16th Sarajevo Film Festival presents Panorama Programme 2010

This year, for the first time, the strands at the Sarajevo Film Festival known as Panorama (fiction), which began in 1999, and Panorama Documentaries, started in 2001, have been combined into one umbrella Panorama. (I must thank Miro Purivatra for the suggestion, something Berlin’s Panorama has been doing for some time.) This makes perfect sense: The distinction between fiction and documentary is more and more blurred. But whether one pigeonholes a film as a fiction or as a documentary, each one tells a story. (Read more here!)

By Howard Feinstein

Panorama Programme 2010:

CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH
LU CHUAN / CHINA 
CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH is a fictional account of the 1937 “Rape of Nanking,” when the Japanese army overran the wartime capital of China and executed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Rarely have massacres been so appealing and appalling at the same time. Mostly handheld, the film is a successful fusion of neorealism and stylization. I am sure every shot is storyboarded. Our moral compass is a Japanese soldier horrified by the acts of his countrymen. Liu Tong’s musical score is exceptional.

COLONY
CARTER GUNN, ROSS MCDONNEL / IRELAND / (DOC)
Ever heard of colony collapse disorder? This is the subject of the serious but also highly entertaining documentary about a mysterious disaster that killed millions of bees beginning in 2008. The film is structured in part as an investigation, with scientists and beekeepers explaining possible causes, as well as a portrait of one religious family and the effect of the loss of their bees on each of its members. The directors manage to tackle a complex, troubling subject but imbue it with a lightness of touch that makes it palatable but also shows deep affection for the people affected.

CRAB TRAP
OSCAR RUIZ NAVIA / COLOMBIA, FRANCE
In Oscar Ruiz Navia’s CRAB TRAP, a no-budget first feature from Colombia, a white man from the city named Daniel ventures to an Afro-Colombian community of ex-slaves on the Pacific coast called La Barra in order to find a boat to escape something. We don’t know what, and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the unhurried lifestyle in this poor but proud village, how this visitor begins to conform to it, and how Ruiz Navia respects the culture by filming the residents at an appropriate tempo. The drama is more about the locals than about Daniel or another white man, Paisa, an exploiter who wants to develop the area no matter what the cost to those who have lived there for generations. The natural setting is unsettling rather than comforting. There is no disjunction between the tough lives of the impoverished people of La Barra and the threatening, and threatened, seaside location.

FLOODING WITH LOVE FOR THE KID
ZACHARY OBERZAN / USA
Oberzan is primarily an actor for alternative theater groups. So it isn’t as bizarre as it might seem that he decided that, in order to make the film he wanted to make, and for almost no money, he would play all of the roles. He worked from David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood (later to be adapted for Sylvester Stallone in a very different way). The entire film was shot in Oberzan’s tiny apartment, with no attempts at making it look naturalistic: The film defies the “seamlessness” that classical Hollywood narrative has made the universal norm. Digital software allows him to appear as two characters in the same shot. This is both inventive and funny.

GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH
DAMIENE CHAZELLE / USA
Chazelle’s American indie film was shot in black and white in Boston and New York. It is cinema as music, both in topic and in form, a blend of classical Hollywood musical, New Wave homage to the Hollywood musical, beatnik movie, city symphony film, and handheld camera verite—all colored by a Cassavetes-like sensibility. Some characters sing their parts: It’s ballsy, but it works. The narrative isn’t heavy, it’s more like…jazz, or blues, the three main characters living life as best they can and rolling with the punches. Justin Hurwitz’s score is exceptional, and lead Jason Palmer plays a mean trumpet.

HOW I ENDED THIS SUMMER
ALEXEI POPOGREBSKY / RUSSIA
Two men work taking readings from their partly radioactive surroundings at an isolated meteorological station in the Arctic, at the far east of Russia. One is in his fifties and has adjusted to this life where 24-hour daylight is the norm, and the only connection to the rest of the world is radio. The other, his new partner, is a young, eager man who surrounds himself with video games and other technologies. Tension builds between the two men. Simple, in terms of narrative, but an incredibly complex film in which rugged wintry landscape and industrial parts, often abstracted, embedded in the mise-en-scene are the prime movers. Not to mention skillful editing and manipulation of sound.

