From Kazakhstan, Georgia and Siberia to Croatia: In this year’s competition, the Go-East film festival shows the ordeal of growing up between tradition and the 21st century.
At first glance, there is simply a large QR code hanging on the wall in the school building of a Kazakh dump. That square arrangement of pixels that over the past three decades has become a convertible gateway to infinite digital expanses. At second glance, however, you can also see an ornamental wall decoration, framed in yellow, which could be a traditional weave pattern – two worlds are superimposed in one object.
It’s just a casual detail in Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Kafkaesque thriller “Ulbolsin”, but on a small scale it involves a larger conflict: tradition and present clash in a series of exciting films in the competition at this year’s Go East Festival, which has been taking place once since Tuesday due to corona no longer around the magical Caligari Filmbühne in Wiesbaden, but takes place digitally. And those who suffer are actually always young people.
In “Ulbolsin” the main character of the same name wants to leave the country with her younger sister – ideally immediately. She herself has already made it out of the village and works in the city as an actress for commercials. Her sister should now also have a chance of an independent, self-determined life, Ulbolsin just wants to leave the school mentioned earlier. With colorful jackets and sunglasses, the two chewing gum pass soldiers patrols in their home village, which will soon sink deep into the winter mist.
The spontaneous deregistration will not work. She gets rid of a school clerk who is not even interested in bribes – and then the sister is kidnapped in a black SUV. This is followed by minutes of film that are deliberately not staged in a popcorn-grabbing way like Liam Neeson action films, but soon reveal the kidnapper and show the desperate struggle against patriarchal violence.
Shortly before the showdown, the kidnapper Ulbolsin explains the meaning of her name: the parents gave it to her only in the hope that the next child would not be a girl too. “It is not bad to be a woman,” he tells her on the way to the forced wedding, “they are human too.”
The situation of the young Ariadna in the film “Bebia, à mon seul désir” by Juja Dobrachkous is similarly involved. She is caught in a web of memories, in a generation network and the lonely life in a foreign country. When her grandmother dies, the model travels back to Georgia from a Paris fashion show for the funeral service.
Soon after arriving, the head of the family hands her a bag with bobbins of thread. As the youngest she should – as is customary – establish a connection between the deathbed in the hospital and the place where she was laid out: 25 kilometers on foot in order to return the soul of the dead. So reluctantly she spins the thread over sticks, stones and watercourses through the Georgian hill country until confusion and anger break out of her: “It’s the 21st century, why the hell am I doing all this?”
Experience Go-East digitally
The Go-East Festival of Central and Eastern European Films Wiesbaden has existed since 2001. As early as 2020, due to the cinemas being closed during the corona pandemic, it had to largely switch to the Internet. This year, the festival organized by the German Film Institute will show 92 films from 38 countries exclusively online. The program is divided into several sections. The focus of the competition is the prize for the best film, endowed with 10,000 euros.
Bookings are still possible until April 26th (6.50 euros per film). A film is then available for viewing for 48 hours. www.filmfestival-goeast.de/
The film’s imagery and narrative structure are also confused. The black and white tableaus, wonderfully filmed by Veronika Solovyeva, sometimes show the figures lost in the landscape in panoramic shots, but usually wander from mourning guest to mourning guest looking for them and often only have space for hands, feet and cut heads and bodies – as if staying the view of the whole is always denied.
In between there are childhood memories of the protagonist: carefree days with schoolmates, but which are increasingly being overlaid by the imperious grandmother: “Children are nothing special”, she barks once, “without them you can get by better.” More and more a mystically charged labyrinth emerges , the outcome of which the heroine with an ancient role model only finds with great emotional effort. What is remarkable is the increasing fragility that actress Anastasia Davidson gives her figure in a virtuoso manner.
Ivanna is anything but fragile. The documentary “The Life of Ivanna” by filmmaker Renato Borrayo Serrano, who was born in Guatemala in 1992, accompanied her and her five children in the icy cold of the Siberian tundra. A snow storm rattles the walls of the nomad house made of reindeer skin. Inside, the five tots romp around on around six square meters. What is almost unbearable even while on film, the young mother endures sometimes with stoic calm and a cigarette in her mouth, sometimes with clear announcements.
Despite the difficulties, she would like to continue the traditional life of the small indigenous people of the Nenets with her children in the next generation. Above all, however, the absence of her husband, who seems paralyzed by alcohol and stupidity, forces her to make a change in purely economic terms and to move to the city. The young filmmaker, who learned his trade in Russia, observes this path with persistence, sometimes lightness and strong images.
Like the woven QR code, the three films become picture puzzles that contain two lifestyles: tradition and the 21st century. In the late Middle Ages, picture puzzles were a way for draftsmen to show more or less hidden grievances or to depict satirical exaggeration. Similarly, in the three exemplary film works, the tension between the opposites leads to an accusation that points to the ordeal of young people across the country.
Another documentary in the competition provides a counterpart: “Once upon a time there was youth” looks back on the short life of a Croatian underground artist with a seemingly endless collection of impressive black and white photographs. For Marco from Zagreb, who died of an overdose at the beginning of the noughties in his mid-twenties, the most traditional was perhaps the 15-year-old Commodore 64, on whom he gambled through the nights with his friend.
It is this friend who is now setting a cinematic monument for him: “Maybe this is the film that he and I should have directed the camera,” says Ivan Ramljak at the end of his cinematic homage in the voiceover.
In his search for clues, he combines the images of the deceased with indulgent stories from companions and friends. In the best moments, this interaction develops a narrative pull that is reminiscent of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée”. And at the same time the description of a hedonistic subculture between Zagreb and Ljubljana succeeds, which after the war does not dwell on questions about yesterday and tomorrow.
