KinoKultura: Issue 65 (2019) |
The 19th edition of goEast festival of Central and East European film took place in Wiesbaden (Germany) from 10–16 April 2019 and presented a strong competition of ten fiction and six documentary films from Central and Eastern Europe, and including Central Asia. This mix of documentaries and fiction in a single competition is quite unique for a region-focused event and allows juries to see tendencies across different genres and evaluate trends as they emerge, especially in areas where often the relative financial independence of the documentary form (thanks to lower budgets) advances new ideas that are later picked up in the fictional feature form, as has been the case with Marina Razbezhkina’s documentary school in Moscow, which certainly set new benchmarks for a whole generation of young filmmakers who moved into feature film (and sometimes television series), if we think only of Valeriia Gai Germanica.
goEast is organized by Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum which, since 2018, comes under the management of Ellen Harrington. The festival is directed by Heleen Gerritsen, who has brought together an amazing program and managed to widen the festival’s scope by including pitching sessions for short film projects and by introducing a VR section for projects from Eastern Europe—and finding sponsors for awarding those works with the RheinMain Short and the Open Frame awards respectively. The city of Wiesbaden and a stunning team of tireless temps and volunteers make this a very “homely” event for two juries (main jury and FIPRESCI jury) that have to work hard, watching 16 competition films over five days—and reaching a decision. The screenings are held in the Caligari cinema, one of the few cinemas from the 1920s that still provides a wonderful setting for film viewing.
The documentaries
Whilst the documentaries could easily be described as the strongest part of the competition, the fiction features offered an interesting survey of themes and forms. But above all stands the tendency for co-production, which raises not only the budget for a film but, if it is a true co-production, also makes for a wider appeal beyond national distribution.
Among the six documentary films in competition were some contestants that had already drawn attention at other festivals. Zosia Rodkevich and Evgeniia Ostanina’s White Mama (Belaia mama, Russia 2018) had its world premiere in Krakow in 2018 and had previously been awarded a FIPRSCI prize at the festival Message to Man in St Petersburg. The film follows a family with six children from the mother’s previous marriage to an Ethiopian, among them an adopted child. They take in a boy with learning difficulties and aggressive behavior that thoroughly upsets the organized and harmonious family life. Throughout the traumatized boy’s quest for care and attention, the mother Alina keeps a calm that seems to go beyond human capacity and requires nerves of steel, not just from the mother but also the viewer. Alisa Kovalenko’s Home Games (Domashni igri, Ukraine, France and Poland, 2018) follows the harsh life of the young Alina, an ardent football player aiming to join the Ukraine’s national team while she has to take care of her half-siblings Renat and Regina, who are about to start school. After her mother’s death and the failure of her alcohol-addicted father to look after the family, she lives in her grandmother’s apartment, trying to cope with sole care for the children and her dream.
Somewhat disappointing was Eszter Hajdú’ Hungary 2018, which followed an opposition politician before the Hungarian elections in 2018. Likewise, Igor Drljača’s television-style documentary The Stone Speakers (Kameni govornici, Canada, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2018) gets lost between a range of traditions, locations and prominent cultural figures in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė’s Acid Forest (Rūgštus miškas, Lithuania 2018) makes an interesting contribution to the eco-documentary, although the blame for the damage to the environment is only indirectly laid at the feet of humankind. In the first instance, the increasing population of cormorants is responsible for the destruction of the Baltic forests that are covered with the birds’ acid feces. A visually quite outstanding comparison between a Soviet lifestyle and modern life is shown in Andrei Kutsila’s Strip and War (Belarus, Poland 2019), which explores the patriotic sentiments and traditional values of a grandfather who shares his apartment with his grandson Anatoli. The latter earns a living as a stripper. The impasse of bringing together the two views, traditional and modern, leads, however, not to a conflict. Instead, Kutsila created a finely edited narrative of two the ways of life that occasionally meet, but never clash in a direct dispute.
