A Film a Week - Bright Future / Viitor luminos

 previously published on Cineuropa

The abrupt fall of the long-lasting dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania seems to be a trendy topic in the realm of national cinema lately. Tudor Giurgiu dealt with it in his docudrama Freedom (2023) and Bogdan Mureşanu did so in his hyperlinked mosaic The New Year That Never Came (2024), while Vlad Petri also touched upon it in his documentary Between Revolutions (2023).

Producer-turned-filmmaker Andra MacMasters chose a different angle for her documentary and directorial debut, Bright Future, which could, for the most part, serve as a “prequel” of sorts to the aforementioned events. After its premiere at last year’s IDFA and a screening at this year’s edition of CPH:DOX, it is now playing in Beldocs’ The Battle for Reality section.

MacMasters opens the film with archival footage of Lenin’s monument being transported and placed on its pedestal in Bucharest, showcasing the conviction of Romanian communists and their dedication to the cause. She will come back home for the poignant ending, but in the meantime, the filmmaker takes us on a trip to Pyongyang, where the 13th edition of the World Youth and Student Festival took place. The large Romanian delegation had an especially honourable status there, owing to the “extraordinary friendship” between Ceauşescu and North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. It was the summer of 1989, and the collapse of the regime was just six months away.

The festival itself was organised by the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students. For the latter, it was the last edition of the gathering: it would also be declared illegal later that year owing to its ties with communist regimes. The festival itself was not ideologically strict, as it brought together 20,000 people from left-leaning youth and student organisations from 177 countries, but the fact that it took place in the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen Square exposed the divisions between the delegations from the West and those from the communist countries. However, some topics they did have in common, and those topics are still present in the global left-wing discourse: the colonial past and neo-colonial present; the fight for human, women’s and gay rights; the fight against capitalism, imperialism and climate change; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and support for the oppressed.

The footage filmed by amateur filmmaker and educator Emilian Urse shows us the atmosphere of the festival: the theatrical ceremonies, the heated debates and the parties where we can witness oddities such as the whole hall singing and dancing to the Korean-language cover of the Modern Talking song “Brother Louie”. Through it, we can see the youthful, idealistic zeal and the high hopes for a “bright future”, as well as the political games that were being played on that level as well. Although we know that the end of the Cold War was near, the subjects remain completely unaware of it, despite some warning signs.

But in spite of the film containing some clandestinely obtained footage (the abundant use of fish-eye lenses is a dead giveaway), it is quite “creative” as a documentary. Most of its narrative material comes from printed sources, which vary from communist countries’ official press publications to Western press and archives, and it is read out by voice actors in a variety of languages off screen. It is deftly welded together by editor Andrei Gorgan, but it still remains very much Andra MacMasters’ work both in terms of the research and the overall finished product. On the surface, Bright Future might be about the past, but it challenges its viewers to reflect on their present and future.

A Film a Week - Patient No. 1 / Patsient #1

 previously published on Cineuropa

The early-to-mid 80s in the former Soviet Union were known as “the time of state funerals,” given that party leaders and heads of state were dying in quick succession one after another. They were old when they “inherited” power and were basically the tools of a system that was running on fumes and powered by inertia. Georgian filmmaker Rezo Gigineishvili takes us back to that period of time with his newest feature Patient #1, which has just opened the official competition of this year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

When we meet our protagonist, a nurse named Sasha (Olga Makeeva), her primary concern is to prepare her singing act for the nurses’ ball that is about to take place in the hospital. Out of the blue, she is selected, interviewed by a high-ranking party member (Igor Chernevich) and approved to become the primary nurse who discreetly takes care of a very special patient. That patient is none other than the Secretary General (Aleksandr Filipenko), a man in such ill health that he can barely support his vital functions, but one who still believes that he has real power.

At first, it seems like a job like any other, for which Sasha’s special skills of being discreet, polite and unobtrusive come in handy. But the situation is way more complex for her, for the hospital, for the Party and for the whole state. Simply put, different players have different requests, political and personal, for the Secretary General whose mind is not quite sound, and most of them see Sasha as the designated channel of communication. She has no other option than to try to balance different powers greater than herself, and she cannot take any rest. The questions are “why?” and “for how long?”, and the answer may lie in the motto that power is never to be given, but always to be taken.

