A Film a Week - Active Vocabulary

 previously published on Cineuropa

Preparations for war do not begin on the frontlines, or even at military training facilities. No, the narrative is laid out in the media for adults, and even at school for children. It seems unethical, and it is even forbidden outright in advanced Western democratic societies (although a teacher is allowed to intervene when students start expressing extremist or totalitarian worldviews), but it is a common practice in societies with lower democratic standards. Sometimes, the indoctrination is subtler, but in the case of Russia, it is completely obvious and very extreme. We were able to see it in this year’s hit documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin, co-directed by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin. The latter is a former teacher but also the film’s primary subject, narrator and cinematographer, who shared his experiences of the soul-crushing system of propaganda and recruitment of young people for cannon fodder.

The winner of DOK Leipzig’s German Documentary Competition, Yulia Lokshina’s Active Vocabulary, deals with the similar experiences of another teacher from Russia who had to leave her country, her position and her family behind in order to seek political asylum abroad. Back in 2022, Maria “Masha” Kalinitschewa was recorded by a student in her small English-language class of four when she shared her thoughts on the war in Ukraine, labelling it unjust and potentially disastrous both for Ukraine and for Russia. The candid mobile-phone recording reached the students’ parents, but also Masha’s colleagues and superiors. Threats were made against her, and she and her mother were even investigated by the FSB for scrawling anti-war graffiti on a wall in their village in the Russian Far East. Masha managed to escape to Germany, where she, with her new class of Berlin kids, wants to make a re-enactment of the incident that forced her to leave her home country.

But this is just one of the plot lines in Lokshina’s self-produced, micro-budget documentary essay laced with a few experimental touches. The Russian-born, German-based filmmaker also narrates her own experiences with the Russian school system and migration to another country at primary-school age, a specific ban that effectively outlawed political indoctrination in West German schools in the 1970s and is still in effect post-reunification, and a seemingly unrelated 2021 incident in which a group of female activists tried to stop a New Moscow construction project in a wooded area close to the Russian capital.

It seems that the topics Lokshina deals with have little in common with each other, apart from creating a consensus that today’s Russia is a totalitarian place where the orders from above show little concern for the ideals of justice, common sense, ecology, and individual and collective well-being. However, the essayist approach allows for these kinds of analogies, loose metaphors and abrupt jumps between topics. The use of JS Bach’s suites as the musical background is effective, as is the simple, hand-held camerawork by Nina Wesemann, while the satellite still photos and archival footage previously obtained by Lokshina herself are deftly edited into the material by the filmmaker and Maya Klar. The standout aspect is, however, the 3D animation by Felix Klee that exposes Russian delusions of grandeur with a model of the “monster school” that is being built in New Moscow, lending it an X-ray-like quality. In the end, Active Vocabulary emerges as an on-point, engaging and thought-provoking documentary.

A Film a Week - La Jetée, the Fifth Shot / Le cinquieme plan de La Jetée

 previously published on Cineuropa

One cannot overstate the influence of the work of Chris Marker on the realms of French cinema in general as well as over global documentary filmmaking. His short La Jetée (1962) serves as a perfect example here: basically an experiment dubbed a “photo novel”, consisting almost entirely of still photos with the exception of a single moving shot, it is regarded as the first French science-fiction film and is often seen as a strong metaphor for the Cold War state of mind. It is also one of the films that enforced the concept of time travel – going back to the past to try to mend the present in order to protect the future.

For veteran French documentarian Dominique Cabrera, Marker’s aforementioned short is the starting point for an investigative journey into history (both official and unofficial), touching on the subjects of politics, cinema and family. The result is La Jetée, the Fifth Shot, which has just premiered and triumphed (see the news) in the International Competition Documentary Film at DOK Leipzig, where a retrospective of Cabrera’s work also unspooled.

The starting point for Cabrera’s documentary is the fact that her cousin Jean-Henri Bertrand recognised himself as a child in the company of his parents in the fifth shot of Marker’s photo novel. Pictured from the back, the family stands on the observation deck of Orly airport, watching planes taking off and coming in to land. The year is 1962, and back then, plane-watching was a popular weekend pastime for some and a symbolic act for others.

