69th International Film Festival in Berlin
Charlotte Rampling Photo by Terry O’Neill
“The world in which we live is reflected in contemporary cinema. The personal is political, the old slogan from the 1968 Women’s Lib movement is experiencing a new currency.
– Dieter Kosslick, Festival Director”
This year’s 69th Berlinale claims to reflect the world we live in by putting women in charge of the camera. The Competition’s line-up boasts that it’s not only about the #Metoo movement in Hollywood or equal opportunity for female directors, but rather an entire examination and much needed revision of traditionally male, pale and stale cinema. How many times does women’s history have to repeat itself?
Of the seventeen films in total submitted into the Competition, which are vying for the Golden and Silver Bears, seven were directed by female filmmakers. This represents 41.2 % and is the figure that has been used to promote the competition this year in most press releases. However, if one digs deeper into the Berlinale Gender Report, into the coveted category of direction, on the basis of current films in the Berlinale programme, 34.8% of overall directors are women, and 60.9% of the entire competition is still wholly dominated and directed by men.
Read the full review at The Berlin Film Journal here: The Personal Is Political
Berlinale 2019 Review: Öndög
by Sophie Mayer
Dulamjav Enkhtaivan © Wang Quan’an
“The technological advancement that mankind is so proud of has distorted us to some extent. Living in giant civilized cities makes it easy for us to forget the essential fact that we are just animals and part of the larger world. The nomadic way of life in Mongolia leaves people no choice but to maintain a much closer relationship with nature. Making a film in Mongolia provides a point of view for reflecting on the meaning of human civilisation from the perspective of nature. I am always longing for nature; in this sense I am Mongolian.
– Wang Quan’an, Director”
To understand China today and Wang’s reflection on the meaning of human civilisation, it is vital to reference the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976) whose sole aim was to preserve Chinese Communism by purging capitalism and reinstating Maoism. The year of the Pig (2019) marks the centenary of the May 4th Movement, in which nationalist student protests erupted in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. It is seventy years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China and sixty years since the failed Tibetan uprising forced Dalai Lama to flee to India.
The country’s slow recovery has been watched with interest and despite a significant Chinese presence at the Berlinale this year, two films Zhang Yimou’s “One Second” and “Better Days” by Derek Kwok-cheung Tsang, due to be screened were yanked from the festival line up. It appears that the China today is in the centre of another political fever, in the form of an anti-corruption crackdown and a harsh stifling of dissenting views. Historical dehumanization, technological isolation and the loss of emotional participation in nature has resulted in global cosmic and social isolation. Wang Lina, a Chinese Director explains that “movies are born from the chaos of all people. What they record are not completed thought, but the formation of thought, a premise of faith.”
Read the full review at The Berlin Film Journal here: Öndög
Berlinale 2019 Review: Elisa & Marcela
by Sophie Mayer
Natalia de Molina, Greta Fernández © Netflix
“Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of degree of artifice, of stylization. – Susan Sontag Notes on Camp 1966”
When Susan Sontag described and put a name to the sensibilities of ‘Camp’ in 1966 she captured a ‘badge of identity, the ideas (the intellectual history) and the behaviour (social history)’ of an epoch of largely homosexual, gay men. In contrast to ‘Camp’ and it’s bias towards ‘the love of the theatrical, exaggerated, unnatural’, very little has been dissected aesthetically and exclusively by women for homosexual women. Rather, on the contrary, being Lesbian and its mode of aestheticism has been defined mainly in terms of beauty as ‘butch dykes or pornographic nymphs’ in main-stream media. This has resulted in the invisibility of an authentic ‘badge of identity’ and stylization for Lesbian women.
Isabel Coixet’s Elisa & Marcela is the portrayal of Lesbian love set in the late 19th century Spanish city of La Coruña between Elisa Sánchez Loriga (Natalia De Molina) and Marcela Gracia Ibeas, (Greta Fernandez) which blossomed into the first-ever recorded marriage between two women. “It took ten years to come to the screen. People didn’t really want to touch it and they didn’t really understand it,” says Coixet of her difficulty getting this true story of ‘Elisa & Marcela’ made. Coixet exploits the romantic love between these two women through gothic architecture, the delicate violin, the searching piano and the expansive aestheticism of 19th century wilderness.