The fiction films
The Romanian feature Moon Hotel Kabul is a good example of successful co-production, in this instance between Romania and France. The film was directed by Anca Damian and received backing from CNC and Eurimages. It is visually polished and tells about the investigative journalist Ivan Semciuc, who returns to Bucharest from Kabul to find that his translator Ioana, who had stayed behind, has committed suicide. Gradually he uncovers her involvement in a secret service operation and a more sinister take on her death emerges. Having spent the last night in Kabul with her, he feels obliged to take her body back to the family and make sure she gets a proper funeral, despite her having committed suicide (and thus sinned before the eyes of the Catholic church). Although the film is not deprived of humor and includes some phantasmagorical scenes of rising corpses, it dwells on a narrative that often makes it resemble a television drama rather than a visual journey exploring the narrow line between truth and fiction in the journalist’s reporting and behind the façade that a secret agent builds for their protection.
Another co-production, between Azerbaijan, Germany and Georgia, is End of Season, a feature film by the Azeri filmmaker Elmar Imanov. Films from Azerbaijan are few and far, and this film on a contemporary urban topic is a welcome addition. The story focuses on the family of Samir and Fidan with their 18-year-old son Mahmud, who live a middle-class life in a large apartment block until suddenly the wife, Fidan, disappears. Her vanishing act highlights the fact that husband, wife and son know fairly little about each other and have no time for each other. The disappearance brings to the fore how suspicions arise from this lack of knowing the other: does the wife have a lover, as the husband suspects; or has she really had an accident, almost drowning in the sea and suffering from memory loss upon being rescued by fishermen? The film raises questions without necessarily providing clear answers. The strong performance of the lead actors maintains the ambiguity of motivations. The images of suburban housing in Baku are juxtaposed with views of the beach and the Caspian Sea. At the opening and in the finale, these housing blocks become actors in their own right, animated through light switched on or off in the windows, and gradually replaced by drawn lines through animation, while the music of Nena’s 1983 hit “99 Luftballons” (99 Red Balloons) sounds, reminding us of the peace movement of the early 1980s against the deployment of missiles in Europe and the fear of devastation. Indeed, the balloons, mistaken in the song lyrics for enemy fighter jets that wreak destruction, echo the misunderstanding about Fidan’s disappearance: her husband Samir sees the shadow of a rival when trying to find an explanation for her disappearance just as she is considering to accept a job in Germany without much discussion with the family.
The Czech-Slovak co-production Moments (Chvilky), which first screened in Karlovy Vary’s East of the West competition, is a strong debut by Beata Parkanová. It tells about the young Anežka, who cares for her parents and grandparents and everybody around, but not for herself. She absorbs everything, but is unable to articulate her own wishes or problems, as is evident when she turns to a psychiatrist for help and remains speechless throughout the session. She has built up a façade that she cannot drop, maybe because there is nothing behind, and maybe because she is afraid of looking at herself. In this sense, she belongs to a generation that has become used to resolving others’ problems but never looks inside herself, for fear of discovering a void, or one of the conditions (dementia, alcoholism, psychiatric disorders) that affect her family. In a sense, the viewer wants to know more about her character, but is—often frustratingly, but consistently—denied access.
Three historical features participated in the competition: the Czech-Slovak film Jan Palach by Robert Sedláček, which offers a historical portrait of the student whose act of self-immolation expressed his protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, or rather against the ensuing social non-resistance. The Estonian film The Riddle of Jaan Niemand (Põrgu Jaan), directed by Kaur Kokk, goes back further in time: set in the early 18th century, it depicts a rural Estonia devastated by years of war and the plague. In circumstances of utter misery, an unknown man is found on the shore; he cannot remember who he is. He seems to be a doctor, but he might equally have been associated with the murder of the landlady of the estate where this man called Niemand (“Nobody”) finds shelter. Both films are important documents for the history of their respective countries and, quite unsurprisingly, not co-produced. Cold November (Nëntor i ftohtë) is the debut by Kosovo filmmaker Ismet Sijarina and co-produced with Albania and North Macedonia, two countries that support the republic of Kosovo to find its cinematic voice. The film creates a moving portrait of the situation and tragedy of Kosovo Albanians when the region around Pristina came under Serbian governance in 1992. The film focuses on the personal tragedy of a family where the husband is threatened with job loss if he does not accept the new Serbian management, while the wife loses her job and has a cancer scare, and the grandfather is wheelchair bound. The film dwells on the injustice of the Serbs vis-à-vis the Kosovo Albanians, highlighting the historical backdrop for a conflict that still flares up time and again today. It makes for an interesting comparison with the recent Russian-Serbian co-production The Balkan Line (Balkanskii rubezh, 2019, directed by Andrei Volgin), which uses the 1999 conflict to highlight how Kosovo was plundered by Albanian warlords and stress Russia’s role in the peacekeeping mission.
