Wednesday, 16 February 2011
Berlinale 2011, Day 7, Helena Bonham-Carter
British actress Helena Bonham-Carter hounded by autograph hunters as she's leaving the press conference of her film, Toast, screened in the section Berlinale Special (directer: S.J. Clarkson, UK 2011), through the back entrance of the Grand Hyatt, Berlin:
Berlinale 2011, Day 7, Competition: Our Grand Despair, Seyfi Teoman, Germany/ Turkey/ Netherlands 2011
The film team of Our Grand Despair as they enter the Berlinale Palace. In the centre: Gunes Sahin, who plays Nahil. To her left: Seyfi Teoman, the director, and to her right Ilker Aksum who plays Ender and next to him Fatih Al who plays Cetin.
Since Our Grand Despair begins with a funeral wake I naturally assumed Seyfi Teoman's film to be about loss and bereavement, hence the film's title ... or so I thought. Later, when the two male leads - Ender and Cetin - confess their love for Nahil, the young woman they are supposed to look after following the fatal accident of her parents, to each other, I decided that the main point Teoman was trying to make was how two male friends come to terms with falling for the same woman. However, towards the end of the film it dawned on me that Teoman's film is none of all that, and although there are certainly some elements of the above in it, it is, first and foremost, a story about a friendship. A friendship between two men, to be precise. I can't put my finger on the exact moment, but somewhere along the line I was suddenly reminded of Claude Sautet's masterpiece, Cesar et Rosalie, and that's when I realised that similar to Sautet's film, Teoman's, too, is basically an homage to male bonding. And a beautiful friendship it is indeed. Ender and Cetin are forever seen eating, cooking, reading, chewing the fat, going on weekend trips together, and not even their - in both cases unrequited - love for the same woman can throw a wedge between them. Quite to the contrary, for in some of the film's most hilarious moments, Ender and Cetin drool over Nahil - to each other. Although well into their thirties, they behave like teenage school boys when it comes to Nahil and the way she walks, talks or does other perfectly ordinary things. Teoman's camera follows them, observes them, and in spite of the prevailing placidity in Our Grand Desapir, there are quite a few comic moments. Yet when we do laugh, it is with Ender and Cetin, and never at them. Not once does Teoman betray his characters, Nahil included. Nahil, who seems to be the epitome of innocence, until we learn that she's actually pregnant - though neither from Cehin nor Ender. But so great and pure is their love for her that they even offer to locate a doctor to take care of it.
I have to admit that it was more in hindsight that I began to fully appreciate this quiet, contemplative, film in which nothing much happens but which nevertheless is a beautiful homage to friendship, love, and life itself.
The film team of Our Grand Despair on the stage of the Berlinale Palace following the screening:
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Berlinale 2011, Day 4, Forum: L'Ausente, Marco Berger, Argentina 2010
In Ausente (Absent) Argentinian director Marco Berger turns the issue of child abuse on its head as in this case it is the child - or rather a 16 year old school boy - who falls for his teacher rather than the other way round. The boy, Martin, goes to great length in his attempt to get into his teacher's trousers, inventing a string of lies with the ultimate aim to be able to spend the night at his teacher's house. Though spending the night at his teacher's Martin does, nothing happens between the two. Things come to a head when the teacher, Juan Pablo, realises that he was being lied to. He punches Martin in the face, but it is evident that he does so not out of disgust for being the object of Martin's desire but because of Martin's dishonesty which, if found out, could potentially cost him his job. Subsequently, Juan-Pablo is going through the motions, first for having allowed his anger to get the better of him and, also, for fear that having allowed Martin to spend the night at his place may lead to his dismissal. However, out of the blue Martin dies by falling off a roof, though it must be added that in my own interpretation it is suicide, a suggestion Berger dismissed in the discussion following the screening of the film. However, as Berger deliberately leaves the spectators a lot of room for their own interpretation, and because the film is almost entirely shot from the teacher's perspective and as a result, it is never quite clear how Martin feels, prompting me to interpret his sudden death as suicide. Suicide over his unrequited love for his teacher as well as over the grief he caused him. Equally open is the film's ending which again, is open to various interpretations.