As the filmmaker finds out by talking to Marker’s collaborators and their descendants, La Jetée was filmed during the breaks from shooting The Lovely Month of May (1963), which pictured life in Paris in May 1962, marked by the end of Algeria’s War of Independence to put a stop to French colonial rule. Many people, the so-called pieds-noirs, usually of French, Spanish or Jewish descent, born and raised in Algeria, lost their homeland and came to France as refugees. Cabrera’s and Bertrand’s parents were among those people. Actor Davos Hanich, who played the protagonist in Marker’s short, was one of them as well…

The investigation spreads out in different directions, revealing other coincidences that might prove to be significant. For instance, in adulthood, Jean-Henri looked quite like Davos looked in the film, and both his and the actor’s family roots lead to the same town of Sig. There might even be some melodramatic plot twists to be revealed, but Cabrera is actually interested in a more wholesome and profound form of knowledge – made up of blends of histories on the macro and micro levels – that ends up forging someone’s memories and identity.

Although she starts the documentary in a fairly standard mode that combines interviews with materials from personal archives and cuts from Marker’s works, as the investigation and the story progress, Cabrera adopts an approach akin to Marker’s. It could be described as essayistic and free-flowing, with her voice-over narration connecting the loose ends into a clear, easy-to-follow stream of consciousness. Editors Sophie Brunet and Dominique Barbier do some impressively precise work in order to ramp up the tension, which can also be felt in the music by Béatrice Thiriet and her piece “Shadows” for violin and mandolin. In the end, this “genealogy of pictures”, as Cabrera calls her work on La Jetée, the Fifth Shot, explores many possible directions and becomes unpredictable, like life itself, but the end result is a strong, thought-provoking documentary.

A Film a Week - Once Upon a Family / Porodica na određeno vrijeme

 previously published on Cineuropa

With his sophomore feature-length film, up-and-coming Montenegrin filmmaker Sead Šabotić challenges us to separate the terms of “faction” and truth, because the two do not have to be one and the same, although they occasionally are. Once Upon a Family has just premiered in the international competition of Beldocs, and given that it’s a very creative, poetic hybrid between documentary, fiction and film essay, it may seem like a nice addition to the more daring sections of the various festivals in the region and internationally.

The strange thing is that Once Upon a Family did not end up being as it was originally envisioned when it started life as Šabotić’s final master’s project at the Belgrade Faculty of Dramatic Arts. Due to administrative issues, the production moved completely to Montenegro, affording the filmmaker more freedom to play with different kinds of material and structure in order to tell a story of disappearance, loss of identity, and the search for others and oneself in the ever-shifting context of life.

As we are informed, the first protagonist, Gorčin Bojanić, the ward of an institution cryptically referred to as “the national depot of the rejected persons of Montenegro” (which the existing Komanski Most facility for people with intellectual disabilities actually stands in for) disappeared without a trace just before the filmmaker, first assuming the position of the narrator before appearing on screen, had been due to start filming him for his next project. Led by Gorčin’s friend Dragan, the filmmaker starts the search for him, guided by what shaky information he has about Gorčin’s past and background. Apparently, his family comes from the Piva region, specifically the town of Old Plužine, which was flooded after the construction of a dam and a hydroelectric plant in the 1970s, and as a baby, he was left by his parents at a home for abandoned children in the coastal town of Bijela. The duo embarks on a journey through the mountainous region in search of any traces of Gorčin and his family, learning about more tragic fates, and eventually about themselves, in the process.

Although hermetic and hard to decode, as were Šabotić’s short films (his previous feature-length documentary, the 2020 title Twins Woven from Dreams, which he co-directed with Lea Vahrušev, was a tad more conventional and accessible, but still quite poetic), Once Upon a Family is a work that grabs viewers and keeps them hooked. It tells true, heartfelt stories by carefully combining fragments of facts from rarely seen archival material, emotions and fiction, and even by opening a meta level at one point, channelling the literary works of 20th-century Yugoslav masters like Borislav Pekić, Danilo Kiš, Mirko Kovač, Filip David and the “keeper of their flame”, the recently deceased Goran Petrović, whose writing is quoted at one significantly meditative point in the movie.

The technical aspects of the feature serve its aesthetics perfectly well: while cinematographer Ivan Čojbašić treats us to vistas of the mountainous and coastal landscapes of Montenegro, and sound designers Antonio Andrić and Stevan Masnec discreetly complement the picture, editor Mina Petrović cuts the whole thing with a good sense of rhythm to end up at a perfectly fitting, meditative pace. In the end, Once Upon a Family is simply a mesmerising, magical-realist ride through the story of human destinies, thoughts, hopes and fears.

