I'm so behind the times, because of several translation and writing projects all at once (Senegal pictures are still coming eventually!) but before the month is entirely over, I did want to at least mention my favorite – okay, my only – film festival: the Berlinale!
It's odd actually, that I'm such a Berlinale fan, because I hardly even go to movies the rest of the year. But the international span of the Berlinale, the chance to watch unknown films that would never come to the normal theaters, and the presence of the directors and actors (not to mention their amazing, usually trilingual, interpreters!) combine to make the festival really special.
This year, I hit my usual average (four films) and they covered a nice span, too: Serbian, Senegalese, Egyptian/English and Turkish/Austrian. I also had the strange but gratifying experience this year that the quality of the films I saw ascended in the order I saw them, from a lackluster start to a stunning finish.
The first film, Kuma, had a promising premise: Young girl from a village in Turkey is brought to Austria as the second wife of a much older man; contrary to what you'd expect, her staunchest ally in an otherwise hostile family is the man's first wife, who has a serious illness and wants to know her husband and children will be taken care of when she's gone.
But it suffered, my friends and I decided afterward, from first-time-director-ism: the attempt to shoehorn every possible topic into the film, from domestic violence to a gay son to generational conflicts, with the result that there isn't enough time to explore anything properly.
My second film, Aujourd'hui (here's a good review of it), I saw because it was set in Senegal, and being set in Senegal was the main thing I liked about it. The premise was also interesting – a man in the prime of life wakes up and inexplicably knows this is his last day alive – but the film wandered (literally, the man spends the day wandering Dakar) and in the end, I wasn't sure what I was left with – except a lovely visual portrait of Senegal itself.
Film three, Parada (The Parade), won the audience award for its section, and good for it! I really enjoyed this one, though the friends I was with found it a little over the top. But what do you expect of a movie about an unlikely friendship that develops between a homophobic gangster and the gay doctor who enlists his help getting Belgrade's first Gay Pride Parade off the ground?
It was campy and funny and sad and had a lot to say not only about the struggle against homophobia in Serbia, but about the pointlessness of inner-ex-Yugoslav animosities. ("I was born a Yugoslav," director Srđan Dragojević said during the Q&A. "I mean, you can speak to me in Macedonian, and I'll answer in Serbo-Croatian, and we'll understand each other.")
I recommend this one, if it shows anywhere near you!
(Other favorite anecdote from the Q&A: Someone from the audience asked what could improve conditions for LGBT people in Serbia and the director replied seriously that the only way would be "another socialistic revolution," an overthrow of the capitalist system that allows a few rich, powerful individuals to channel people's frustrations into aggression toward minorities. For a few moments, there was dead silence in the audience, because really, how do you top a call for a socialist revolution?)
The last and best film I saw was a stunning debut from director Sally El Hosaini: My Brother the Devil.
I owe my friend K., massive film fan and the only person I know who stands on the Berlinale's torturous ticket lines every day of the festival, a debt of gratitude for this film. I hadn't wanted to see it because it sounded like it was about violence and I don't like violence, but K. forgot I'd said so, and got me a ticket, so I went.
Yes, it's about violence, but in the smartest way a film can be – far more it's about love and tough choices and the sacrifices love inspires even in a seemingly dead-end situation. Yes, it's about two immigrant brothers in a gang-ridden London neighborhood, but it's not just that, and it's certainly not the clichés you might expect. I'm not doing this film anywhere near justice – go see it if you possibly can.
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