What exactly is Forum?
The question rose anew after a screening of Calimucho, when an audience member asked why such a good film hadn’t been selected for competition. Having come to Berlinale this year specifically and exclusively to view Forum selections, the question puzzled me, and set me on a path of reflection that helped me understand why I drop everything to fly to Berlin in the dead of winter to see movies that may likely never be screened back home.
Born forty years ago in an act of protest (see History of the International Forum of New Cinema), the The International Forum of New Cinema - arguably the most consciously political section of this most political of the mega film festivals - fosters movie makers who explore of the cracks between philosophies and genres.
For the past three years that I’ve attended, the Forum selections have been most effective in shifting my perceptions of film, art, and culture.
This year, three important movies examined the peculiar space between documentary and fictional feature film.
Yanaka boshoku
In Funahashi Atsushi’s Yanaka boshoku (Deep in the Valley), a Tokyo district gradually emerges, through the morning routines of its people, as place apart. The film combines historical narrative, a fictional love story, and real-life film forensics to make an entirely original entertainment about a peaceful, leafy, and traditional neighborhood that changed forever one summer night in 1957, when a five-story wooden pagoda dating from the Edo era burned down.
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 (movie-making). The stories that emerge depict film-making and viewing as essentially social historical endeavors, building context for contemporary lives and rescuing significant human events from the interstices of reported history.
Calimucho
Filmmaker Eugenie Jansen continues on a path first cleared by journalist and novelist Natasha Gerson, who researched the lives of a troupe of circus travelers, writing an article for the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, and then continued living and performing with them for another five years before working on the script of Calimucho.
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. We first see the heroine Dicky in close-up, flinching at each misthrown blade, as her boyfriend Willy practices his knife-throwing act on her. 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 lives 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. The story is pure fiction, told with the tools of documentary. 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. Circus Harlekino is real too, though more artisanal than threadbare.
La sirena y el buzo
La sirena y el buzo (The Mermaid and the Diver) layers elements of narrative and essay onto what look like unstaged documentary sequences of life in a Miskito fishing village to tell “an imaginary tale transporting us to reality,” in the words of director Mercedes Moncada Rodríguez:
The body of Sinbad the Diver is discovered floating off the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. The mermaid turns his soul into a turtle, and the turtle returns him to the world of men. Sinbad is later reborn as a member of the Miskito tribe living on the banks of the Coco River. When he grows up, nature carries him back to the sea, where the mermaid is waiting for him.
The film that results is equal part documentary, anthropological essay, and mythic evocation of an indigenous culture in limbo.
Born of dissent, the International Forum of New Cinema serves film-makers and audiences who - while appreciative of cinema’s power to entertain and knowledgeable of the tools of entertainment - want something more.
I believe the singular value of Forum is to be found in the evergreen ability of its sponsored artists to change our minds, figuratively and literally, as the world changes around us.
It’s worth the trip.
Posts for peace, sound environmental stewardship, humane economic policy and promotion of human health and creativity. About the blogger.
Technorati tags:
film festivals berlin film festival
Comments and Links Appreciated!