What is not open to interpretation is the film's message (for lack of a better word ...), which results from the last images when we see Juan-Pablo kissing Martin gently on the lips. Something which may have happened in Juan-Pablo's imagination or something that actually occurred prior to Martin spending the night at Juan-Pablo's house, who's to know ...? But what the film seems to say is that, even if it did happen, what's the big deal? If it's with the consent of both, so what? A kiss is just a kiss ... Or is it? But that, too, is up to the viewer to decide. But given its topic, I'm sure Berger's film will nevertheless spark a fair amount of controversy for any number of reasons. To me, it is quite simply a very beautiful, very poetic film, giving an old - albeit relevant - story a new and interesting twist.
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Berlinale 2011, Day 3, Perspektive Deutsches Kino: The Education, Dirk Luetter, Germany 2011
Anytown, Germany, the present. Jan is in a trainee programme in a company which seems as interchangeable as its location and its interior: a grey, cold, boring, open plan office space where employees sit by their desks, replete with laptop and headset. Jan's head of department, Tobias is a glib, slightly arrogant thirty-something who uses his sleek black Mercedes to impress his employees. And it works, too, for they've long become victims of the system that is about to devour them. Though none of them appear to be particularly content with neither their lives nor their jobs, money and the things it buys are all they care about and work towards. Anything beyond that has no room in their world. It's a world dominated by technology, by material goods we are told are worth having: I-phones, flat-screens, fast cars and expensive clothes.
Though the big shots of the company are never seen, it is obvious that in Tobias they got themselves the head of department of their dreams, someone who plays by their rules, who pulls rank with those he's in charge of and who's no qualms exerting pressure on his staff, including Jan's team-leader, Susanne, a single mother who takes care of her disabled son. The company assesses its employees by 'performance indicators' and uses its staff to spy on each other. Employees are fired at will. Unless they perform - and conform - the company will find a loophole to get rid of those who don't.
Luetter's film depicts the downside of capitalism, a nightmare-world of the survival of the fittest. The Education could be read as a counterpart to the various films that emerged as a result of the credit crunch ('Margin Call', 'The International'), and it is an especially relevant contribution in a time like this where huge bonuses are still being paid out to bankers while at the same time governments around the world cut their public spending due to extraordinary budget deficits. We live in a world where the rich get ever richer and the poor ever poorer while at the same time the number of both increase dramatically with the well known effect of a disappearing middle class. What else is new, I hear you say. True, most of us are all too familiar with the effects of the global credit crunch. But it has seldom been addressed on film. If ever. Luetter's film comes at a crucial time as the German government has just announced that unemployment is at 20 year low while the GDP is higher than it's been in years. Yet, one wonders, who exactly benefits from this much-hailed 'second economic miracle' ...? Dismissal protection is virtually non-existent nowadays. Internships where employees work basically for free and temp contracts have become standard practice, all of which are only to the benefit of the employer while the rights of employees are more and more curbed.
Luetter's film is bleak, certainly, but I don't mean that as a criticism. He tells his story in long takes, using little dialogue, the resulting images are all the stronger and powerful for it. The Education has the eerie, sometimes disturbing, feel of a futuristic nightmare scenario. But future it ain't. The scary thing is that the world Luetter so relentlessly yet absorbingly depicts is the one that surrounds us.
Dirk Luetter (left), after the world premiere of his film The Education (Die Ausbildung) tonight at the Berlin Film Festival. For Dirk Luetter's profile on FilmPortal, please click HERE.
