A Film a Week - Extraordinary / Glavonja

 previously published on Cineuropa

As a global society, we are becoming increasingly aware that we are not all the same, so a “one size fits all” approach cannot be applied to everyone. The differences between specific needs and reactions can and should be noted from an early age, so that we can create a flexible world based on acceptance, which can serve as a decent home for everyone. In the cinematic world, this is being reflected in the ongoing trend towards movies for younger audiences featuring characters that are on the autism spectrum and sending the message that they should be accepted as they are.

The newest addition to this canon comes in the form of Extraordinary by Marina Andree Škop and Vanda Raymanová. It has already enjoyed a gala premiere and a wide theatrical release in Croatia. However, at BUFF Malmö, the film festival for children’s and youth audiences, it is celebrating its first international screening.

Alisa (newcomer Marta Mihanović) lives in the shadow of her brother Milan (Maks Kleončić), who is a bit out of the ordinary and whose needs mean he gets all of the attention from their parents (Ajda Smrekar and Matej Puc). Milan always wears a leather helmet on his head, since it helps him block out the loud sounds from the outside world. He is also able to walk along straight, clearly marked lines, and his preferred ritual is drawing straight lines on perfectly white sheets of paper with his pen. As Alisa likes to say, he lives in his own world.

The social services, represented by two agents (Judita Franković Brdar and Borko Perić), are always on the parents’ case, trying to take Milan to a medical facility, so the family moves from the city to the nearby countryside. After an accident befalls each of the over-stressed parents, they both end up in the local hospital, where the doctor (Csongor Kassai) and the stern head nurse (Gabriela Dzuríková) have sinister plans for them. So, the siblings, with the help of a trio of local kids playing detectives (Andrija Lamot, Mark Spiridonović and Martin Pišlar), set off on an adventure to find them, revealing a heist plot in the process. For the first time, the “extraordinary” Milan has to face the ordinary world…

The duo of directors works in perfect synergy here. Marina Andree Škop has made a name for herself with children’s films (for instance, the 2019 title My Grandpa Is an Alien) and knows how to gently steer her young actors in the desired direction. This is especially the case for the two leads, as Marta Mihanović showcases both her character’s inner strength and vulnerability at the same time, which is quite a task even for experienced thesps, while Maks Kleončić possesses the necessary mix of calmness and expressiveness that is needed for the character of Milan, who does not speak. On the other hand, Vanda Raymanová comes from the realm of animation, which is crucial for a heavily stylised film such as this one, where the characters exist against backgrounds consisting of photographic imagery refined with hand-drawn details, and where the travelling sequences are made in a cute form of 2D animation.

Extraordinary might be a tad over the top with its striking design cues and the almost cartoonish concepts of the adult characters. Also, the detective plot is possibly too far removed from the initial topic, so it might resonate better with parents than with children. But the simple, positive message of friendship and acceptance it conveys, as well as its unapologetic playfulness, makes it a praiseworthy effort.

A Film a Week - Greetings from Mars / Grüsse vom Mars

 previously published on Cineuropa

Much like Marc Rothemund’s Weekend Rebels, which played last year at the Zagreb Film Festival, in the KinoKino sidebar dedicated to younger audiences, Sarah Winkenstette’s Greetings from Mars, which is being shown in that same sidebar this year, takes its core subject of autism quite seriously. It is not used as a gimmick to propel comedy or drama around the young protagonist, but it is an integral part of his personality. Judging by its festival track record so far – a prolonged tour sprinkled with a handful of awards – the approach has paid off.

Our ten-year-old hero named Tom (Theo Kretschmer) is growing up with two siblings in a single-parent household. Since their father passed away recently, the mother, Vera (Eva Löbau, recently glimpsed in The Teachers’ Lounge, has little choice but to agree to a four-week business trip to China. For Tom, his daredevil brother Elmar (Anton Noltensmeter) and their teenage sister Nina (Lilli Lacher, glimpsed in last year’s Berlinale title Ivo), it means that they will have to spend that part of the summer holidays with their paternal grandparents, Horst (Michael Wittenborn, a character actor seen in Toni Erdmann and All Quiet on the Western Front) and Hanna (Hedi Kriegeskotte, mostly active on television), who are still coming to terms with their son’s passing.

