating a spicy pepper, prompting neighbours to think that he’s being violent. The stern black and white photography clashes with ostensibly humorous tone of the story. It doesn’t work as a drama, either. The romance between Svetka and Bamba isn’t fully explored. There is not a single kiss, and the sexual interaction is but a vague suggestion. As a result, this Bulgarian movie elicits little laughter and little emotion.

Another problem is that the Bamba character never becomes fully fledged. He embodies kindness and education, but that’s about it. He never challenges the confronts the rabid prejudice and the threats to which he is subjected. Further characters and narrative devices are disjointed. There is a local band, an unscrupulous politician, a lenient border force. I’m not entirely sure of the function they perform. Drone establishing shots capture the ruins of an abandoned seafront resort. It just doesn’t gel together.

Fear has just premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It is in the event’s Official Competition.

Meerkat Moonship (Meerkat Maantuig)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Teenager Gideonette de la Rey (Anchen du Plessis) doesn’t like her name. In fact, our protagonist is convinced her unusual moniker carries a curse. Her father, the pastor of a small church, he assures her there’s no such curse. But then one day he’s found dead in the church building.

Gideonette is obsessed with the curse and begins writing a list of ways it might cause her to die. Her alcoholic mother (Hanlé Barnard) finds out and forbids her from looking at the list.

When her mother checks herself into a hospital “for some rest”, Nettie, as she prefers to be called, moves in with her grandparents Willem (Pierre van Pletzen) and Koekie (Rika Sennett) whose farmhouse is surrounded by countryside where she meets a younger boy Bhubesi (Themba Ntuli), a mute, who with the help of her grandfather is building a giant spaceship in the shape of a meerkat so that he can blast off into the stars…

The above probably sounds completely bonkers. But it’s really hard to do this film justice simply by talking about its plot. So much else is going on, not least the exquisite cinematography which lend many of Nettie’s scenes, some of them walking through vegetation in sunlight, an ethereal dreamlike quality.

This is a film about coming to terms with your past and letting go of fear in order to move forward. And then there’s the fact that this is a South African movie set in a loosely defined time presumably while the country was still under Apartheid, in which this writer, for one, kept wondering where all the black people were.

Well, the mute Bhubesi is black, as his briefly seen mum, and while the white Nettie’s relationship with him is quite odd, it doesn’t seem to be so much about race as about friendship for someone who needs a helping hand. Which both these characters do in their differing ways.

For the finale, all the hitherto hidden black people finally appear alongside the white Nettie and her grandparents with a feeling of different colour skinned people getting along together and moving forward. And of Nettie finding herself in this new context. A wonderfully and thoroughly subversive little film which deserves to be widely seen.

Meerkat Moonship played in the Schlingel International Film Festival where it deservedly picked up the Fipresci jury prize.