williamaveryhudson

Sweetgrass (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ilisa Barbash, USA) (World Premiere)
Berlinale Forum, Friday, 13 February
Read the Forum synopsis

It is over - the last sheep drive into Montana’s Beartooth Mountains. Unbeknownst to anthropologists Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, they are filming the end of these biblical-scale migrations from lowland ranches to mountain grazing lands. Casualties not so much of environmentalist protection of public lands as the hard economic reality of declining sales of lamb.

Cowboys singing in the night, cursing in the day, as sheep will be sheep and grizzly bears try to eat as many as they can. Sheep as far as the eye can see. Lambs gamboling - they really do gambol, as we can see. And the heartbreaking beauty of the American West, seen in a 360-degree pan as a cowboy calls home to his mother, crying in his exhaustion and pain. His horse skin and bones, dogs too tired to run. “I want to love these mountains, but I’m beginning to hate them.”

Posts for peace, sound environmental stewardship, humane economic policy and promotion of human health and creativity. About the blogger.

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When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, USA/Iceland) (European Premiere, special screening)
Berlinale Forum, Friday, 13 February
Read the Forum synopsis

Paradoxically mournful and optimistic about the state of our planet and the 16mm medium, this triumph of handmade film, film score, live music, and skilled projection can be presented only at a few venues. I was fortunate to be in the audience at Delphi Filmpalast, and wish more theaters had the resources to deliver art like this.

Jennifer Reeves’ masterpiece employs double projection of superimposed photography and painting in multiple layers against a similarly superimposed sound design of recorded and live music. The effect is variously of nature and the human presence as abstract imagery with extended moments of naturalistic documentation.

A moment of breathtaking beauty - a flowered yard - and then it’s over, never to be experienced like this again.

Reeves edited the two films to create one, with space for subtle variations at each screening. The film was shot from 1997 to 2007, and edited/painted over a four-year period. Icelandic composer Skúli Sverrisson composed the score at the same time, in collaboration. The result is a wonder, connected to the human heartbeat, pregnant with loss and hope.

So many theaters have stopped projecting 16mm. And such flawless projection is rare. Delphi is to be commended.

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Calimucho (Eugenie Jansen, The Netherlands) (International Premiere)
Thursday, 12 February
With Dicky Kilian, Willy Soeurt, Peter Verberk, Ellie Teeuw, Tarek Hannoudi, Ralph Huppertz, Manfred Huppertz, Joshy Huppertz, Freddy Kenton, Evelyne Bouglione, Timo Soeurt.
Read the Forum synopsis.

Director Eugenie Jansen traveled with threadbare Circus Harlekino for an entire season, through the rural countryside along the German-Dutch border.

Harking back to the beginnings of sound film, Jansen frames the story with narrative songs composed and performed - with much argument - by the circus band. I believe Brecht would have been amused, and appreciative.

We first see Dicky in close-up, flinching at each misthrown blade, as her loser boyfriend Willy practices his knifethrowing act on her. As the film progresses, we come to know these two mismatched souls, their families, and members of the company as they raise and strike tents, tend after animals, promote the circus in forlorn border towns, perform, and go about their hardscrabble existence as circus people.

A remarkable tightrope walk between documentary and narrative fiction, Calimucho employs the means of reportage to make a robustly entertaining feature film. Willy Soeurt really is the Harlekino’s clown and magician - though a skilled performer, not the drunken loser of the story. He and Dicky Kilian really are partners, and the winning child Timo Soeurt is their real son. Not surprising, but they are quite good actors. Circus Harlekino is real too, though more artisanal than threadbare, and from all evidence an event not to be missed. Only the story is pure fiction.

Willy Soeurt said it best in the Q&A: “As a circus man, I see it is like circus.” Todd Browning would’ve freaked.