A Film a Week - Antarctica Calling / Continent Magnétique

 previously published on Cineuropa

Back in 2005, French documentarian Luc Jacquet strode to box-office and Oscars glory with his March of the Penguins, which also marked the start of “penguin mania” in cinema. Jacquet returned to the animals 12 years later with L’Empereur, which nevertheless did not replicate the success of its predecessor. The filmmaker also came back to the penguins’ home continent of Antarctica two years earlier to make a documentary about global warming, Ice and the Sky, which garnered some generally favourable reviews from critics, but still did not cause much of a sensation.

Once again, Jacquet goes back to the continent that has inspired him so much with Antarctica Calling, but his focus is a little different now. The key can be found in the original French title of the film – Continent Magnétique – hinting at the filmmaker himself and his obsession with the place. The documentary has premiered in the Piazza Grande section of Locarno and will probably attract some attention from festivals, both documentary and general ones.

In Antarctica Calling, the filmmaker’s personal journey starts in the south of Patagonia, on the southern end of the Andes, where he comments on the natural phenomena in all their harshness and stunning beauty. Then he crosses to Tierra del Fuego, where he teases viewers who might be expecting more penguins with imagery of the endearing birds for the first time, after which he boards a ship and, after an exciting journey across the choppy waters, ends up in the titular continent that keeps calling him back.

But, we can assume, it is not about the physical journey, but rather the journey of the heart and mind that entices the filmmaker to keep coming back to this mostly uninhabitable place. So Jacquet deals less with penguins, ice and sky, and more with himself in a seemingly endless string of thoughts, musings and observations in his own voice-over narration. In that department, the filmmaker perhaps does not reach the same philosophical heights and depths of Werner Herzog or Chris Marker, but he does a decent job of keeping viewers interested enough in his attempts to convert something that is not that easy to express verbally into words.

Luckily, Jacquet’s musings get a suitable audio and visual backdrop. Cyrille Aufort’s omnipresent music score crosses neoclassical genres with ease, incorporating different influences from several movie genres in the process so as to ramp up the tension and dictate the emotion. It might not be at all subtle, but it is more than effective, and the same could be said for the sound design. However, the visuals are the main stars of the film, even more so than its auteur. Often shot with drones by the trio of cinematographers (Christophe Graillot, Jérôme Bouvier and Sarah Del Ben) in high-contrast black and white, which might seem like a very risky choice, and paired with some precise editing by Stéphane Mazalaigue, they keep the viewers’ eyes fixated on the screen and their ears open to whatever Jacquet has to say. In the end, after Antarctica Calling, many in the crowd might feel the call of Antarctica, along with its ice, skies, turbulent seas and… penguins.

A Film a Week - Fairytale / Skazka

 previously published on Cineuropa

One might argue that World War II had a fairytale ending: two of the villains ended up killed, the third one repented and got pardoned, and the good guys won and lived happily ever after. But was it really that simple? According to the newest feature written and directed by Alexandr Sokurov, Fairytale, it wasn't. The film premiered in the main competition at the Locarno Film Festival, which also bears some symbolic weight given that the Russian auteur’s breakthrough also happened at the same place, 35 years ago with The Lonely Voice of Men.

Fairytale is actually a re-imagined situation in which four men, historical figures on the opposite sides in the Second World War, try to get through God’s Gate guarded by their imperial predecessor. Two of the four men were on the winning and two on the losing side during the war. Three were dictators that either embraced socialism totally, or had at least flirted with it in their younger years, while the fourth one is nominally a democrat, but actually an imperialist and traditionalist. These people are Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Yosef Vissarionovich Jugashvili – better known as Stalin – and Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, while the “gatekeeper” is none other than Napoleon Bonaparte himself.

God overhears them all, the shadow of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin looms over at least two of them who went the furthest in their connections with the ideas of socialism (the banter between Stalin and Mussolini is simply precious), Churchill wants to get instructions from the Queen, while Hitler shares and develops his paranoid ideas. Neither of the four can open the gate due to their various sins, from the desire for absolute power to open antisemitism, rampant self-love, imperialism or simply bowing to a higher authority other than God, but that won't not stop them from trying. Maybe the key is given in the Biblical quote at the very opening of the film: “You strangled Satan, passion bearer, with the godly strings of your suffering.” But has either of them who brought on suffering really suffered? And would it prevent them from competing with one another over various causes?