Tom is interested in space exploration, and his dream is to become an astronaut and visit Mars. He can flood anyone who’ll listen with a ton of facts off the top of his head, on this and other topics, but he has a hard time managing everyday challenges, like seeing the colour red, hearing loud noises and enduring unwanted physical contact from anyone other than his mother. Tom sees staying with his hippie-like grandparents in their house with a red front door and no rules as a training mission for his future career as a space explorer. He has even found some ideal mission-related roles for his siblings, while the mystery surrounding the disappearance of an asteroid keeps his mind occupied. As is usually the case, adventures and new challenges will ensue…

Although it is pretty clear from the get-go that Tom is different from his (neuro-)typical siblings, the diagnosis is not uttered until the third-act climactic scene. That decision shows a certain seriousness and respect for the topic that Sebastian Grusnick and Thomas Möller dealt with in their book, which Winkenstette tries to adapt for the screen. Theo Kretschmer’s lived-in, but also measured, acting helps the cause as well, while the rest of the cast have no trouble striking up their own chemistry with the young lead and with each other.

However, some of the solutions that Winkenstette opts for are quite run-of-the-mill, such as Jakob Berger’s hand-held camerawork, while the on-the-nose score by André Feldhouse gets overbearing in its attempts to constantly spell out the desired emotional tone. But the film is actually saved by Nicole Kortlüke’s editing: not just because the animated material is deftly blended with the live-action shots, but also thanks to the roughness of the montage sequences when Tom gets agitated: in this way, the movie presents what is happening in his head in a compelling fashion.

In the end, Greetings from Mars accomplishes its mission of exploring and presenting “foreign inner universes” to neurotypical audiences with great empathy and warmth. Both children and their parents could learn a thing or two from Sarah Winkenstette’s film.

A Film a Week - Weekend Rebels / Wochenendrebellen

 previously published on Cineuropa

According to the statistics printed on a textual info-card during the ending of Marc Rothemund’s Weekend Rebels, one in every 100 children is autistic. Since autism is a spectrum, the manifestation of it and the needs of autistic people are diverse, so they very much depend on the response from their immediate environment – especially its understanding, acceptance and support.

Rothemund’s film is based on the true story of Mirco and Jason von Juterczenka, which was previously published as a blog and a book by Mirco himself. The Zagreb Film Festival has screened it in the Kino Kino competition, which showcases children’s flicks.

Jason was born with Asperger’s, which prevents him from functioning as neurotypical kids do. As the specialist informs his parents, Mirco (Florian David Fitz) and Fatime (Aylin Tezel), he can develop special interests and thrive by pursuing knowledge about them, but he needs a strict set of rules to abide by as well as their constant love and support. Jason (newcomer Cecilio Andersen) grows up to be a smart, curious boy interested in space, advanced physics and the preservation of the environment, but is also attached to some of his routines and rituals that make little sense to others.

At school, he is not accepted by his peers, and he sometimes reacts to their provocations with violence. One thing he gets from them, however, is the notion that he needs to pick a football club to support. Since his parents support different teams, he forges a system to test all of the German professional clubs against his set of rules so as to find the one he should support. Mirco volunteers to take him to games across Germany, which comes as a relief to Fatime, who is exhausted from caring for Jason and his needs.

Insights from Grandpa (Joachim Król) and from other football fans might come in handy, but Jason has to learn how to put up with a world that irritates him with loud noises, vivid colours, involuntary touches and situations that bring his rules into conflict with one another. Can Jason learn how to stand this outside world that he cannot control in order to fulfil his goal?