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Ma dai fu de zhen suo / Doctor Ma’s Country Clinic (Cong Feng, People’s Republic of China) (European Premiere)
Wednesday, February 11
Read the Forum synopsis

The Berlinale Journal offers a consummate précis:

“Dr Ma Bingcheng runs a popular clinic for traditional Chinese medicine in the barren Province of Gansu in northeastern China. The arduous work in the rough fields has left its mark on his patients. The physician takes their pulse, mixes the appropriate medicine from roots, herbs and tree bark, and gently asks questions to try to discover the source of the illness. Documentary filmmaker Cong Feng patiently listens to the conversations. The healing that Ma Dai Fu De Zhen Suo (Doctor Ma’s Country Clinic) offers does not just treat the diseases, but also the emotional ailments of those left behind by the economic boom in China.”

What can I add. We learn Dr. Ma’s hardscrabble path to medicine, studying and practicing at the same time, his practice growing with his increasing competence. His clinic, scarcely larger than a dormitory room, combines a waiting room, pharmacy, consulting room, and a bed for transfusions and other severe cases. Consultations are necessarily a community affair, as patients gain medical knowledge from their neighbors’ stories.

Dr. Ma’s patients talk openly to the camera, sharing family troubles and age-old farmer complaints of 13-hour days in the fields with little gain to themselves, as they are exploited by their bosses.

“It’s hopeless here in the village.” “We are too ragged and dirty to be filmed.”

Life is so hard here that young people run away, and wives are bought. The film challenges our conceptions about human trafficking while confirming the cruelty of the practice.

The film ends in an elevated, isolated place where a brightly decorated coffin is carried by a horse-drawn cart and buried in a mound marked only by a stick. A little drunk, Doctor Ma talks about the graves and their tenants, all of them known to him in this harsh land.

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Polamuang Juling / Citizen Juling (Kraisak Choonhavan, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Ing K, Thailand) (European Premiere)
Tuesday, February 10
Read the Forum synopsis

In the spring of 2006, a gang of criminals disguised in full burqa broke into a charity preschool for poor Muslims in southern Thailand, where they imprisoned and beat a Buddhist teacher from the north into a coma from which she never awoke. The 26-year-old teacher, Juling Pongkanmul, died the following year, the object of a nationwide vigil. Her spine crushed in several places, more than forty fractures to her skull, her brain swollen, her brain stem torn and bleeding.

Journalist Ing K, photographer Manit Sriwanichpoom, and opposition senator Kraisak Choohavan journeyed the length of the land to investigate the attack and its context in the rich and tortured culture of Thailand. Mostly they look and listen, leaving interpretation to their interview subjects and the viewer.

The tragedy and the wisdom of their film - beyond documenting Juling’s murder site, her hospital bed, and her childhood home - is our observation that all of the interview subjects are good people. It leads us to wonder who are the bad people who killed Juling, and to pray with her parents that they stop committing crimes like this.

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Yanaka boshoku / Deep in the Valley (Funahashi Atsushi, Japan) (World Premiere)
Monday, February 9
Read the Forum synopsis

The Yanaka district of Tokyo is a place apart. Peaceful, leafy and traditional, the neighborhood marks the night of July 6, 1957 as a watershed moment when a five-story wooden pagoda dating from the Edo era burned down.

One of several “semi-documentaries” in this year’s Forum, Yanaka boshoku combines historical narrative, a fictional love story, and real-life film forensics to make an entirely original entertainment.

An innovative musical score builds throughout the film, as images coalesce around a final revelatory document of the night the pagoda burned down.

Director Funahashi Atsushi confronts his frustrations with preconceptions of documentary and fiction film head on, as well as conceptions of what is high (pagoda building) and low (filmmaking).

The film’s featured group, the Yanaka Film Preservation Society, exists in reality.

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Seishin / Mental (Soda Kazuhiro, Japan) (European Premiere)
Monday, February 9
Read the Forum synopsis

The patients who visit Chorale Okayama have profound illnesses - schizophrenia, severe depression - many are self-abusive, some are suicidal. Through several deftly filmed consultations and other encounters, we learn Dr. Yamamoto Masatomo’s original, thoroughly humanistic, and highly social therapeutic method.