IT’S YOUR FAULT
ANAHI BERNERI / ARGENTINA
Berneri proves that she is not only a better filmmaker than the overrated Lucrecia Martel (Berneri’s ENCARNACIÓN promised it was just a matter of time) but that she also tells more interesting, more in-depth stories about women in her country and how they view themselves. Erica Rivas gives a strong performance as a young mother whose ambiguous behavior with her fighting children leads to a charge of child abuse, after she shows up at the emergency room for an ostensible head wound from a fall by her younger son. The attending physicians are more concerned with all the bruises on both boys and a fracture of the little one’s arm. She does not at first realize the severity of the charges, and Berneri’s handheld camera reinforces her mental disarray. When her macho husband arrives, we witness the magnitude of her subjugation. This is not Martel’s mannered feminism: This is strong drama that also touches upon gender issues.

I WISH I KNEW
JIA ZHANG-KE / CHINA / (DOC)
Jia Zhang-ke has moved more and more toward a fiction/documentary hybrid, as he demonstrated in 24 CITY. I WISH I KNEW is a fairly pure documentary, a skillfully stitched one at that. Shanghai is the subject of the movie; actually, the film is more about memories of Shanghai--the most European city in China—than about Shanghai itself. Many of the interviewees are in Taiwan or Hong Kong, having abandoned their place of birth when the Communists came to power. Those who remained in the city relay their hardships, such as the man who was punished for assisting Antonioni on a doc on China in the ‘70s. The government deemed the portrait unflattering.

JAFFA: THE ORANGE’S CLOCKWORK
EYAL SIVAN / BELGIUM / (DOC)
In the past, Israeli activist Sivan has exposed such shameful sites as nightmarish  Palestinian refugee camps. Here he uses mostly archival footage and still photographs going back to the 19th century to track the appropriation of the image of the luscious orange from the Palestinians by the Israelis. Of course it is a means of graphically explaining the politics of the region, but the footage itself is fascinating. This major export went from being the pride of the Palestinians to a symbol of Zionism, in many respects. He intercuts these old films with contemporary interviews with astute historians, both Jewish and Arab, to solidify his arguments.

LAST TRAIN HOME
LIXIN FAN / CANADA, CHINA / (DOC)
No country has a mass holiday exodus as large as China’s. All migrant workers, as many as 130 million, journey to their hometowns for the Chinese New Year. Train stations are packed, difficult to maneuver. In this excellent, highly affecting Canadian-Chinese documentary, Chinese filmmaker Lixin Fan wisely spotlights one couple caught up in the pilgrimage, garment laborers in South China who hail from poor Sichuan. He charts their tribulations attempting to purchase tickets, and their mixed emotions at seeing the children they left behind. (The kids have no emotional investment in their absent folks.) The Chinese economy depends on these provincials to go to large cities and expend most of their energy in factories, even if they have to give up what is most dear to them. Few of us will ever know the frustration these people endure in order to keep their families afloat.

LEBANON
SAMUEL MAOZ / ISRAEL
Based on his traumatic experience as a 20-year-old gunner during the 1982 Israeli invasion of its northern neighbor, Lebanon was a cathartic exercise for Maoz, too personal for concessions; he does not mitigate the war’s horrors. The film takes place over a 24-hour period at the very beginning of the conflict. The gunner is Maoz’s alter ego. The film is a major achievement in cinematic technique applied to a small space; he shoots most of the film inside a military tank. He had a larger version of a tank interior built, with a camera arm linking the cinematographer with the four actors inside. With rapid cutting among the men stuck there, plus the frantic movement of the tank’s viewfinder (pretty much the only way we see the outside world), one gets beyond the expected claustrophobia.

LOLA
BRILLANTE MENDOZA / PHILIPPINES
Filipino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza (SUMMER HEAT, SLINGSHOT) is back in form with the poignant LOLA, which translates from Tagalog as Grandmother. Mendoza captures the poetry even in an urban slum, this one the perpetually flooded Malabon neighborhood of Manila. He interweaves the connected stories of two old grandmas: Lola Sepa’s grandson has been killed resisting a cell-phone thief; Lola Puring’s grandson is the robber. Without judgment, the director finds each woman sympathetic, caught in a quagmire of poverty, corruption, and sexism. The two eventually find common ground, even if one family buys the other off, but that’s a culturally-coded affair that is not for outsiders to judge. The lead actresses, one 84, the other 79, are perfectly understated.

MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER
DAVID ROBERT MITCHELL / USA
For once, an American filmmaker who doesn’t go purely linear with his narrative, instead daring to—and succeeding in—interweaving the stories of four high school- and college-age youths in a Michigan town. Mitchell loosely structures the film like interlocked concentric circles (he has said his idea of narrative is more European than American), which pivot on four high school and college age teens in a cocooned suburban milieu. Several concurrent sleepovers take place the day before the fall term begins. Three of the protagonists’ problems revolve around crushes, definitely unrequited but promising. Mitchell doesn’t intrude, and only deploys “alternate” strategies, say slo-mo, when appropriate.

A MAN WHO ATE HIS CHERRIES
PAYMAN HAGHANI / IRAN
Like many good Iranian films today, the movie tells of an individual’s persistence in the face of adversity. Reza is a worker who must pay back his wife’s dowry in a nasty divorce settlement but hasn’t the money. He is being milked, but is stuck, and tries every possible avenue to resolve the dilemma. But there is no solution, especially in this society in which lots of laws and customs make little sense. He resorts to a dangerous scam to get the funds. The film is beautifully shot, and we fully identify with Reza by movie’s end.

NORTHLESS
RIGOBERTO PEREZCANO / MEXICO, SPAIN
Andres is a young man from Oaxaca who tries to enter the U.S. illegally. He gets stuck in the border town of Tijuana, where he works in a convenience store and begins affairs with both the proprietress and her assistant, both of whom have never heard from their husbands after they successfully joined the American work force. Perezcano shoots details of their unexciting daily lives without rushing toward hyperdramatic plot points. Ultimately, Andres feels compelled to exit this warm atmosphere and try again to sneak over the border in order to earn dollars for his family.

THE OATH
LAURA POITRAS / USA / (DOC)
As she showed in MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY, in which she interviewed a Sunni physician in Iraq, New York-based documentarian Laura Poitras—among the top docmakers anywhere--peers into lives and issues missed by both the mainstream and alternative media. Here she ventures to Sana’a, the unsanitary capitol of Yemen, to speak to Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard and a jihadist; and to sterile Guantanamo, where she is denied direct access to Abu Jandal’s well-known recruit, Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s ex-driver, now on trial for terrorism. (Denied access to him, she has someone read in voiceover his prison letters.) Abu Jandal is conflicted: He has been “rehabilitated” by a Yemeni government program, but he also expresses ideas sympathetic to Al Qaeda. Now he has reinvented himself as a taxi driver. Poitras keeps the film moving by stressing the tension between these formerly close friends. More non-fiction films should be as beautifully photographed. 


ONCE UPON A TIME PROLETARIAN
GUO XIAOLU / CHINA / (DOC)
British-based Chinese director Guo Xiaolu divides the film into 12 “chapters,” separated by gritty black-and-white footage of laughing young children, the new generation, reading jokes to the camera. The assorted stories are far from happy. Mostly they are tales of the newly rich and the opportunistic, who operate far from the few portrayed who are still attached to the naïve collective idealism of the Maoist past. Taken as a whole, the film is an insightful essay on the contradictions of the new China.

PERPETUUM MOBILE
NICOLAS PEREDA / MEXICO
This film embraces several genres. One is the slacker film. At the center is working-class layabout Gabino (a fantastic Gabino Rodriguez), who constantly fights with his mother and hustles with a friend as a mover, using a cheap van. Another is the family melodrama: Whereas family was once the fabric that held Mexican society together, it has pretty much unraveled. A third is the “city film:” Gabino’s work gives him, and us, the opportunity to visit the lives of Mexicans of all classes. Moving someone is a transient job, the better to observe clients who, like travelers, are at their most pressured, and in this stratified society, their most prejudiced. Pereda is an anti-glamour director. A sense of melancholic solitude runs through the film.

PRESUMED GUILTY
ROBERTO HERNANDEZ, GEOFFREY SMITH / MEXICO / (DOC)
This groundbreaking work takes on Mexico’s absurdly corrupt “justice” system. The directors obtained permission to film the trial of a young man, Jose “Tono” Rodriguez, who is falsely accused of murder by an unreliable witness and faces a 20-year prison term. Hernandez and Layda Negrete, who serve as Rodriguez’s lawyers, combat a bureaucracy in which one is presumed guilty until proven innocent. In spite of the stacked deck against Rodriguez, Hernandez and Negrete wisely use their wits as weapons.