Weekend Rebels is clearly a film with a positive message of patience, tolerance and understanding to convey, which it does through the simple, but efficient, script by Richard Kropf. Marc Rothemund, best known for his acclaimed 2005 Berlinale title Sophie Scholl: The Final Days [+], directs it in a fitting, not overly obtrusive, way that is still dynamic enough to hold the attention of the target audiences – kids and their parents – even in the slightly repetitive scenes and sequences. The dynamic camerawork by Philip Peschlow in bright and vivid colours certainly helps, and so do the striking sound design by Lena Beck and the rapid editing by Hans Horn and Chris Mühlbauer. The omnipresent, gentle music by Johnny Klimek and Hans Hafner is, on the other hand, a bit too on the nose in its attempts to dictate the viewer’s feelings.

The acting is also solid throughout. Cecilio Andersen is bubbly and believable in the role of Jason, while Florian David Fitz imbues Mirco’s character with the gentle energy of a father willing to go the extra mile to please his son. On the other hand, Aylin Tezel does not have that much work to do as Fatime, but veteran thesp Joachim Król steals a few scenes as the football-loving Grandpa. In the end, Weekend Rebels overflows with warmth and empathy.

A Film a Week - Spring in Between / Hazama ni ikiru, haru

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

The spectre of autism can prove to be a slippery slope for filmmakers. Even if it does not necessarily end up on the territory of exploitation, it tends to be the defining characteristic for the characters with it, as we testified with the films like Rain Man and Forest Gump. Having that in mind, making a compelling, convincing and believable romance movie with at least one character somewhere on the spectre seems like a difficult, if not downright impossible task, and the Japanese filmmaker Rika Katsu undertook it for her debut feature Spring in Between that we had the chance to see at Nippon Connection.

Katsu opens the film with a parallel montage of a man seemingly playing with blue paint on its hands, but actually painting and a woman running to some kind of an open show, against the backdrop of music consisting of gentle piano and melancholic strings. He is actually an accomplished, even celebrated painter Tohru Okunai (Hio Miyazawa), and she runs to meet him at his exhibition. As we find out in the next string of scenes, she, Haru (Sakurako Konishi) is a low-rank journalist often berated by her boss, and her newest task is to interview Tohru and write a piece on him and his art.

As she prepares for the task, she gets more and more into Tohru’s art and Tohru himself, his quirks, rituals and self-imposed structure, although they reveal his diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, making him prone to obsessions and finding fascinating patterns in seemingly random things, acting on his impulses and apparent inability to empathize. For her, who finds some of those traits, although in a milder form, also in her own personality, it is not a game-changer. For her, it seems that Tohru is the only one able to really understand her, since her boss, colleagues and even her patronizing boyfriend (Yoshihiko Kosoda), also a journalist, but of a higher status in different type of paper definitely do not. But are those traits between the diagnosis and the relative functionality in the world really a promising beginning of a love story?

Working with her own script, Katsu manages to treat her characters with gentleness and even empathy, making their interest in each other seem genuine. The trouble is that, after a refreshing and promising start, she starts more and more relying on the romantic drama clichés in the terms of building up the events. However, the word play between the protagonist’s name (Haru means “spring” in Japanese) and her romantic interest’s obsession with natural phenomena, including cherry tree blossom in springtime add up to another meaning of the title, quite poetically so.

Directing-wise, her language is steady and clear, with the employment of usually controlled camerawork by Jun Fukumoto that tends to get a bit too fidgety in the scenes that try to signal some emotional uncertainty. Also, the way the director uses Toru Ishitsuka’s original score to mimic the emotions of the leading character and to trigger them within the viewers sometimes seems too obvious and therefore heavy-handed.

Hio Miyazawa, seen recently in Daishi Matsunaga’s Egoist (2022), continues to raise his profile with solid roles and good casting choices. But Sakurako Konishi, of Takashi Miike’s First Love (2019) fame, is really in command here, showing the complete control over her character. With the filmmaker’s noble intentions and the actors’ seamless effort, Spring in Between is definitely worth a watch, especially for festival-going, romance-loving crowds.