Dr. Yamamoto suggests practical tools patients can use to share their perspective with others and guides them to make incremental steps toward self-determined goals. His skillful and caring staff provide practical support and education toward meeting essential tasks of daily life - creating, working, paying bills, preparing food, cleaning house, planning an evening out. Focused on “rebuilding the whole person,” doctor, staff, and ultimately the patients create a uniquely functional community.

During the course of the film, we see how several patients develop remarkable insight and critical acuity, both about their illness and about the relationship of the individual to society. Even while realizing their vulnerability to pathological processes, they accept responsibility for their actions. And in pulling the curtain back on this taboo subject - taboo not only in Japan - each one begins to realize that “I’m mentally ill, but no one is perfect.”

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Zum Vergleich / By Comparison (Harun Farocki, Germany/Austria) (World Premiere)
Monday, February 9
Read the Forum Synopsis

Where else but the Berlinale Forum could I find a movie that teaches everything there is to know about brickmaking from Gando, Burkina Faso to Fläsch, Switzerland? An exaggeration, of course - we cannot know what it is like to work in a brick factory unless we do it.

But this triumph of cinéma vérité brings us close to the most basic of building materials, and how people construct them in Africa, Asia, and Europe. We also see how people have progressed from highly social, pre-industrial methods of producing bricks to isolated, high-tech modes that humans monitor in silence. And perhaps breaking the cycle to enter new modes of sustainable manufacture.

In Gando, bricks are made by hand from earth watered at the site of construction. The community comes out to observe and converse. Men, women, and children participate and the work seems joyful. In Fläsch, a sense of joy seems to be recaptured as a robot translates an artist’s image onto a brick wall. In between, we see various degrees of exploitation of human and machine labor, and perhaps even learn something new about women and men at work. And in the process, clinics, schools, and homes are built. All in one hour!

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Generasi biru / The Blue Generation (Garin Nugroho, John De Rantau, Dosy Omar, Indonesia) (World Premiere, special screening)
Saturday, February 6
Read the Forum synopsis

A fascinating document of the Indonesian Revolution of 1998 and the fall of Suharto, told through a music video/agitprop documentary focusing on the phenomenon Slank. This band has been on the forefront of Indonesian pop culture for 25 years, and from a platform of sentimental pop has raised national consciousness on the social evils of government-sponsored kidnapping, torture and corruption.

With a butterfly logo and a slogan of “Peace, Love, Unity, Respect”, Slank promotes romance and rebellion, opposition to global consumerism, and a return to a peaceful life rooted in indigenous culture.

The film blends concert footage, performance art and multiple forms of animation in a unique form of communication that may or may not play well with western audiences. But for a couple of hours in Berlin, one room may have approached an experience of Indonesia.

I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like it.

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Semaan Bilda’ia / The One Man Village (Simon El Habre, Lebanon) (European Premiere)
Saturday, February 5
Read the Forum synopsis

What do I know about the Lebanese civil war? Nothing. Simon El Habre introduces us to his 50-year-old uncle Semaan, who has left the city to return to their family village. Semaan bey, his animals, his visitors, and the land itself speak to us of otherwise unspeakable hardship, grief, and the possibility of beauty and peace in our world.

We meet Semaan’s cats, cows, chickens, horses, and join him in making sunrise coffee and an Easter meal. He has made a comfortable, simple home amid the ruins of his ancestors’ village. “The city bored me with all its crowdedness and pollution.” The cows. “I milk them in the morning and feed them at noon and at night, and distribute my milk. When I want to rest, I do.”

Every animal is an individual. Hanouni, who is calm and caring. Raisa, who is smart and stubborn.

When Semaan sings folksongs, it is like a call to prayer. The beautiful, rugged valley landscape needs voices like it needs water and cultivation. The village is a photographer’s dream. Semaan’s white horse runs down the road in twilight, free, and returns home.

In a way, film is a poor medium for depicting farm life. The smells, touch, temperature are gone. But the images and sounds are there. The film is a success.