Though the big shots of the company are never seen, it is obvious that in Tobias they got themselves the head of department of their dreams, someone who plays by their rules, who pulls rank with those he's in charge of and who's no qualms exerting pressure on his staff, including Jan's team-leader, Susanne, a single mother who takes care of her disabled son. The company assesses its employees by 'performance indicators' and uses its staff to spy on each other. Employees are fired at will. Unless they perform - and conform - the company will find a loophole to get rid of those who don't.
Luetter's film depicts the downside of capitalism, a nightmare-world of the survival of the fittest. The Education could be read as a counterpart to the various films that emerged as a result of the credit crunch ('Margin Call', 'The International'), and it is an especially relevant contribution in a time like this where huge bonuses are still being paid out to bankers while at the same time governments around the world cut their public spending due to extraordinary budget deficits. We live in a world where the rich get ever richer and the poor ever poorer while at the same time the number of both increase dramatically with the well known effect of a disappearing middle class. What else is new, I hear you say. True, most of us are all too familiar with the effects of the global credit crunch. But it has seldom been addressed on film. If ever. Luetter's film comes at a crucial time as the German government has just announced that unemployment is at 20 year low while the GDP is higher than it's been in years. Yet, one wonders, who exactly benefits from this much-hailed 'second economic miracle' ...? Dismissal protection is virtually non-existent nowadays. Internships where employees work basically for free and temp contracts have become standard practice, all of which are only to the benefit of the employer while the rights of employees are more and more curbed.
Luetter's film is bleak, certainly, but I don't mean that as a criticism. He tells his story in long takes, using little dialogue, the resulting images are all the stronger and powerful for it. The Education has the eerie, sometimes disturbing, feel of a futuristic nightmare scenario. But future it ain't. The scary thing is that the world Luetter so relentlessly yet absorbingly depicts is the one that surrounds us.
Dirk Luetter (left), after the world premiere of his film The Education (Die Ausbildung) tonight at the Berlin Film Festival. For Dirk Luetter's profile on FilmPortal, please click HERE.
Friday, 11 February 2011
Berlinale 2011, Day 2, Panorama: We Were Here, David Weissman, USA 2011
David Weissman calls his film a love-letter to San Francisco. But it is much more than that. The film's title - We Were Here - suggests an eye-witness account, someone having actively participated in something. And indeed, Weisman's film takes us back to the days when HIV and AIDS first emerged and threatened to wipe out San Francisco entire gay community (or, for that matter, gay communities everywhere). Through interviews and using rare archival footage, Weissman recapitulates the period between the early 1980s and mid-1990s, when San Francisco's gay community, which then was in the process of gaining strength and confidence following the Stonewall riots in New York a good decade earlier, was being stigmatised by the public at large as knowledge regarding the cause of AIDS and how it is transmitted, let alone a cure, was non-existent.
An important point - or, perhaps, the point - in Weissman's film is that he reminds us of the widespread solidarity within the gay community and how it was that solidarity that provided help and support where the government utterly failed. But rather than being polemical or pointing fingers, We Were Here is is a memorial to those people who generously gave of their time when the US government chose to ignore the epidemic, doing next to nothing to alleviate the plight of those who were infected, facing a mostly painful, miserable and often lonely, death. Moreover, the film memorialises all those who didn't live long enough to be able to benefit from the medication that has since become available and subsequently turned HIV from a lethal into a chronic disease.
In a time when gay communities around the world are hardly worthy of the term community as muscles, looks and which club to go to seem more important than political issues or gay rights - hard fought for by previous generations of gay men but taken for granted today - Weissman's film is particularly relevant. That a drug can be both recreational as well as a medical is something only few gay men under thirty may be aware of as they have most probably never heard of Indinavir, Norvir, Sustiva, or Retrovir, drugs, which to many have since become live-savers. Furthermore, as the use of condoms is losing in popularity, notably among gays in their twenties and thirties, We Were Here is an overdue reminder of why their use is as necessary as ever since to this day, HIV and AIDS still remains an incurable and ultimately deadly disease, notwithstanding the fact that its death rate - as far as the western world is concerned - has significantly dropped.
