Borders without end - Newspaper Kommersant No. 21 (7466) dated 02/06/2023

Borders without end - Newspaper Kommersant No. 21 (7466) dated 02/06/2023


The festival in Rotterdam ended with the awarding of films about the painful problems of the modern world. A turn in the strategy of this festival, which in the past had the glory of authorial, experimental and even aesthetic, appreciates Andrey Plakhov.

The main topics this year in Rotterdam are life in countries engulfed by repression and terror, escape from captivity, and the social consequences of the covid epidemic. The main characters are dissidents and refugees, outsiders of society, as well as children building an alternative world.

Children are at the center of the documentary The Ghost of Boko Haram, winner of the Tiger Competition. They live in one of the northern provinces of Cameroon, which remain the targets of attacks by Islamists from the terrorist organization Boko Haram. Attacks on schools, murders and kidnappings of children are the cruel everyday life in which six-year-old Falta, whose father died in a terrorist attack, eight-year-old Ibrahim and his eleven-year-old brother Mohamad, who also saw a lot at their tender age, grew up. The director of this picture, Siriel Rengu, herself born in these parts, tells the story in a warm, intimate intonation, while the viewer does not leave the sense of danger for a minute. Gunshots can be heard in the distance, and as children play football and ski jumping, a military patrol appears on the periphery of the frame.

Another territory over which the ghost of death hovers is Sri Lanka, and interesting films are also shot there. The special prize of the Tiger Competition program was awarded to the film directed by Visakeshi Chandrasekaram "Forward". Rudran, a former Tamil Tigers militant, returns crippled to his village. His mother is a soothsayer, helping to find people who disappeared in the midst of repression. One of them is Vaani, Rudran's childhood love. She turns out to be alive and unharmed, but this will not save the protagonist from loneliness: he is doomed to painful memories of the lost war.

Sri Lankan Jagat Manuvarna's Whispering Mountains won the NETPAC Award for Best Asian Film. Filled with whispers of suppressed uprisings and cries of civil war, it depicts modernity with dark sarcasm: here the main enemy of the government is a virus that allegedly provokes young people to commit suicide. The curses of history that resonate today also form the plot of the Ukrainian painting “La Palisiada” by Philip Sotnichenko. It was awarded the FIPRESCI award: critics appreciated the original imagery of the film, shot with a mini-camera of the 1990s, which in itself becomes part of the atmosphere of the time.

The word “virus” has firmly entered the cinematic vocabulary during the pandemic. And it spawned a lot of "one room films" - on the topic of lockdown and the problems that have worsened because of it. More often they are spoken of with stifled laughter, as in Artemis Shaw's and Prashant Kamalakanthan's The New Strains, where the characters in love, having arrived in New York for a few days, find themselves locked up in a relative's apartment for a long time. The film, although awarded the special prize of the Tiger Competition program, does not rise above the level of an anecdote. Unlike the German “Last Evening” by Lukas Natrath: in it, pandemic phobias – the characters constantly disinfect their hands – are cleverly combined with the eternal desire of the provincials to move to the capital, in this case from Hanover to Berlin.

The winner of the Big Screen Award was the film "Endless Frontiers" by Iranian Abbas Amini. During the entire festival, there was increased attention to Iran. He was fueled by an incident with another director, Masoud Kimiai, who was detained by Iranian authorities at the border and his passport was taken from him, so that he could not personally present his film “Kill a Traitor” in Rotterdam. And on February 2, it became known that the famous dissident director Jafar Panahi went on a hunger strike in an Iranian prison (he was released the next day). The festival held a solidarity action with Iranian protesters and prisoners.

The film "Endless Frontiers" is reminiscent of Panaja's last film, "Without Bears", awarded in Venice, although it is far from its philosophical refinement. This is more of a genre movie, semi-melodrama, semi-thriller with political content. Ahmad, an idealistic teacher persecuted by the authorities, comes to a border village, teaches children there, and contemplates running away from the country with his girlfriend, although she is not too sure of the right move. At the same time, before Ahmad's eyes, the drama of a group of Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban is unfolding (the Taliban movement has been recognized as terrorist and banned in the Russian Federation). One of them is a gynecologist, whom the savages threaten to execute for touching women. Fate brings Ahmad to a family in which all the contradictions of the patriarchal eastern world are manifested: an underage girl turns out to be the wife of a dying old man, she runs away from her relatives along with a guy in love with her. The action moves from the Afghan to the Turkish border, but it is just as dangerous there and refugees are not expected at all.

Of course, there was a place in the festival program for such personal works as Jan Švankmajer's Kunstkamera, in which the great Czech surrealist takes the audience through the halls of his country house full of wonders, announcing that this is the last film of his life. But the Georgian director Zaza Khalvashi died before he could complete his project, and the film "Lotto" was completed by his daughter Tamta Khalvashi, a philosopher and anthropologist from the University of Copenhagen. It's a whimsical black-and-white parable about a house in a seaside town, whose inhabitants are watched by the camera with voyeuristic enthusiasm.

At one time, the Rotterdam Festival arose as a review of auteur films and was an alternative to Berlin, which was traditionally passionate about politics. But it looks like things are changing here. This year, the focus on relevance and global topics in Rotterdam clearly prevails.



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