The dead. “I miss them. I miss their kindness.”

Simon El Habre shows us a man living in beauty, in peace with his former enemies. We have a chance, if we listen to stories like this one.

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Ai no mukidashi / Love Exposure (Sono Sion, Japan) (International Premiere)
With Takahiro Nishijima, Hikari Mitsushima, Makiko Watanabe, Atsuro Watabe, Sakura Ando, Yûko Genkaku, Itsuji Itao, Mitsuru Kuramoto, and others.
From the program: “Kind-hearted Yu has no choice. His father, a Catholic priest, is urging him to confess, but in order to confess he must sin, and the only sin his cynical father recognizes as such is sexual perversion. So Yu becomes the King of Tokyo’s photo voyeurs – until he meets the Maria of his religious fantasies in the form of schoolgirl Yoko. However, not only does she turn out to be a man-hating rebel, she’s also the stepdaughter of the priest’s lover, and later on she is used as bait by an unscrupulous sect that wants to ensnare the desperate Yu. Child abuse, fetishism, Catholicism, sects: Sono Sion has never shied away from politically incorrect themes. Savage, overwhelming, baroque and opulent, in Love Exposure he composes the extremes of human behavior into an ecstatic passion choreographed to religious music, the Bolero, the funeral march and the Japanese band Yura Yura Teikoku’s J-Pop music. But not all that glitters is camp. Thanks to the candor with which he exposes a love that in the end overcomes all lies, despite all its tempestuousness this almost four-hour-long but nonetheless extremely entertaining film never loses its tension for even a single moment.”
From Quiet Earth: “This looks like what Woody Allen would do if he were Japanese: some perversion, religious symbolism, and a sprinkling of martial arts. ‘Forced to confess his sins by his priest father, Yu devotes himself to wrongdoing and becomes a legend of sneak photography. Then he meets Yoko, and becomes involved with a mysterious religious cult… NISHIJIMA Takahiro, MITSUSHIMA Hikari and ANDO Sakura make a splendid ensemble in this epic love story.’”

Essay
This year’s Forum opened with an honest-to-god transcendent masterpiece. (Sorry, but Woody Allen has nothing to do with it. I think Shion Sonos is more an heir to Jean-Luc Godard if one is looking to western models.) Four hours long, but so tightly constructed and ever novel that it seems less than half that time.

Notably the director of Ekusute (Exte: Hair Extensions, 2007) and Jisatsu saakuru (Suicide Club, 2002), Sonos continues his exploration of modern culture and our blended potential for self-destruction and redemption.

Catholic doctrine & iconography, martial arts, family drama, photo voyeurism, and cult indoctrination are only a few of the cultural strands that Sonos weaves together to make this epic film of love lost, found, lost, and finally redeemed. Ultimately, the movie is an essay on 1 Corinthians 13 (delivered beneath a breathtaking image that surpasses the beach scene in From Here to Eternity):

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Every element is perfection. Cinematography, casting, acting, music (Yura Yura Teikoku, Ravel Bolero, Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3), costumes - a completely integrated, beautifully humane film.

For more information, visit the Forum website.

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More than I can see/do, as usual. But the spirit is willing! Also a couple of non-Berlinale events that I couldn’t miss - a Volksbühne appearance by Gustav, and the premiere of a new Ariadne at Deutsche Oper.

Dienstag, 3 Feb

Gustav & Band (with Schlammpeitziger)
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, 20.00 Uhr

Freitag, 6 Feb

Ai no mukidashi / Love Exposure (Sono Sion, Japan) (IP)
With Takahiro Nishijima, Hikari Mitsushima, Makiko Watanabe, Atsuro Watabe, Sakura Ando, Yûko Genkaku, Itsuji Itao, Mitsuru Kuramoto, and others.
From Quiet Earth: “This looks like what Woody Allen would do if he were Japanese: some perversion, religious symbolism, and a sprinkling of martial arts. ‘Forced to confess his sins by his priest father, Yu devotes himself to wrongdoing and becomes a legend of sneak photography. Then he meets Yoko, and becomes involved with a mysterious religious cult… NISHIJIMA Takahiro, MITSUSHIMA Hikari and ANDO Sakura make a splendid ensemble in this epic love story.’”
Delphi Filmpalast, 19.00 Uhr
Essay