We Were Here is the biography of en era, documenting a crucial slice of gay history which, although it happened almost 30 years ago, represents the decisive point in the lives of the survivors. And it is seen through the eyes of these survivors that Weissman tells his story - an important story. The result is a little gem: Highly recommended viewing for everyone, gay or straight.
An important point - or, perhaps, the point - in Weissman's film is that he reminds us of the widespread solidarity within the gay community and how it was that solidarity that provided help and support where the government utterly failed. But rather than being polemical or pointing fingers, We Were Here is is a memorial to those people who generously gave of their time when the US government chose to ignore the epidemic, doing next to nothing to alleviate the plight of those who were infected, facing a mostly painful, miserable and often lonely, death. Moreover, the film memorialises all those who didn't live long enough to be able to benefit from the medication that has since become available and subsequently turned HIV from a lethal into a chronic disease.
In a time when gay communities around the world are hardly worthy of the term community as muscles, looks and which club to go to seem more important than political issues or gay rights - hard fought for by previous generations of gay men but taken for granted today - Weissman's film is particularly relevant. That a drug can be both recreational as well as a medical is something only few gay men under thirty may be aware of as they have most probably never heard of Indinavir, Norvir, Sustiva, or Retrovir, drugs, which to many have since become live-savers. Furthermore, as the use of condoms is losing in popularity, notably among gays in their twenties and thirties, We Were Here is an overdue reminder of why their use is as necessary as ever since to this day, HIV and AIDS still remains an incurable and ultimately deadly disease, notwithstanding the fact that its death rate - as far as the western world is concerned - has significantly dropped.
We Were Here is the biography of en era, documenting a crucial slice of gay history which, although it happened almost 30 years ago, represents the decisive point in the lives of the survivors. And it is seen through the eyes of these survivors that Weissman tells his story - an important story. The result is a little gem: Highly recommended viewing for everyone, gay or straight.
Berlinale 2011, Day 2: Jim Rakete, Der Stand der Dinge, Koidl Gallery, Berlin
To commemorate its forthcoming re-opening following a two-year face-lift, the German Film-Museum in Frankfurt commissioned 100 photos of the most celebrated film artists active in Germany today, photographed by cult photographer Jim Rakete. Jim Rakete is one of Germany's most important contemporary photographers, on a par with Peter Lindbergh, Juergen Teller, or Ellen von Unwerth, however, unlike the latter three, Rakete lives and works in Berlin. Among the subjects Rakete's been portraying in a career that spans well over forty years, are Jimi Hendrix, Ray Charles, Mick Jagger and David Bowie.
Prior to being shown in the Frank Film Museum this summer, the Berlin-based Kunsthalle Koidl shows all 100 photos in a preview which opened simultaneously with the Berlin Film Festival. Jim Rakete calls his series of photos Stand der Dinge (Status Quo), a title borrowed from Wim Wenders' film from 1980. The gimmick, if you want to call it that, in Stand der Dinge is, that Rakete photographed his models with an object from the film they consider to be their best or the one they're most associated with.
A few examples:
Mario Adorf, wearing the hat from the Oscar-nominated Nachts wenn der Teufel kam (1958)
Moritz Bleibtreu carrying the gun from Oezguer Yildrim's film Chiko (2009)
Hannah Herzsprung sitting by the piano in the film that put her on the map, Four Minutes (2007)
Michael Ballhaus, long-time collaborator of R.W. Fassbinder and Martin Scorsese, carrying a lens
Director Volker Schloendorff with the original tin-drum from his highly acclaimed masterpiece The Tin-Drum (1980)
Jim Rakete, Der Stand der Dinge, 10th February - 11th March 2011,Kunsthalle Koidl, Berlin-Charlottenburg, Gervinusstrasse 36, 10629 Berlin
Prior to being shown in the Frank Film Museum this summer, the Berlin-based Kunsthalle Koidl shows all 100 photos in a preview which opened simultaneously with the Berlin Film Festival. Jim Rakete calls his series of photos Stand der Dinge (Status Quo), a title borrowed from Wim Wenders' film from 1980. The gimmick, if you want to call it that, in Stand der Dinge is, that Rakete photographed his models with an object from the film they consider to be their best or the one they're most associated with.
