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 - Role Model / Vzornik

 previously published on Cineuropa

Is starting afresh ever an option? Can we simply reset our lives? Is it up to us and only us, or does it actually depend on the environment? These are the questions that filmmaker Nejc Gazvoda (known for 2011’s A Trip and 2013’s Dual, as well as for collaborating on the script for Rok Biček’s award-winning Class Enemy) asks in his third fiction feature, Role Model, which premiered recently at the Festival of Slovenian Film, while its domestic distribution is scheduled for this autumn.

The recently divorced Maja (Mojca Funkl, glimpsed in Miroslav Mandić’s Sanremo and Matevž Luzar’s Orchestra) and her 15-year-old son Jan (newcomer France Mandić, the son of famous Slovenian actor Marko) come from Ljubljana to an unnamed small town on the Croatian border. It is spring in the pandemic year of 2021, and the schools are about to re-open after months of online teaching. Maja and Jan have to “go” to the same school, she as the psychologist and he as a final-year student, and it presents a challenge for both of them, especially after it becomes clear that they are not the types that fit in easily and that they had something of a posh life back in Ljubljana.

During her first week at work, Maja strikes up a rivalry with another newly appointed psychologist, Neja (Klara Kuk), over their differences in opinion on how to approach the problematic suicidal ninth-grader Jakob and his impulsive mother Marina (Marina Redžepović, of The Staffroom fame, in an impressive turn here). On the other hand, Jan, being the “new guy”, gets hazed and bullied by his class, especially when he unwittingly takes over the title of “Sunshine” from Jakob in an especially brutal “game”. Both mother and son meet people in the neighbourhood who may potentially offer them a chance to escape – for her, it is a slacker named Gregor (Matej Puc), who lives next door, and for him a mysterious, awkward, slightly older dude also named Jan (Jure Henigman), who fancies himself as a musician and martial artist. But as Maja succumbs more and more to alcohol, Jan thinks of ending things for good the only way he can think of…

Gazvoda establishes a beautiful and functional cinematic language early on, relying on static, usually long-distance shots in the cinematography of Jan Šuster, which suggest observation, and a foggy colour scheme that hints at the confusion of moving into a new environment. While the abundant use of classical music ramps up the tension, the script co-written by Gazvoda and Tomislav Zajec also offers some relief in the awkwardly humorous moments hinging on Maja’s nature as being stuck up and snobbish, and the neighbour Jan acting weird. Also, Gazvoda’s work with France Mandić is stellar, but it also shows that the latter is a natural-born actor capable even of micro-acting in his first role.

Unfortunately, Role Model loses momentum and breaks its own “rules”, directing-wise, as the script raises the stakes constantly and becomes more of a standard-issue film about bullying and the reaction to it – and it almost falls apart completely in the final section. While the filmmaker’s matter-of-fact attitude that teenagers can be cruel bastards (as is also the case with most of the adults) is quite refreshing, the influences of other, better films on the same topic are pretty transparent here. In the end, it seems that the helmer proverbially bit off more than he could chew, so he ended up being on the trail of something, but not quite catching up with it.

A Film a Week - Extracurricular / Dopunska nastava

previously published on Cineuropa.org

The films of Ivan-Goran Vitez are always thought-provoking and laced with irony as well as sharp social commentary, from his student films and shorts to his work on TV series and on his features. After his intriguing mix of woods slasher, politically incorrect comedy and social drama in Forest Creatures (2010) and the World War II-themed satire Shooting Stars (2015), Vitez has written and directed his third feature, Extracurricular. A socially charged genre piece set around a hostage crisis in a school, the film also opens an array of social issues relevant to contemporary Croatia. It premiered in the national competition of the Pula Film Festival and, as a competently executed genre piece, should see a regular theatrical distribution in the near future.

Vitez dedicated just the right amount of time to exposition before events are set in motion. He opens the film with a parallel montage of a man wrapping up a gift and a woman dropping of her daughter at school on a very special day, set against the tension-building soundtrack written by Jelenko Hodak. The young girl, named Ana (first-timer Frida Jakšić), is celebrating her ninth birthday, and the school just got a brand-new gym thanks to the project of the town's corrupt mayor (veteran stage and TV actor Željko Königsknecht) and the "fortunate" timing of elections just around the corner.

Vlado Mladinić (Milivoj Beader), the man we saw wrapping the gift, is planning to spend the day with Ana, who is his daughter. After his first attempt at taking her out of class fails due to the intervention of the school staff, he comes back with plan B: a hunting rifle in one hand and a cake in the other. A divorced, desperate man left behind by society, Vlado does a desperate thing: he takes Ana's class hostage. As the situation develops, a number of interested parties join in, so to speak. Besides the kids' parents and the police, there is also the mayor, who seeks a political angle, and the fame-hungry journalist from the local online newspaper, who tries to control a situation that repeatedly gets out of control.

Vitez, by contrast, manages to maintain perfect control over the material for most of the film’s duration — not an easy task, since his ambitious script juggles a lot of characters, each with their own well-established points of view and agendas. Thanks to the director’s precise direction and good sense of timing, his characters are rather evenly developed and do not overstay their welcome on the screen. The casting choices are also interesting and seem deliberate, as most of the actors in both the main and the supporting cast play against their usual type. Cinematographer Lutvo Mekić does a very good job and the editing by Ivana Rogić is faultless.

Slight problems occur in the film’s conclusion. The ending itself could be a little tighter and better motivated, with some of the plot threads simply getting lost on the way. It feels as though the writer-director has simply tried to touch on too many social issues — such as education, the judicial and political system in Croatia, its endemic corruption, the country’s history of war, diverging parenting methods, the rise of right-wing rhetoric in public discourse, and so on. This was more of an issue in Vitez's previous films, however; here, this profusion of topics does not take as much of a toll on the film, since Extracurricular remains a good, well-paced and precisely executed genre piece.