Read the full review at The Berlin Film Journal here: Elisa & Marcela
Berlinale 2019 Review: Flatland
by Sophie Mayer
Faith Baloyi © Flatland Productions
““Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace”
The opening film in the Berlinale Panorama, Flatland from Jenna Bass, exudes suffering with a Western flavour set inside the fragile democratic ‘shell’ of the Post-Mandela South African landscape. We open on the surreal Badlands of the Great Karoo, wide open skies and vast plains, the land so flat, “you can see your future rolling in.” It’s a land that has been fought over, vilified and torched for centuries. The sacred Khoisan tribes of these regions remain ominously forgotten to this day.
Bass opens with a wedding ceremony in a church between skittish, virginal bride Natalie Jonkers (Nicole Fortuin) and her policeman groom, Bakkies Bezuindenhout (De Klerk Oelofse) in the boondocks of Beaufort West, a town in the Western Cape province in South Africa. To fully appreciate the nuances of this story, one needs to reflect on the context of its politics. South Africa’s economic history goes back to the discovery of minerals in the nineteenth century, initially diamonds and thereafter gold. Legalised race discrimination, white supremacist ideologies, coupled with the cruelty and repression of the National Party Rule in ‘Apartheid’ South Africa made the ground ripe for revolution inside the country. By the time the peoples war was over, and the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela had taken power back in May 1994, the democracy inherited was a shell without any substance.
Read the full review at The Berlin Film Journal here: Flatland
Berlinale 2019 Review: Vice
by Sophie Mayer
Amy Adams, Christian Bale © Matt Kennedy / Annapurna Pictures, LLC. All Rights Reserved
““In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
— George Orwell”
What is the truth? Does it even exist? The thrilling polemic in this year’s Berlinale, Vice from Adam Mckay is a comedic expose on the path to power which examines the culture of 21st Century American Politics through Shakespearean verse. McKay’s film, much like his earlier work (The Big Short, 1995) exposes the tension between the imagined reality that we think is real versus the truth. In Vice, McKay digs for the truth behind the Cheney’s ruthless rise to power within a serpent’s nest of corporate dynasties and family conflicts.
It is a systematic culture of corruption that allowed a Wyoming reared, Yale dropout, working dead-end jobs to flourish and become the most powerful Vice President and megalomaniac in the history of the United States. The first glimpse we see of Cheney is in 1963 Wyoming, as an inebriated twenty-two-year-old behind the wheel, his face smashed from a bar brawl, soon to be pulled over and locked up by a policeman. It is evident that Dick Cheney would not have amounted to much were it not for his wife, who regaling the horrific flashbacks of her abusive father, demanded “Either you have the courage to become someone or I’m gone.”
Read the full review at The Berlin Film Journal here: Vice
Berlinale 2019 Review: Der Goldene Handschuh
by Sophie Mayer
Margarethe Tiesel, Jonas Dassler © Boris Laewen / 2018 bombero int./Warner Bros. Ent.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
― Friedrich Nietzsche”
We live in a sphere of opposites, a place where good and evil, light and dark, faith and reason, love and lust exist side by side in an uneasy truce. Inside this realm is the fragile sphere where the exquisite and the cursed collide. Based on a true story, Fatih Akin’s Competition Entry Der Goldene Handschuh (The Golden Glove) captures these collisions through the inherited trauma of a serial killer, Fritz Honka (Jonas Dessler) and the dark fissures of a post war German society, fraught with memories of growing up in the Third Reich. The memories of World War II, both first hand and inherited are subtly dissected and disembowelled in this gruesome social study.