PROTECTOR
MAREK NAJBRT / CZECH REPUBLIC
Film noir is the appropriate style for this ‘40s-set movie centered on a married couple whose happiness is marred by the politics of the Nazi occupation. She is a Jewish actress, and her fortunes slide; he is a well-known non-Jewish radio personality whose latent opportunism serves him well under new masters. The structuring absence is the assassination of Heydrich, but it is way in the background, the better to foreground the main characters and some of their unusual acquaintances, each of whom has a different way of coping with the new masters.

RED WHITE & BLUE
SIMON RUMLEY / UK, USA
As he proved in the haunting THE LIVING AND THE DEAD  (2007), Simon Rumley is one of the great British cinematic outsiders, a gifted director with the know-how to puncture the conventions of horror with sophisticated interwoven time frames and unpredictable acts of violence by individuals in crisis. This one is very American in concept and setting – smug slackers and their nemeses in the mostly claustrophobic spaces of Austin, Texas. For nearly the first half of the film, Rumley follows a distant but wildly promiscuous young woman. Then we get a craggy newcomer, recently honorably discharged from Iraq, where he worked as an interrogator in especially difficult cases. The two have something in common: her sexuality and his war experience are weapons of destruction.

SELF
OLEG DUBSON / USA (SHORT)
An accomplished performer in experimental theater, Dubson stars in his own film. He plays three different variations of himself as daydreams keep interrupting his morning routine. This is an intimate self-portrait, shot in the director’s New York City apartment over five days with a minimal crew. The film is not only elegantly shot, it also affords the filmmaker an opportunity to display his considerable acting ability.

A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN
HANS PETTER MOLAND / NORWAY
Norwegian director Moland and Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard are a match made in cinema heaven. They have worked together before, on ZERO KELVIN (1995) and ABERDEEN(2000), and presumably have a shorthand. In the criminal comedy A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN they achieve a cool, deceptively simple minimalism which is both perfectly timed and brilliantly pared-down. The film is so rich visually and aurally that it could be appreciated even if the dialogue were removed. Most of the characters here are lowlifes. The better adapted ones are dull. Moland’s heart is with the marginalised, the idiosyncratic. The plotline of Skarsgaard’s character’s searching for the man who turned him in is no more than a device to keep everything else flowing. Moland’s style never impedes on the humanity of his characters, even the weirdest of them.

SYMBOL
HITOSHI MATSUMOTO / JAPAN
The well-known comedian-turned-director takes the “Butterfly Effect” (the flapping of a wing affects some larger situation far away, you know, Chaos Theory) to a mind-boggling surreal degree. For a while you watch two films: a nicely shot conventional Mexican tale about a washed-up provincial wrestler and his family; and a series of abstractions of Matsumoto himself trapped in, and trying to find a way out of, a sterile white space with rubber cherubs’ penises dotting the walls. There is a connection between the two narratives, far-fetched for sure, with an outrageously dynamic payoff.

THE TEMPTATION OF ST. TONY
VEIKO OUNPUU/ESTONIA
Ounpuu’s painfully seductive THE TEMPTATION OF ST. TONY  has an aesthetic and moral gravitas that many cinephiles feel has died out with the Bergmans, the Dreyers, the Fellinis. The movie may nod to these veterans and other cultural icons (Blake, Bosch), but be clear: This has Ounpuu’s stamp throughout. Shot in delicious black and white, a decision Ounpuu says he owes to the influence of Bela Tarr, and with an otherworldly soundscape and soundtrack, this film is more of an event than merely a single work. It tracks the dissolution of the body and soul of an Everyman—a bourgeois mid-level manager who searches for “good” - scrunched in between the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the profane. I don’t mean to sound uncool, but metaphysics can rock.

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES
APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL / THAILAND,UK
The film garnered Cannes’s Palm d’or from a jury led by Tim Burton, who told reporters that the film took him to “another reality.” For Weerasethakul, the film IS his reality, a reflection of his belief in reincarnation, coupled with a love for early Thai cinema. Humans in animal form have blazing red eyes, as in the Thai movies from his youth, and the characters speak with little inflection, as they did in those films. Uncle Boonmee himself, played by a nonprofessional roofer, is a dying man who is visited by ghosts of his loved ones. Weerasethakul inserts a sequence with a bull, and one with an aging princess being serviced by a catfish, all of whom may or may not be some of his earlier incarnations; the viewer decides. The film is beautiful to look at, with many long takes honoring the jungle landscape and people of northeast Thailand.