Berlinale

The recent years has made us almost numb to seeing politicians around the globe in their seemingly ceaseless efforts to address the lingering economic crisis which is ready to encircle ever more countries. Intergovernmental agreements are being worked out and then, finally, met. Banks and financial structures are saved and the ATMs still work, but, for the large majority, the amounts that can be drawn there are ever diminishing. Several films during this year’s Berlinale are giving a stage, both fictional and documentary, to the affected individuals, whose situations are often disastrous.

Notwithstanding the global character of the economic crisis, it is still astonishing to see how any two films can be so similar both in the issues they address and the narrative mechanisms they use. The Daughter (Greece, Italy 2013) tells a story of a 14 years old Myrto that resorts to extreme tactics in order to return her father who disappears following the financial problems and unpayable debt that his business faces. The 280 cinema seats during the press screening were fought over. Such an unusual interest of the German press in a Greek film from the quite experimental festival section Forum can be easily explained in the context of the discourse of debt and repay, that has been haunting the relationship between the two countries for over a year now. A story that circles the topical concepts of laziness and laboriousness, of responsibility and retribution, of guilt and innocence was given an extraordinary cinematic form. However, the oversaturation with Christian sacrificial symbolism and the rough thriller-like suspense will probably not make it everybody’s cup of tea.

Financial trouble also hovers over the Israeli middle class family in Youth (Israel, Germany 2012). The aging father loses his job, is unable to find a new one and is gradually vanishing into depression. His sons, twin brothers – a fresh army recruit and a high school pupil, – secretly scheme to fight the menace of losing the family’s apartment where they share a room covered with posters of action films. In this film too, we see that typical reversal – a victim, when cornered, is readily turns into a villain. And the retribution of injustice, as it is often the case, leads to even more injustice and draws even more innocent people into the circle of violence.

The shared economic problems are so sincere that they may sometimes seem unsolvable. However, the youth, whose future are at stake primarily, will often be the first one to defy that pessimistic realism of the adults. Of course, both sides can be suspected of disavowal. While the older generation tends to dismiss the possibility of radical or systemic changes, the youths are inclined to defy reasonable, slow and moderate solutions. While adults take refuge in pessimism, the youngsters will sometimes be ready to take the matters into their own hands and, often simplifying both the problem and the solution, battle the dangerously torpid desperation by adopting equally dangerous methods.

The Babelinale Moment of the Day was this time a moment of truly Babelian disconnection.

The program consisted of two movies from Japan, one from Republic of Korea, one from Italy and the last one from the French director Jean-Bernard Marlin. After the session with the first group of films, Berlinale Shorts I, an Artist talks was programmed where normally the audience puts its questions to the directors.

The young directors coming from Asia were helped by a professional interpreter. It was a delightful linguistic experience. No one got lost in translation. Next came down the Italian director, Mario Rizzi, just after the screening of his documentary, to explain the circumstances in which he made his movie about a Syrian refugee’s camp in Jordan. Director and session conductor both speak in English.

The last short, coming from France, dealt with youth delinquency in Marseille. Jean-Bernard Marlin comes to the stage to talk about is movie. Just as he arrives he is asked if he is going to speak in German. The poor guy seems surprised. If it was a private joke coming from previous encounters between them we don’t know. The person in charge of conducting the session tries English but he is still lost in this Babelian irony. The person who you could expect to be more easily understood was precisely the one who got lost in translation. Just after the film exhibition and during the Artist Talks. Maybe they both over trusted in their language skills but the result was a complete failure of understanding.


Filmstill: La Fugue, Adel Bencherif, FRA 2013


The full program was: Love Games, Joung Yumi, 15’; UZUSHIO -Seto Current- Naoto Kawamoto, 10’; The Silent Passenger, Hirofumi Nakamoto, 14’; Al Intithar, Mario Rizzi, 30’; La Fugue, Jean-Bernard Marlin, 22’.

This afternoon the Cafébabel Berlin Team met to talk about the film of the day "I Kori - The Daughter" (Regie: Thanos Anastopoulos). A girl in her teens, an eight-year-old boy, and a father suddenly no longer there. When fourteen-year-old Myrto learns her father has fled to avoid paying his debts, she kidnaps the son of his business partner whom she blames for bankrupting her father’s joiner’s workshop

The film is capturing the interest among journalists and the public. To Berlin traveled also the main actress Savina Alimani, who plays the role of Myrto.

It was a true babelian moment in Berlinale and it qualifies as our Babelinale Moment of the Day.



Our question was: Are we facing an universal problem or is it confined with Greek reality?



Thanos Anastopoulos employs precise images and a protocol-like dramatic structure infused with thriller elements to portray a society whose key players flee their responsibilities. He shows us images of the crisis that have already become symbolic: the black market, invoices no-one can afford to pay, Molotov cocktails in the streets.



The crisis is there but, to some of us, it might be disguised with too much symbolism.