A few examples:
Mario Adorf, wearing the hat from the Oscar-nominated Nachts wenn der Teufel kam (1958)
Moritz Bleibtreu carrying the gun from Oezguer Yildrim's film Chiko (2009)
Hannah Herzsprung sitting by the piano in the film that put her on the map, Four Minutes (2007)
Michael Ballhaus, long-time collaborator of R.W. Fassbinder and Martin Scorsese, carrying a lens
Director Volker Schloendorff with the original tin-drum from his highly acclaimed masterpiece The Tin-Drum (1980)
Jim Rakete, Der Stand der Dinge, 10th February - 11th March 2011,Kunsthalle Koidl, Berlin-Charlottenburg, Gervinusstrasse 36, 10629 Berlin
Thursday, 10 February 2011
Berlinale 2011, Day 1:
Berlinale Palace, tonight at 6pm, red carpet:
I got jostled, pushed, insulted, thrown of the pedestal (literally - LOL) which I thought was too good to be true to have come across in the first place - all because thousands of people (people ...?), movie buffs, paparazzi and celebrity hounds were fighting for the best spots to catch a glimpse of their favourite star. Due to the ensuing pandemonium and because I was simply too far away from the action I only managed to get a few decent shots, and none of them were of Isabella Rossellini, Diane Lane, Josh Brolin or Jeff Bridges. To add insult to injury, the memory card on my camera was full just as Isabella Rossellini's limousine pulled up ... ... Luckily, my friend Willem was luckier, and lucky me, he let me have some of his photos:
Festival director Dieter Kosslick, as usual arriving before everybody else in order to be at the ready to welcome his guests, and as usual wearing his trademark hat:
Jasmin Tabatabai (Unveiled):
Nicolette Krebitz aka Coco (The Tunnel), arriving in a flashy BMW convertible:
Sibel Kekelli (Head On):
Heike Makatsch (Love, Actually):
German director Oskar Roehler (Nowhere To Go, Suck My Dick):
Mario Adorf (Kir Royal, Nachts wenn der Teufel kam):
Earlier this afternoon, after the press conference for True Grit: Joel and Ethan Coen (top picture) and Josh Brolin (bottom picture), leaving the Grand Hyatt, Berlin, via the hotel's back entrance:
I got jostled, pushed, insulted, thrown of the pedestal (literally - LOL) which I thought was too good to be true to have come across in the first place - all because thousands of people (people ...?), movie buffs, paparazzi and celebrity hounds were fighting for the best spots to catch a glimpse of their favourite star. Due to the ensuing pandemonium and because I was simply too far away from the action I only managed to get a few decent shots, and none of them were of Isabella Rossellini, Diane Lane, Josh Brolin or Jeff Bridges. To add insult to injury, the memory card on my camera was full just as Isabella Rossellini's limousine pulled up ... ... Luckily, my friend Willem was luckier, and lucky me, he let me have some of his photos:
Festival director Dieter Kosslick, as usual arriving before everybody else in order to be at the ready to welcome his guests, and as usual wearing his trademark hat:
Jasmin Tabatabai (Unveiled):
Nicolette Krebitz aka Coco (The Tunnel), arriving in a flashy BMW convertible:
Sibel Kekelli (Head On):
Heike Makatsch (Love, Actually):
German director Oskar Roehler (Nowhere To Go, Suck My Dick):
Mario Adorf (Kir Royal, Nachts wenn der Teufel kam):
Earlier this afternoon, after the press conference for True Grit: Joel and Ethan Coen (top picture) and Josh Brolin (bottom picture), leaving the Grand Hyatt, Berlin, via the hotel's back entrance:
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