Keep making films!

The bright red carpet of the International Berlin Film Festival is empty now. The winners have been announced and the festive closing ceremony is over. The Bears have been bestowed, as have many other awards, which will determine the future destinies of their recipients.

The Golden Bear for Best Film of the 60th Berlin Film Festival went to Bal (Honey) directed by Semih Kaplanoglu from Turkey. It has taken 46 years for Turkish films to win the main award of the Berlin Film Festival. Honey is a part of trilogy about the poet Yusuf created by Kaplanoglu. The two previous parts were shown in Cannes (Egg), and Venice (Milk), so the director considers that in a sense the highest award of the Berlinale was bestowed on him for the entire trilogy. Honey is a symbol of purity, initiation, immortality and revival, eloquence and poetry. Honey has also won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.

The second most important award is the Jury Grand Prix, which went to the representative of the new Romanian wave, Florin Serban for his debut film, Eu cand vreau sa fluier, fluier (If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle). Serban also received the prestigious Alfred Bauer Prize for innovation in cinematography. The film tells about a 18-year-old criminal who tries to escape from the penal colony several days before release. This illogical deed is provoked by the sudden return of his mother, who long ago went to earn money to Italy and left him and his younger brother in the lurch. Now the woman decides to take her younger son with her. The author dedicated his film to children who haven’t seen their mothers.

Russian film-makers fared extremely well: Alexey Popogrebsky’s psychological drama Kak ya provel etim letom (How I Ended This Summer) won three Berlin’s Silver Bears, actually, a Bear and two Small Bears. The Silver Bear for best actor’s work was split between Sergei Puskepalis and Grigori Dobrygin. A Silver Bear was also presented to the film’s cameraman Pavel Kostomarov for outstanding artistic achievements, as he managed to show the beauty of the nature and the power of elements in the Far North. In this primordial world, in isolation from the mainland, the author investigates the nature of human relations – devotion, weakness, fear, and nobility. The story of two polar explorers, who keep watch at a meteorological station was shown before the curtain. Astoundingly, the screening even changed the rating situation in cinema critics’ reviews, regularly published in the magazine Screen International: the picture How I Ended This Summer took a lead over the Romanian film If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle, which was a strong leader up till then.

The jury headed by Werner Herzog gave the Silver Bear for the best director’s work to the movie by Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer. This is a political thriller by the cult director based on the novel by Robert Harris. The film’s hero, a writer, gets an invitation to write and edit the memoirs of Great Britain’s ex-prime minister, accused of war crimes. While working, the unnamed writer uncovers a global plot, sealing his fate as a result. The film is not the festival’s best work, falling somewhat short of both competitors and Polanski’s previous work. Therefore, the award appears to be an act of support for the director who is now under house arrest, waiting for extradition to the US for an offense he committed long time ago. This has presented the festival press with a rare opportunity for sensationalist publications about the sharp dramatic turns of Polanski’s life. At the same time, one cannot object that the master performed the montage of the film in a very refined manner, and mocked the much-boasted American traditions of lawfulness and morality in an elegant package.

Two Independent Jury Awards, the Amnesty International Film Prize and Peace Film Award, went to the Arab-Kurd film Son of Babylon, directed by Mohamed Al-Daradji and included in the Panorama section. This is a road movie, in which a boy in search for his father goes through war-stricken roads and embarks upon an initiation quest, as a result of which the teenager turns into a man.

The film Shahada (director: Burhan Qurbani) received the Prize of the Guild of German Art House Cinemas. The film highlights episodes from the lives of three young Muslims, Meriam, Samira, and Izmail, who reside in Berlin, and features the transformation of their values and worldview. Meriam dares having an illegal abortion, which is seen as a radical revolt of the Muslim girl against tradition, family and faith. Samira becomes intimate with her German friend Daniel, their relations become more than friendly after reading the Koran together. Izmail works in the police and remains a model family man until he meets the enchanting Leila, whom he happens to detain one day, and their relations grow into a passionate love affair.

The very interesting film En ganske snill mann (A Somewhat Gentle Man) by Hans Peter Moland (Norway), only won the Audience Award of the readers of the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost. The main character of the movie, Ulrik, is an even-tempered and calm mechanic at a car maintenance station, who has spent 12 years in prison for involuntary murder of his wife’s lover. Ulrik’s gangster friend tries to provoke him to commit another murder. However Ulrik does not want to kill anyone: he has found his son, an adult now, and has become a grandfather. He proves to be a faultless gentleman, all the while cleaning up the world of the unbridled and war-like gansters. The film contains sexual scenes, which are presented in an asexual, even anti-erotic, manner. It also contains some violence. However the author shows the violence being committed under such circumstances that the audience feels absolutely solidar with the hero, who rebuffs against a scum that hits a woman, or shoots an instigator-gangster. It is an ironic provocation by the director.