Samstag, 7 Feb

Semaan Bilda’ia / The One Man Village (Simon El Habre, Lebanon) (EP)
From the press release: “A portrait of his uncle Semaan, the sole inhabitant of a mountain village turned into a ghost town by the Lebanese civil war. Despite its sadness, this wonderfully photographed film is also a story about the joy of a life lived in peace.”
Delphi Filmpalast, 14.00 Uhr

H:r Landshövding / Mr Governor (Måns Månsson, Sweden) (IP)
With Anders Björck.
From stockholmfilmfestival.se: “Over a year, we follow the former Swedish Minister of Defense, Anders Björck, in his work as governor of Uppsala County. The official position is almost 400 years old, and the job consists of sitting at a big desk, having lunch meetings with other governors, cutting ribbons at opening ceremonies, holding speeches and eating dinner with the King and Queen of Sweden. It is hard work, but someone has to do it. Björck gives the viewer full access, making this personal portrait both humorous and very, very serious.”
Delphi Filmpalast, 16.30 Uhr

Kan door huid heen / Can Go Through Skin (Esther Rots, The Netherlands) (IP)
With Rifka Lodeizen, Wim Opbrouck, and Chris Borowski.
From IMDb: “The silent aftermath of a young woman’s disaster is broken by her discovery of nature’s old rhythms.”
Delphi Filmpalast, 19.00 Uhr

Ching yan / The Beast Stalker (Dante Lam, Hong Kong) (IP, special screening)
With Nicholas Tse, Jingchu Zhang, Nick Cheung, Kai Chi Liu, Sherman Chung, Philip Keung, Esther Kwan, Jing-hung Kwok and others.
Delphi Filmpalast, 21:30 Uhr

Sonntag, 8 Feb

Generasi biru / The Blue Generation (Garin Nugroho, John De Rantau, Dosy Omar, Indonesia) (WP, special screening)
Cubix 7, 13.00 Uhr

Ariadne auf Naxos (Richard Strauss, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, New Production Premiere)
Eine Produktion der Bayerischen Staatsoper München
Regie: Robert Carsen; Musikalische Leitung: Jacques Lacombe (Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin)
Ariadne: Violeta Urmana; Zerbinetta: Jane Archibald; Komponist: Ruxandra Donose; Bacchus: Roberto Saccà

Deutsche Oper Berlin, 18.00 Uhr

Montag, 9 Feb

Zum Vergleich / By Comparison (Harun Farocki, Germany/Austria) (WP)
Delphi Filmpalast, 14.00 Uhr

Seishin / Mental (Soda Kazuhiro, Japan) (EP)
From Japan Today: “A chronicle of lives focusing on a small outpatient mental clinic in Okayama City, the 135-minute film makes the viewer feel as if he or she is making a personal visit to the clinic, questioning what it means to be ‘‘sane’’ and ‘‘insane’’ along the way.”
From IMDb: “MENTAL is a feature-length documentary that observes the complex world of an outpatient mental health clinic in Japan, interwoven with patients, doctors, staff, volunteers, and home-helpers, in cinema-verite style. The film breaks a major taboo against discussing mental illness prevalent in Japanese society, and captures the candid lives of people coping with suicidal tendencies, poverty, a sense of shame, apprehension, and fear of society. Written by Kazuhiro Soda.”
Delphi Filmpalast, 16.00 Uhr

Yanaka boshoku / Deep in the Valley (Funahashi Atsushi, Japan) (WP)
Delphi Filmpalast, 21.30 Uhr