Rezo Gigineishvili has made a career directing commercials, music videos and Russian-language repertoire romantic comedies before achieving notoriety on the film festival circuit with the based-on-true-events Georgian-language film Hostages in 2017. That film was similarly set in the 1980s and likewise dealt with a system running on its own inertia, through the story of a futile attempt by a group of young, West-leaning intellectuals to escape by hatching a plan to hijack a plane. With Patient #1, the period is the same, but the mood is even gloomier. There is no youthful enthusiasm or dreams of escape, and even when Sasha manages to sneak away for the night to blow off some steam at a dance party, the Party has no trouble finding her.

Gigineishvili masterfully commands the sombre mood. The narrow aspect ratio, the desaturated colours of the interiors and the brutalist angular buildings in the rare exterior shots make the point on their own, as do the contrasts between the usually static shots that depict the reality and the hand-held ones that show the darkly dreamy, almost nightmarish insights into the mind of a person who thinks that he still has power. The mood is further coloured by Giya Kancheli’s score which moves from a minimalist, almost atonal palette at the beginning, towards the neoclassical, before finally ending in the rock realm.

The performances are also inspired throughout. There is more than a drop of Jessica Chastain in Olga Makeeva’s interpretation of Sasha, which comes handy for the interplay with the rest of the ensemble. Veteran actor Aleksandr Filipenko proves to be a perfect choice to portray both the fragility and the conviction of a dying party leader, while one scene is enough for Inna Churikova, playing his wife, to deliver an acting masterclass in her final big screen role.

Deliberately slow-paced to communicate a sense of gravity, Patient #1 serves as an evocative reminder of bygone times. As such, it is also a potent comment of our current times which also run on fumes and inertia.

A Film a Week - The Rise and Fall of Comrade Zylo / Shkelqimi dhe renia e shokut Zylo

 previously published on Cineuropa

The satirical novel The Rise & Fall of Comrade Zylo by Dritëro Agolli was very popular among readers right from its first publication as a series of columns in a satirical newspaper in 1972, and then as a book in 1973, as it mocked the incompetent officials in a communist dictatorship, while not questioning the system itself. Now, it is considered a seminal piece of 20th-century Albanian literature, but so far, it has not been adapted for the screen. This has now been put right by one of the most well-established Albanian helmers, Fatmir Koçi, who has been on the scene since the 1980s.

The Rise & Fall of Comrade Zylo world-premiered in the newly established Critics’ Picks competition programme of Tallinn Black Nights. Its topic and tone should go down well with audiences who have some historical knowledge about life under the communist dictatorship, while its purely filmic references to noir and the Nouvelle Vague work equally well in all contexts.

As in the source material, our point of view is established by the narrator and protagonist, Demka (Donald Shehu), a man who gave up on his dream of becoming a writer in favour of making a living by writing reports and speeches for high-ranking party officials. He is therefore bitter and constantly on call, and his wife Zenepja (Xhoana Karaj) therefore advises him to take on less work. However, he does not know how to break the cycle of being overworked and exploited.

His newest boss is our title character, Zylo (Alex Seitaj), a man with grandiose ambitions but limited capabilities. His ideas are neither original nor applicable to reality; they are just platitudes taken from the communist propaganda textbooks, so it comes as no surprise that they all end in failure. In his madness, Zylo is supported by his wife, Adila (Enisa Hysa), and his neighbour, influential journalist Cleopatra (Jorida Meta), while some other comrades in the committee cannot wait to see his downfall. It seems that Demka has no choice but to follow him wherever he goes, whether it’s to a remote village where he “preaches” the need to consume culture to the over-worked and extremely poor farmers, or to a country in Africa with which Zylo wants to establish some kind of cultural exchange. But then the plot starts to thicken on both the work and domestic fronts.

Agolli’s novel has been adapted into a script quite faithfully by the filmmaker himself in collaboration with Mike Downey and Jonathan Preece, who was the writer for his more international works, such as Amsterdam Express and Elvis Walks Home. The trouble with such faithfulness in an adaptation is that some things do not transfer well between the different media. For his part, Koçi tries to break the rigidity of the chapter-like structure with long, dialogue-driven scenes, by visualising the narrator’s thoughts and musings in black and white, and by using the styles of different historical genres, but nevertheless, this kind of structure would be better suited to theatre. Some other debatable choices would be the almost constant use of Karl Heortweard’s score in different musical keys and genres, and the broad acting by all of the cast members, although the latter actually suits the satirical genre of the movie. Meanwhile, the technical work that has gone into the production design and costume design faithfully re-creates the atmosphere and the feeling of the early 1970s.