Based on both the recipients of the awards and the contest program itself, the 60th Berlinale looked quite variegated. Even for the festival’s habitues aware of the forum’s key priorities (sociopolitical orientation, tolerance, and political correctness concerning sexual minorities, discovery of new regions on the world’s map of cinematography) it was hard to catch the principle according to which the programs were selected this year.

After numerous screenings two selection vectors were outlined. First, traditional family values were highlighted, which seems natural considering the crisis of family models in recent times. Multiculturalism is the second selection vector. Many films from this year’s festival program are marked by a serious investigation of the image of the Islamic world, and investigate into the place of Islam in the West.

What traces did Ukraine leave in the Berlinale-2010?

On February 18, the banquet hall of the Mariot hotel, where the Ukrainian stand of the European cinema market was located, housed a bright soiree, which reinforced the Ukrainian accent at the Berlinale-2010. The get-together of the friends of Ukrainian cinema was organized by the international Charity Foundation, Ukraina-3000, with the assistance of the internationally-recognized brand Nemiroff. It was attended by officials and VIPs, whose names have won much-deserved recognition in the world of cinema, and was accompanied by dances and music by Foma. A huge plasma display placed near the stage showed the photos of Ukrainian and foreign directors and actors as they participated in noteworthy cinematographic events in Ukraine. Thus, the cinema party was broadened with the help of virtual participants. Those willing could watch the films produced by many of them at the Ukrainian stand. The stand also presented the small-budget collection of short films, “Mudaky. Arabesky.” The author of Mudaky and active inspirer of the project, Volodymyr Tykhy, intentionally or not, initiated a sort of Ukrainian “response” to The Idiots (Idioterne), a Danish film directed by Lars von Trier. The DVD disc, presented by Ukraine’s press office for representatives of various cinema festivals, contains nine short stories. One of them, Deafness, produced by Myroslav Slaboshpytsky, was included in the official list of nominees for the short film award of this year’s festival.

It was the second time that Slaboshpytsky participated in the Berlinale competition. Last year Ukraine was represented in the short film competition by the 15-minute-long movie Diagnosis directed by Slaboshpytsky, which was described by the author as an act of free expression about social problems via the language of cinema. The 11-minute-long movie Deafness also contains a social message. The action unfolds in a boarding school for deaf children. It was a long-time idea of the director to shoot a movie about deaf people, as it offers an opportunity to touch the stylistics of speechless movies, a modern version of silent movies. It has no dialogs, and the sound space is full of the natural noises of life: birds singing, the rustle of steps, and the sound of car tires squeaking on the road. In it the police looks for a teenager from a boarding school who has committed an offense. After several futile attempts to find the whereabouts of the person wanted with the help of photos and gesticulating with the boarding school pupils, the police officers pull one of the teenagers into a patrol car and squeeze the needed information out of him with the help of barbarian methods (putting a plastic bag on his head, hitting him in the belly, and using other reliable “arguments”). After the boy escapes from the hands of the law enforcement officials, and is on a safe distance from the police car, he splashes out his wrath and the accumulated emotions. He “cries out” his monologue with the help of the only method that is available to him – expressive gestures. Was not the mere purpose of the film to show this unequivocal “plastic sketch,” a mixture of signs for swearing and reproach, accusation of illegal use of violence against a person? It seems that by choosing teenagers with hearing defects, the author wanted to underline their peculiar defenselessness against the implacable mechanism of force, before which everyone is in a sense is dumb and weak. The director does not give the details of the offense committed by the teenager who is wanted, as he wants to resolve the task of ethics rather than genre nature, wishing to remind: “woe betide him who offends these little ones.” Perhaps, such a serious message demanded a larger dramatical articulation.

The jury gave their preferences to the 12-minute-long film about a bank robbery entitled Haendelse Vid Bank directed by Ruben Oestlund from Sweden. Interestingly, both films are approximately equal in terms of timing, and they both were shot in one long scene. The Swedish movie features amateurs shooting a landscape film when all of a sudden they notice that someone is trying to rob the bank before their eyes. The audience hears a dialog behind the scene. One cameraman says doubtfully, “Maybe we should call the police?” whereas the second one replies stubbornly, “Keep shooting!”

This time the Golden Bear for short film went to Sweden, but the Bears of the next Berlinale are now growing, therefore the cue of the Sweden film’s hero may be well reckoned as a guide for action, “Keep shooting!”