Dienstag, 10 Feb

Heosuabideuleui ddang / Land of Scarecrows (Roh Gyeong-Tae, Republic of Korea/France) (IP)
With Kim Sun-young, Phuong Thi Bich, Jung Du-won, and Shin An-jin.
From VarietyAsiaOnline: “…three misfits living on the very outer fringes of society.”
Delphi Filmpalast, 16.30 Uhr

Polamuang Juling / Citizen Juling (Kraisak Choonhavan, Manit Sriwanichpoom, Ing K, Thailand) (EP)
From the press release: "After a fanatical mob brutally attacked two school teachers in the spring of 2006, filmmaker Ing K and politician and human rights activist Kraisak Choonhavan set out on a journey across Thailand, a country divided by violence and prejudice."
Cinemaxx 4, 19.30 Uhr

Mittwoch, 11 Feb

멋진 하루 / Meotjin haru / My Dear Enemy (Lee Yoon-Ki, Republic of Korea) (IP)
With Do-yeon Jeon, Jung-woo Ha, Il-hwa Choi, Ju-bong Gi , Hyo-ju Han , So-yeon Jang, Si-nae Jo, Hye-ok Kim, and others.
From KMDb: “Jobless and single in her thirties, Hee-soo is miserable. On one fine day, she sets out to find Byoung-woon, her ex-boyfriend. It is not love that brings them together but $1,000 Hee-soo had lent to Byoung-woon a year ago. Byoung-woon is also penniless but surprisingly happy for he knows the girls who are willing to give him money. Afraid Byoung-woon may run off before clearing his debt, Hee-soo follows him as he visits many girls to borrow money, so the two ex-love birds set out on a one day journey to collect money, and memory.”
Delphi Filmpalast, 14.00 Uhr

Ma dai fu de zhen suo / Doctor Ma’s Country Clinic (Cong Feng, People’s Republic of China) (EP)
From ccdworkstation.com: "In this narrow and small clinic, when people wait for seeing doctor or making up prescription, they usually chat with each others about their lives, local conditions, or the experience of people they know."
Arsenal 1, 20.00 Uhr

Donnerstag, 12 Feb

Calimucho (Eugenie Jansen, The Netherlands) (IP)
With Evelyne Bougliogne, Tarek Hannoudi, Joshy Huppertz, Manfred Huppertz, Ralf Huppertz, Freddy Kenton, Dicky Kilian, Ana Muntean, and others.
From the press release: “For an entire season the director traveled with a circus through the small towns of the Dutch countryside, going on to stage a fictional story in which all the characters more or less play themselves in an atmosphere reminiscent of a fairy tale.”
From IMDb: “Dicky bears the full weight of the small, financially unstable family circus on her shoulders.”
From Variety.com: “A circus artiste tries to juggle love, desire and her dead sister’s job in Dutch verite-fiction hybrid ‘Calimucho’.”
Delphi Filmpalast, 14.00 Uhr

La sirena y el buzo / The Mermaid and the Diver (Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez, Mexico/Nicaragua/Spain) (WP)
Delphi Filmpalast, 21.30 Uhr

Freitag, 13 Feb

When it was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, USA/Iceland) (EP, special screening)
Delphi Filmpalast, 15.00 Uhr

Sweetgrass (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, USA) (WP)
From Harvard VES: “a long-form work depicting the annual transhumance of a band of sheep and their herders with the last grazing permit in the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains.”
Delphi Filmpalast, 17.30 Uhr

Letters to the President (Petr Lom, Canada/Iran) (WP)
From the press release: "…The subject is the letters that millions of Iranians, encouraged by state propaganda, write to their president."
Cinemaxx 4, 22.30 Uhr

Focusing on non-US films that I also can’t be sure will have New York screenings. Also favoring movies screening at Delphi Filmpalast, which is one my favorite cinemas anywhere. Sold out of Mitte Ende August. Leaving a couple of days early, which will have to be my excuse for missing others.

For more information, visit the Forum website.

Posts for peace, sound environmental stewardship, humane economic policy and promotion of human health and creativity. About the blogger.

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