Honka was a disfigured, deplorable, hunch back of Notre Dame figure, psychologically and physically scarred by the abuse and viciousness of his youth in the Russian concentration camps. He emerged from the bowels of post war society, the lowest social strata and became villainous during his scandalous trial in 1976. The film is a shadowy dive into the underbelly of the Capitalist Dream off Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, a heady medley of alcoholism, rape, misery and criminal activity. Set in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district, Akin tells the true story of serial killer Fritz Honka who lured his victims home from the bar Der Goldene Handschuh. Honka’s persistent erectile dysfunction and escalating alcoholism fuel his sadism towards the “old bags” whom he solicits at the bar, cementing the film with a Fassbinder inspired morally bankrupt centre.
Read the full review at The Berlin Film Journal here: Der Goldene Handschuh
To All The Witches They Could Not Burn
by Sophie Mayer
Maggie Mulubwa as Shula
“As long as women are denied the priesthood, we will try to make our own rituals at our own kitchen altars and we will sew our own magical capes at our own sewing machines. – Erica Jong, Witches, 1981”
In the hyper testosterone fuelled Trump age, arguably, one of the most poignant stories to come out of 2018 is from newcomer director, Rungano Nyoni who delivers a narrative fuelled tale, I Am Not A Witch (2017) which bursts and leaps from the screen as it follows the mysticism and misfortune of a nine-year-old girl capriciously accused of being a witch. Witch (n.) Old English “female magician, sorceress” – the primary example of the feared and maligned woman. Witches and witchcraft have been a quagmire of myth, misinformation and Halloween apparatus for centuries. A women’s body is both a place of resistance and exploitation. It is in this fractious space that Nyobni’s image of the woman as the eternally damned witch is conjured. The form of the film allows the spectator to possess the real world, to capture the appearance of a female divinity within a patriarchal culture.
Earlier this month, the 2019 Golden Globes nominations were announced—and, yet again, the directing category is 100% male. Hollywood, the boy’s club behemoth continues to profit off its assembly line of patriarchal tropes. Finding films with originality, energy and ambition is increasingly difficult against money spinning blockbusters and the relentless Disney-fication of our childhoods. According to The Numbers, Walt Disney has the lion’s market share with 26% of all movie distribution in 2018, followed by the Warner Bros with 16,5%. The gulf between independent film and blockbuster bombs continues to widen. The top selling worldwide blockbuster of the year was Avengers: Infinity War (2018), with China the largest contributing territory.
Read the full review at The Berlin Film Journal here: To All The Witches They Could Not Burn
Skate Kitchen: The Closest Thing To Flying
by Sophie Mayer
Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) and Devon (Jaden Smith)
“When a girl first starts skate boarding, something magical happens, says Nina Moran, “a skateboard is like their flying broom, when you get on a board, you literally feel like you can fly and go wherever you want.”
like you can fly and go wherever you want.”
It was on the G4 Train in Brooklyn that director and writer Crystal Moselle, WolfPack (2015) overheard Nina Moran talking to her friend about skateboarding. The outcome of this chance encounter is a film called Skate Kitchen (2018) which follows a girl group of teenage skateboarders shredding the skater bro stereotype and flying through the streets of New York.
Instead of trying to exclusively create or record, Moselle’s Skate Kitchen attempts a synthesis of both with a credible form that matches the spectator’s expectations throughout the film. We follow a spectacled, introverted teenage skater, Camille (newcomer Rachelle Vinberg) who sneaks out of suburban Long Island, to meet an all-girl, New York City-based skateboarding crew called Skate Kitchen. One day they advertise a meet-up through social media at a skate park and Camille goes into the city, where she befriends Janay (Dede Lovelace), Indigo (Ajani Russell), Kurt (Nina Moran), Ruby (Kabrina Adams), Eliza (Jules Lorenzo) and Quinn (Brenn Lorenzo). She is accepted by the crew, clashes with her Colombian mother, (Orange Is The New Black‘s Elizabeth Rodriguez) and falls for the alluring sk8er boi, fresh from never-never land, with dyed red hair (Jaden Smith). Moselle focuses the form of the film on challenging gender norms and traditionally male dominated spaces which makes Skate Kitchen emblematic of political progression rather than just another dull girl-meets-boy trope.
Read the full review at The Berlin Film Journal here: The Closest Thing To Flying