The morals underlying this dramatic events is that in an estate of exception everyone can turn out being the bad one. As Myrto puts it, "There are no monsters, only bad people." Myrto is the amazon trying to put some justice in a land in chaos. Who's the strong? Who's the weak? Are we all lambs after all?



photos: Katarzyna Świerc
''comments: Sandro Candido Marques and Christiane Lötsch' "quotations: www.berlinale.de

British ministers are reportedly considering to launch a negative campaign in Romania and Bulgaria to try and discourage potential immigrants with more or less the following message: Britain’s streets are not paved with gold, the weather is depressing and the few vacant jobs are underpaid. Some viewers might be amused to think of Lose Your Head (D: Stefan Westerwelle, Patrick Schuckmann, Germany 2013) as a kind of artistic petition of a similar kind directed at potential party tourists and hipster immigrants magnetized by Berlin’s alternative charms.

Leaving his ever-busy boyfriend behind in Madrid young Luis lands in Schönefeld Airport full of undefined hopes, excitements and expectations. Expectedly he soon ends up queuing to a club where with the help of an arrogant local girl attracted by his undisguised innocence he manages to pass the doorman.

Once inside the dense and bassy techno microclimat, there is usually one more portal to pass. The remedy against alienation and loneliness is cheap and easily accessible. The drug dealer’s “you’re gonna lose your head” rings like a prophecy and the film’s psychothrillerlike plot takes the action from there. Luis meets Viktor, a slightly older and bigger eastern european guy. With his somewhat sloppy, mysterious and, at times, even menacing appearance, Viktor functions in the film as a kind of impersonation of Berlin itself. All the same, he exerts a powerful attraction and Luis soon falls for him.

It seems that the film doesn’t really want to escape a few stereotypes. Maybe it scatters them around as orientation clues in a complex plot that jumps between several alternative realities. On the other hand, it also makes the story more universally recognizable and discloses a pursuit of a more effective moralistic statement.

At the same time, in addition to being topically relevant, Lose Your Head brings genuine authentic moments. Of course, the film does not get even close to passing the infamous Bechdel test, but feminists might still enjoy the curious mutation of the male gaze in its scopophilic objectification of a male gay youth. The sex scenes are bold but sincere and convince in their depiction of passion and intimacy. In general, the depiction of a gay relationship is almost emancipatory in its avoidance of the metrosexual visual platitudes.

for more infos and screening times see Berlinale Programme

Hey, it’s already next week – 63rd Berlinale film festival’s hustle of films, exhibitions, press conferences, workshops, handshakes, camera flashes, flickering of projectors and lights going off and off again. On Potsdamer Platz the empty tickets booths are already waiting for film enthusiasts of one sort and the red carpets – to be rolled out for another, and the fresh, out of print programme brochures await your notes, dog-ears and markings.

The festival committee board selected 400 films from more than 6000 applications. Wieland Speck, the director of Panorama section, alone viewed reportedly close to 1000 films in order to pick the lucky 52 for Berlinale’s biggest section. The festival goer too is now confronted with as difficult a task of skimming the rich programme to what would be worth the time of standing the lines and sitting the darkness. The good news are that Café Babel’s multilingual team will be reporting directly from the scene in the effort to make the selection task easier and more informed. As a matter of fact, we already started previewing.

According to the festival’s ever jolly director Dieter Kosslick press conference note on Monday, this years Competition section will try to make a balancing act between big commercial productions and contributions from the independent film scene that becomes increasingly more active, makes films quicker and more of them. Women, both as filmmakers and protagonists, will constitute a guiding thread of this Competition. That emancipatory trends are a core of Berlinale’s self-identity as a film festival is not very surprising. Facts on the ground are always much more inspiring. For example the fact that for the first time in its history, the majority of Berlinale’s jury – four out of seven jury members – are women.

Berlin’s traditional role as the gateway between East and West, even though this polarity may sound outdated, still brings a great number of films from Central and Eastern Europe and Asia to festivals screens.

The above mentioned bear-less but trend-setting Panorama section allots a high portion of its selection this year to brave independent cinema from the Americas. According to Speck, there are positive signs that the US film scene has finally recovered from the “airless Bush era” and we can now enjoy its comeback and a fresh spirit of arrogance and self-criticism. Latin and South Americas also produced a filmic abundance and an effort was made for it to be reflected in the programme. Middle East remains to be one of the central topics of Panorama. The recent elections in Israel create some hope of improvement for the deadlocked situation in Palestine which is in focus of many films. Another focal point of Panorama, the examination the consequences of the lingering economic crisis and the fears of the middle class, also occupies the attention of Forum. Being Berlinale’s most daring section, Forum is dedicated to the cinematic productions which lie in the overlapping area between film and other visual and performative arts and pushes the limits of the formal conventional borders of film as a medium. Being maybe the most challenging section, it does usually succeed avoiding to fall into the trap of the museum-like and sterile abstraction mysticism and remains devoted to giving new forms of expression to relevant ongoing issues. Forum's director Christoph Terhechte announced that during this Berlinale many important contribution will be coming from Europe and especially from countries that are recently mentioned mostly in the context of the economic crisis.