The concept of speculative fiction that brings different figures together in the same context is not that new, and Sokurov's fairytale on the textual level slightly resembles Maurice Joly’s political satire The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, but with the key difference that Machiavelli and Montesquieu were able to conduct a dialogue, despite their different centuries of origin and the different philosophies they defend, while the 20^th century strongmen in Sokurov's film are not able to communicate, which often results in an Altman-esque sound design of overlapping monologues.

There is no news on the coherency level either, since Fairytale resembles a lot of Sokurov’s works in its essayistic approach consisting of the auteur’s thoughts and musings, but the good news is that the film is visually stunning and innovative due to the filmmaker’s unique idea to cut the political figures, each of them in a few different versions (different age, posture, clothing etc.), out from existing documentaries, newsreels and archival footage and set them against animated backgrounds resembling very dark paintings. With a boxy 4:3 ratio, in black and white and with added granulation, the look resembles the films from the expressionist period, with voice actors providing their deliveries in native languages, while the musical choices from the droning score to the classical and army music accompany the mood of the “plot” closely. As the title suggests, Fairytale is an odd one, and as is typical for Sokurov, quite innovative.

A Film a Week - Coming Home Again

previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Wayne Wang is one of the pioneers of Asian-American cinema, often providing a unique voice on the topics of identity, immigration and integration. In his long and fruitful career, listing 22 feature-length films over the course of 44 years, he has made some of the biggest and most beloved indie hits like “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) and “Smoke” (1995), had his chance of earning Hollywood fame with “Maid in Manhattan” (2002), but he always came back to Asian-American themes. The other thing characteristic for Wang is the tendency to work with the material sourced in literature. Both stated facts hold for his latest film, “Coming Home Again”, which was shown at Toronto and Busan before having its European premiere in the official selection at Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn.

However, “Coming Home Again” will take a special place in Wang’s filmography. The reason for that is the type of the material he works with: a deeply personal, autobiographical and essayist reflective stream of consciousness-type short story written by Lee Chang-rae. It is a challenge, but Wang has always been unorthodox in his choice of literary bases for his cinematic works, preferring to adapt short stories rather than novels and even experimenting with his own and his creative partner Paul Auster’s observations on their two-tome 1995 collaboration consisting of “Smoke” and “Blue in the Face”.

Wang opens the film with narration by Chang-rae, played by Justin Chon, about a special way to prepare beef short-ribs by almost filleting it, but leaving the bone attached to the meat on the side, so the meat can suck its richness. On that one, he is quoting his mother (Jackie Chung), the woman who had been always treating him with good food. But the mother’s cruel sickness, stomach cancer, is the reason why Chang-rae left his well-payed job in New York and went back to his childhood home: he feels obliged to take care of his dying mother who was always the first to sacrifice her own happiness for the well-being of the family, since his college professor father is busy with work and his career-pursuing sister lives in South Korea.

The plot of the film (sort to speak) takes place over the course of one day, but through flashbacks, narrations and reminiscences, Lee as a writer and Wang as a filmmaker reveal more background details about the family’s past, making the movie more of a meditation on the subjects of family, ambition, self-sacrifice and the constant fear of death. “Coming Home Again” is far from an easy watch due to its sombre topic and essay-like storytelling through voice-over narration with only a small portion of dialogue and in the complete absence of “action” of any kind. On the other hand, it is clearly a work of a filmmaking master and one of the best films of its kind.

The reason for that is Wang’s sure-handed directing and meticulous approach to the material that makes “Coming Home Again” easy to follow and navigate. The scenes set in the present are cold in terms of colours, the camera is usually fixed and it observes the characters from behind, while those set in flashbacks, memories and reminiscences are richer in colour, filmed with hand-held camera and more dynamic. The absence of external music (that is not the part of the plot) until the very end is also telling what kind of emotions Wang aims for and actually scores, for which he also has to thank his crew, the cinematographer Richard Wong as well as Ashley Pagan and Deirdre Slevin, who were handling the editing.

The actors also deserve to be considered among the film’s highlights. Justin Chon (“Twilight Saga”, “Gook”) finds a good balance between the multiple roles he has to fill in as a character, but also as an observer and narrator, aiming either for more of a cerebral effect or for pure emotion. Jackie Chung has even a harder mission playing a character who barely moves and talks, but she handles it with grace, making “Coming Home Again” an emotional and cinematic experience hardly comparable to anything else.