The theme of the young generation stands at the centre of Take me Somewhere Nice, a co-production between the Netherlands and Bosnia & Herzegovina, directed by Amsterdam-based Ena Sendijarević, who makes her feature debut with this film, which already won the Tiger Award at Rotterdam in January 2019. Conceived in the tradition of a road movie, the film tells of the teenage émigré Alma, who returns to her native Bosnia to meet her father. The events that unfold are somewhat unbelievable, but allow the director to bring humor and comedy into a scenario that is full of tragedy: Alma finds her father when he has just died; she is abandoned by her cousin; she is left on the roadside, attacked by criminals, and almost raped. All the time she remains calm and cool, as if none of this could get to her, not unlike the protagonist from Moments; she tries to find her identity and never gives up on the country that is hers, and yet no longer hers, while she matures from a teenager into a responsible adult on this journey. The debut film Acid (Kislota) by Aleksandr Gorchilin also portrays the lack of understanding experienced by the young generation in a subtle manner as it follows the young Sasha through his experiences with friends and family, first love and a friend’s suicide, as he tries out the norms and limits of what is called “life.” An actor at the Gogol Centre in Moscow, Gorchilin could not attend the festival, as he was—unexpectedly yet happily—involved in theater work following the release on bail of the Centre’s artistic director Kirill Serebrennikov. Scripted by the playwright Valerii Pecheikin, the strong dramaturgy of this film garnered it the festival jury’s main award.
The Kazakh filmmaker and co-founder of the Partisan Group that promotes independent filmmaking for films dealing with topics not supported through Kazakh state funds, Adilkhan Yerzhanov, presented The Gentle Indifference of this World (Laskovoe bezrazlichie mira), a Kazakh-French co-production. The film benefits hugely from the strong visual line constructed by the hand of its director and of the debutant cinematographer Aidar Sharipov (Tatarstan). It tells of the beautiful young Kazakh woman Saltanat, who is forced to work in the city to support her family back in the steppe following the bankruptcy and suicide of her father. This plot may seem all too familiar, but there are two aspects that make this film such an outstanding achievement: first, Saltanat is accompanied by the somewhat retarded, yet artistically talented Kuandyk, who takes her on journeys into creatively “made” worlds. And second, the visual solution of juxtaposing not merely rural landscapes to modernist urban settings, but to set the world of visual art, specifically painting, captured within frames—picture frames and camera frames—into play with the rough reality of urban backyards, where the world in these frames offer a temporary refuge and escape from reality, a performance space for dreams that will never come true. And we know how this film will end. The film, which had screened at Un Certain Regard in Cannes in 2018 but not received any major festival prizes since its grandiose premiere, garnered the FIPRESCI award in Wiesbaden, as well as the international jury’s prize for Best Direction.
Images ©goEast
Awards of the 19th edition of goEast
Main Jury Awards
Golden Lilly for Best Film: ACID (KISLOTA, Russia, 2018), directed by Alexander Gorchilin
Award of the City of Wiesbaden for Best Director: Adilkhan Yerzhanov for THE GENTLE INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD (LAZKOVOE BEZRAZLICHIE MIRA, Kazakhstan, France, 2018).
Award of the Federal Foreign Office for Cultural Diversity: HOME GAMES (DOMASHNI IGRI, Ukraine, France, Poland, 2018), directed by Alisa Kovalenko
FIPRESCI International Film Critics Award
Fiction film category: THE GENTLE INDIFFERENCE OF THE WORLD (LAZKOVOE BEZRAZLICHIE MIRA, Kazakhstan, France, 2018, directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov)
Documentary film category: STRIP AND WAR (Belarus, Poland, 2019, directed by Andrei Kutsila)
Birgit Beumers © 2019
| Comment on this article on Facebook |