A Film a Week - The Silent Revolution / Das schweigende Klassenzimmer

Stalinstadt, GDR, 1956. A group of high school boys travels to West Berlin to see a film, a B-movie in which the actress shows her naked body, something that was not considered appropriate in socialist cinema. The point is not the movie, but the journal shown before: the report of Soviet tanks entering Hungary to crush the very first anti-communist revolution attempt in Europe. Sick of the Soviet occupation and domestic socialist propaganda, they decide to convince all of their class in joining them for two minutes of silence as the sign of the protest against socialists killing other socialists.

That causes a lot of stir in the rigid school system and the whole class falls under suspicion by the school and political authorities. It might seem a bit exaggerated, but lot of thinks are at stake in a country that relies on propaganda and paranoia. Were the school kids listening to the foreign radio? How did they get their information? What motivated them to act? Were they trying to conduct a revolution of their own? The pressure amounts on their parents and on them and the group dynamics shift from unity achieved through the debate to the state of cracking.

The Silent Revolution is a fiction film written and directed by Lars Kraume and based on Dietrich Grastka’s novel inspired by true events. At the beginning, it seems that what we expect, we shall get from it: a slightly above TV-worthy period piece written from nowadays mindset treating the events in the past with some kind of an agenda woven into the film’s text. The acting is decent, the period details are precise and the toned down pace and rhythm is just tolerable as we are expecting that the atmosphere of threat will be developed over the course of action.

The trouble is we do not get it. Kraume fails to convince us that his young characters are in danger of any sort. They will get an official warning from school? So what! Their unity will be tested under pressure? It always is. Even the characters themselves are thin, usually reduced to one or two personality traits, so we have a rebel coming from the ranks of “red bourgeois”, a pragmatic from a working class family, a generic radical girlfriend whose loyalty will be switched from one boy to another because of the “political” and not emotional reasons, the system firm believer, the tag-along people etc. etc. The dialogue is, appropriately, stiff and banal and Kraume even tries and fails to win us over with the oldest trick in the book: the love triangle, while he barely touches the social aspect of the whole thing.

And that is too bad, from a personal point of view, because I am usually a sucker for the things like coming of age, school-set films, youth rebellion and Cold War history. I am ready to “buy” it even when it is a bit sloppily done and unremarkable. Presumed good intentions aside, The Silent Revolution is just too flat.

A Film a Week - Liberation Day

Unlikely as it might seem, Laibach and North Korea are match made in heaven. Slovenian band was the first musical act from the West to perform in Pyongyang, mildly (or not so mildly) shocking both Western and Korean audiences on national holiday, the titular Liberation Day. The “pitch” to the Koreans was the idea that their country is being misunderstood (with the label of heavily militarized communist despotism) just like Laibach, a conceptual act which toying with different iconographies of dictatorship while having to deal with label “fascist”.

The man who made this strange cultural exchange happen was Morten Traavik, the Norwegian theatre director and provocateur who had previously dealt with both Laibach (he did a music video for them) and the North Koreans (he organized a tour for their national military choir in Norway, which was considered scandalous even in that open-minded Scandinavian country). He directed the show for which the audience reacted with genuine confusion and, with the help of the editor Ugis Olte, the documentary about the whole ordeal.

Just imagine the level of mistrust and miscommunication between the two worlds, one of them being extremely paranoid with all the “aparatchiks”, spies, secretaries, committee members and whatnot hanging around the band during the show preparations, trying to censor the whole thing (and usually succeeding). Laibach members, technicians and the whole entourage around them are not helping either: the frontman Milan Fras keeps wearing his “Nazi” hat even during the official photo-shooting, and the main ideologist Ivan “Jani” Novak almost caused the catastrophic incident by simply going for a walk, against the advise.