Commemorating Hitler’s rise to power 80 years ago is one of the reasons to dedicate a Homage to the French documentary film director, author and journalist Claude Lanzmann and award him the Honorary Golden Bear. Lanzmann is mostly known for his renowned monumental documentary on Holocaust, which is still one of the foremost influential films on the subject. Another reason for the retrospective is an opportunity to show most of his films in digitally restored format and to prevent his paramount work from sinking into oblivion.

Café Babel’s editorial team in Berlin will abstain from the auratic question à la Bild, which superstars are coming to Berlinale this year, at least for now. In a city, where the alternative becomes a kind of a strong, almost conformist obligation, answering such a question becomes structurally impossible, as there is no consensus about the definition of a star. “But what about George Clooney?” asked a curious journalist referring to the current filming project in Babelsberg. “He was not invited”, Kosslick nonchalantly replied, “because he is already here”.

For their touching documentary, American and British directors Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall got on the ground in Kampala, Uganda, to record the lifes and struggles of the local gay and lesbian or 'kuchu' activists, who combat a repressive system and fight for their equality.

Most known of them is David Kato, who was murdered in January 2011 and became a famous representative of the fight for human rights. Call Me Kuchu will premiere on 11 February at the 2012 Berlin film festival . cafebabel.com interviewed the directors by e-mail shortly before they boarded a flight to the German capital.

Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall. Photos courtesy of Call Me Kuchu

cafebabel Berlin: Katherine, Malika, you've been able to get very close access to activists in Uganda. Was it difficult to get this access, as you are not from Uganda?

David Kato was actually the first person we were in contact with as we started researching the film from the US in 2009. Upon our arrival, David was the one who first introduced us to various members of the kuchu community, a gesture that proved to be a crucial step towards gaining the community’s trust. From there, we took careful measures to approach everyone respectfully, and explained exactly what we were trying to do. We also tried to make clear to them that we wanted to document their stories well beyond the sound bytes they were accustomed to providing to journalists. There were definitely people who chose not to be filmed, and we respected their wishes of course. But those who decided to let us into their lives did so because they wanted to be involved in a project that would get their stories out, and we were surprised at the intimacy that engendered.

cafebabel Berlin: You’ve also got very close access to David Kato. How is the David Kato you met in comparison to the famous public human rights-campaigner?

Since his murder, David has been mythologised as a courageous and passionate human rights activist - which is exactly what he was. However, over the time that we spent filming with him, we also got to know a man who was charismatic yet vulnerable, sharp witted and often afraid to sleep alone. As is true of the heroes of any movement, some of these character and situational nuances have been overshadowed by the broad strokes of his accomplishments. Our hope is that Call Me Kuchu will help supplement the canonised David Kato as a long-format character study, and ensure that people understand that he was a normal man who went to astounding lengths to liberate Uganda’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

cafebabel Berlin: What was your motivation to go to Uganda and make a movie about LGBT rights in that corner of the world?

We had both read about the tabling of Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill, and we were increasingly disturbed by its implications. Malika had also been following the case of Victor Mukasa, a transgender man who, not long before the bill was tabled, had won a landmark case in the Ugandan high court. We were intrigued to learn that while the country’s sodomy laws were still routinely enforced, and even harsher laws were being considered, the country’s judicial system was independent enough to allow kuchus to reclaim their rights. We also learned that these court cases were being used by an increasingly organised LGBT community in Uganda to fight back against state-sanctioned homophobia. We spoke about heading to Uganda to check out the situation, and found ourselves on a plane bound for Kampala two weeks later.

Of course, David’s brutal murder changed the film’s trajectory, and to some extent our motivations for working on the film as well. While we had always been keen to get the story of Kampala’s kuchus out into the world, that sentiment became far more urgent and personal when David died. We essentially documented the entire last year of his life, and since his life was cut short, it ended up being during a time when he was at the pinnacle of his activism, when his philosophies and oration were most concrete and well-formulated, and when his voice and understanding of the complexity of the scenario was strongest. Therefore, both of us felt the responsibility to honor his life by making the best film we could, and ensuring that it has as broad of a reach as possible.

cafebabel Berlin: Do you think the movie will be able to make a difference?

While the LGBT community certainly suffers under Uganda’s harsh state-sanctioned homophobia, many of the kuchus we met were not only victims. David Kato and his fellow activists worked hard to change their own fate through every means possible: the Ugandan courts, the United Nations, the international news media. As a result, Call Me Kuchu is a nuanced story of empowerment as much as persecution.

cafebabel Berlin: Did filming Call me Kuchu make a difference for you personally?

The most important lesson for us both has been about the responsibility inherent to filmmaking, especially when it involves real people and contentious issues. In our case, that responsibility has involved not only creatively yet accurately representing the lives of the film’s protagonists, but also considering the impact the film may have on their safety in Uganda. While filming, we were always treading a fine line to ensure that we could record the most intimate stories while not revealing information that could put anyone at risk.

World Premiere: February 11, 17:00, Cinestar 7

February 12, 14:30, Cinestar 7

February 13, 22:30, Cinestar 7

Watch the film's trailer here