Competition films from the Berlinale from Switzerland, China, Catalonia and Germany.
Is it already the Berlinale again?” The surprise of several Berlin acquaintances gives food for thought. Before the pandemic, Germany’s largest film festival in the capital was hard to miss. But although all the signs are now pointing to an opening, you don’t notice much of it. No parties mean fewer taxis, and there are no billboards even on Potsdamer Platz. And even the applause in the press screenings sounds much thinner than usual, even for films that really deserve it. With the Swiss alpine drama “Drii Winter”, the small film country would have the rare chance of winning a Golden Bear.
For the filmmaker Michael Koch, who studied at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts, this is only the second feature film, but even the first images reveal a rare sense of style. With just a few lines, he sketches the love story of a young couple who have found happiness in a small village.
One is involuntarily reminded of Terence Malick in the way the staging of the landscape creates emotional spaces here, but Michael Koch is not a voluptuous aesthete like the American. In the concentrated work with amateurs, he also puts the brakes on romanticism. Armin Dieroff’s camera work composes the classic 4:3 format in a form-conscious but unobtrusive manner; The drama slowly unfolds: a tumor has taken root in the young man’s brain, where impulse control is located. The inevitable change in personality turns the just positive signs of the love relationship into the opposite.
If only this one discovery of an exceptional talent was remembered from the 2022 Berlinale competition, it would have been worth it. Ironically, in the context of an Alpine drama, Koch literally reinvents cinema – with classic elements that he dusts off and brings in as if they had never been used before. It is a production that is ascetic as it is overwhelming, open to improvisation and yet leaves nothing to chance. And introduces two natural talents in front of the camera, Michèle Brand and Simon Wisler.
Apparently other filmmakers are also discovering the photogenic quality of traditional agriculture. “Return to Dust” by Li Ruijun came into the competition from China: Here, too, the focus is on a hard-working couple in a farming village, but as heartbreaking as love and suffering are staged here, the two films are as different as day and night. Nothing separates the conservative staging in “Return to Dust” from that state-supporting socialist realism that was already mixed up in the early eighties by the filmmakers of the fifth generation.
Zhang Yimou’s “Red Cornfield” winning the Berlinale in 1988 contributed significantly to the fame of this movement. The 39-year-old Li Ruijun seems to be emulating this movement, but lacks any poetic inspiration that could enable a break from the formulaic. Or is perhaps the impersonal aspect of the old state cinema particularly opportune again today?
The third peasant piece, “Alcarràs” from Catalonia, is all the more endearing. Filmmaker Carla Simón tells the story of a family that spends every summer harvesting peaches on a plantation set up by their great-grandparents. But this summer could be the last: natural cultivation has become uneconomical, and farmers in turn are selling their property to an operator of solar systems. But this environmental policy perspective remains unobtrusive. Director Carla Simón’s trick is to tell the film largely from the perspective of playing children, who hardly notice their desperate father’s worries. In this way, an equally delightful film was made about a threatening cultural change.
Even more audacious is Andreas Dresen’s trick of using one of the worst human rights violations in the western world as an occasion for a comedy: the Guantanamo camp.
“Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush” is a tour de force of the Cologne presenter and comedienne Meltem Kaptan in the role of the mother of the innocently imprisoned Murat Kurnaz. At the side of Alexander Scheer – in the role of the lawyer in the years-long, mostly hopeless struggle – she carries the film. What is missing is any mention of a politician instrumental in preventing Kurnaz’s release. So nothing clouded the happy re-election of Frank-Walter Steinmeier as Federal President on the premiere weekend. One of the absent permanent guests of this Berlinale is missing in particular: political explosives.