Naturally, the concert was also a strange compromise. First of all, the equipment in the hall is from the middle of last century. Also the music and the concept of Laibach is strange and even disturbing in the context of humourless North Korean society, so lots of last minute changes were being made, usually the things like projected videos and similar stuff. Maybe the craziest of all fuck-ups was the issue of the dialect: for one song, the band has translated some verses from German to Korean, but their pronunciation sounded suspiciously “southern”.

But the concert actually happened, and everybody involved was, well... satisfied. So, how about the audiences? In Slovenia at least, where the whole tour was covered in daily papers, an issue popped up just after the premiere: according to some critics, the film is neither about Laibach nor North Korea, but about Traavik himself, making it a publicity stunt. They have actually missed the point by a mile. It might not be about Laibach and Traavik might have made himself more important, but it definitely is about the parallel universe of North Korea. And in that universe every team has its leader, the one who is responsible. In the case of this particular show, that person was Traavik and it just shows how well he got the point about the North Korean culture. If it is not a shiny example of cultural exchange, I really do not know what would it be...

A Film a Week - The Young Karl Marx / Le jeune Karl Marx

Contrary to his serious-as-heart-attack philosophical and economical scriptures, Karl Marx, at least in his youth years, was an interesting person. Being usually the smartest person in the room didn’t prevent him to be a drunken, irresponsible asshole, which makes him almost ideal subject of an insightful, informative, light-weight and fun to watch biopic as is the case with Raoul Peck’s (Lumumba, last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro) The Young Karl Marx that covers the philosopher's years in Paris, Brussels and London.

“The atheist, socialist Jew”, as his wife half-seriously calls himself, Karl Marx (played by August Deihl of Inglorious Basterds, The Counterfeiters and Allied fame) tries to provide for his family in bubbling, post-Bonaparte Paris as a writer of thought-provoking articles in German and French journals. He and his “fallen” aristocratic wife Jenny von Westphalen (Vicki Kreips of A Most Wanted Man) are living in relative poverty and their baby is constantly getting ill. Instead of exploring other career options, both of them frequent leftist political manifestations, getting in touch with political figures as anarchists Proudhon (played like a wise Zen-master by Olivier Gourmet), Bakunin and Weitling (Alexander Scheer).

There he also meets (for the second time, which is one of film’s punchline) young, boyishly good-looking and bourgeois well-behaved Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske), son of wealthy industrialist and already an author of the famous economical study The Condition of the Working Class in England. The bromance starts and the rest is history: the invention of “Scientific Socialism”, the transformation of The League of the Just into The League of Communists, and taking over the international workers movement.

The film has a considerable educational value. The script written by Peck and French veteran screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer uses the real letters two of the minds behind scientific, revolutionary socialism exchanged throughout the years as the primary source so the audience, especially the ones who haven’t wrestled with Marxism in high-school and college years, can see the real people behind the philosophy, social, economical and political theory. The level of mutual respect and commitment to the work from the duo is commendable and the fun they have theoreticising seems great.

Also, Peck and Bonitzer have a good eye for the details of the period, not just the visual details, but the complete atmosphere considering the class system, early form of liberal capitalism not squeamish towards the child labor and the constant threat of repression and surveillance. Some would say that nothing much has changed since, since nowadays capitalism is as brutal as the one from almost 200 years ago and new revolutions are being debated in caffes and apartments in vibrant, metropolitan cities.

The other qualities of the script are its witty dialogues and a strong level of self-consciousness that transforms into brilliant irony that pictures socialism either as a blind idealist or as a destructive fantasy cooked in the minds of upper classes. Having in mind the historical events following the intellectual adventurism of Marx, Engels and the rest of the bunch, it is fair to say that the prominent socialists maybe detested bourgeois sense of morality, but were first to accept the enemy’s goods and lifestyle as their own. The love for champaign is inherent, some would say.

The irony extends even to the meta-level, knowing that the director of this biopic is Raoul Peck, former Haitian minister of culture, and a political figure par excellence. It is safe to assume that it takes to be a “champaign socialist” to know one. Otherwise, his sense of directing is clear and lucid enough not to get in the way of an interesting material up until the very end destroyed by on the nose symbolism of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone and montage of the revolutionary events from the 20^th century. There is no Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Honecker (if we want to stay on the grounds of German socialism), though.