Festivals The 10th Berlin Critics’ Week (14th-22nd February, 2024)
Day Six - Carnival of Souls
The debate called Carnival of Souls discussed the horror of capitalism, the surrealism of world politics, and whether masking this for playfulness in representative films only subverts the serious message of activist cinema. Moreover, the debate questioned what role is played by human bodies, identities, biographies, and experiences of violence in these films. The guests were: Riar Rizaldi, who presented the short film Notes from Gog Magog (2022); Omer Fast, the director of the feature film Abendland (2024); Sirin Fulya Erensoy, a film and media scholar; and Massimo Perinelli, a film historian who is at pains to add is not a cineaste; with moderation again by Dennis Vetter.
The renowned video artist and filmmaker Omer Fast likes to foreground the invisible and the taboo subjects in his work, championing oppressed characters to address real power structures and mechanisms of exclusion in societies. With the use of such symbolic figures, his works also touch a nerve on the fragility of identity, space, and reality effect, as well as the consequence of these aspects. His new feature film Abendland had its World Premiere screening at Berlin Critics’ Week to an intense and resonating effect. A group of young climate activists wearing masks attack tree logger workers clearing a forest. They are overcome but one escapes wearing an Angela Merkel mask. After being chased through the forest by police she falls down a steep ravine and is knocked unconscious. She later wanders dazed through the forest until she discovers a community of masked residents looking for an alternative to the failed German state.
The screening of Abendland was alongside an Indonesian short film called Notes from Gog Magog, written and directed by Riar Rizaldi. A director who regularly plays with the boundaries of the documentary, Rinaldi’s work encompasses unexpected connections between capitalism, technology, exploitation, and ecology. In the case of his new film it becomes a genuinely eerie trip as two workers from differing corners of a tech corporation find themselves becoming embodied as they lose their sense of individuality. In its 20-minute length, Notes from Gog Magog manages to compel, captivate as well as hypnotise. In taking a swipe at the corporate monster and capitalism, AI, mythical monsters, Samsung, Burj Khalifa, Petronas, shipping containers, physically isolating outsourced staff, monotonous and horrific work in a deserted office, all these institutions and symbols are foregrounded. The technique uses voice-over with strong animation versus live action, showing corporate spaces without any humans in the frame, underlining the alienation and void of the human experience in large tech companies. In Korean culture people from the outside are considered as ghosts, just like the ocean.
The discussion began with the hypothesis that both films represented a dystopian description of today’s state of the world but also a collective state of identity that may be getting lost in the realms of activism. Massimo Perinelli was puzzled and disoriented by Abendland the first time he saw it but watching it a second time understands its climate activism more clearly. He also saw a connection between Abendland and Notes from Gog Magog in the craving for a human social encounter, but which the protagonists don’t quite achieve. Sirin Fulya Erensoy highlighted Abendland’s many associations, particularly the use of masks (Covid and activists hiding their identities from the police, etc.) and has herself experienced environmental activism first hand in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey. In Notes from Gog Magog, she considered the workers are unaccounted for so they are like ghosts, physically present but with no real presence. The Notes from Gog Magog director Riar Rizaldi added that he was initially interested in making safety at work videos and workers accident films because of brutal working conditions that are masked by AI serenity, so he juxtaposed AI algorithms with documentary footage for this film.
Abendland director Omer Fast was apparently quoted as saying that he does not like to watch a film with an audience (usually his work is shown in galleries) but admitted he enjoyed the immediate engagement at Critics’ Week. He said Abendland was two-fold in its narrative; the first element was from Robinson Crusoe, a western male’s quest to become the master of the world. He sees Angela Merkel as a parable of this in that they are not in control of the new world they voluntarily subjected themselves to because circumstances in this world have rapidly changed. He is interested when surplus figures return to haunt the system as it is hated by capitalists because it makes for a collateral image. The surplus figures that won’t disappear are the ghosts who remain, the ghosts that haunt us.
Day Seven - City Lights
For the debate City Lights, the urban and the cinematic collided, with the spotlight on one country and one city, in this case Argentina and Buenos Aires. The hypothesis focused on whether there is a distinct social and cultural mode of expression that makes a film distinctly national. Taking two example films, a short and a feature made more than forty years apart, the debate attempted to identify a visual representation of Argentina’s social inequality, past and present, while also obscuring reality through broken promises, and latterly the evocation of ghosts and carnivals. Joining moderator Lucía Salas were guests Francisco Bouzas, director of Hidden City (Ciudad Oculta, 2024), a surreal journey between the living and the dead of Buenos Aires; the actress and director Susanne Sachsse, who is known in the film industry not least for her collaboration with Bruce LaBruce; and Davide Oberto, who has worked for many years at film festivals such as the Turin Film Festival, was co-director of the Doclisboa festival, and curated numerous retrospectives, reported on documentary films, archive programmes, and the perspective of European festivals on Latin American cinema.
Warnes (1991) is a short film from the German-born Argentinian artist turned experimental filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch and looks at the demolition of an unfinished children’s hospital in Buenos Aries. In its short three-minute length it still details much in terms of crowd point-of-view as they watch the building crumble and disappear in slow motion as this never realised part of Argentina's history is reduced to rubble and dust. It could be any building, but it was a special one as it was the demolition of Argentina’s never completed building project for the largest children’s hospital by the government of Carlos Menem, a project originally initiated by Eva Perón some 40 years earlier. It remained a political issue for a long time as many residents who had been living in the unused building for decades were displaced when it was eventually demolished. This was one of a series of documentary films about various events in the city that Hirsch made during this period of the 1980s and into the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, Francisco Bouzas tells the story of a group of queer rebels in search of the gateway to the afterlife in his playful feature film debut Hidden City. Echoing the Warnes documentary short, the social realities of Buenos Aires today are foregrounded in Bouzas’s film, the title of which is a reference to the nickname given to the Villa 15 shanty town. Taking a punky, tragicomic DIY gangster film premise, a queer gang of carnival musicians clash with the police. When a member of their clique dies, the law still stands in their way as the gates to the afterlife and a more tolerant world. However, the place they intend to make a justifiable farewell to the deceased happens to be located in the middle of a police station. After the screenings, the debate looked at the DIY aesthetic and queerness of Hidden City, particularly in relation to the rewards and creative benefits of artistic experimentation in freedom of expression. Director and actress Susanne Sachsse told director Francisco Bouzas that she thought it was a brilliantly suffocating film that seemed to invoke an involuntary bodily reaction. Festival director Davide Oberto praised the art direction of the film, the signifiers of zombies and empty spaces. Director Bouzas said that he originated from opposite the Villa 15 district but, in regards to what makes a film national; he admitted that some of the cast and even himself are not fully Argentinean.
The protest movement inspired by Narcisa Hirsch’s short film Warnes, which moderator Lucía Salas reiterated was a major landmark in Buenos Aires from 1955 to 1991, was also something she considered typical of the bad urban planning endemic in the Argentinean capital before it was finally demolished and ironically replaced on the site by the Ministry of Habitat, a smart new building but of course very paradoxical in the context of everything. This was also something that Salas argued is also endemic in how Neoliberal governments across the world have destroyed the social fabric of cities. A unique film artist very well-known in Argentina but little known outside of the country, Narcisa Hirsch died on 4th May 2024 at the age of 96 so the screening of Warnes at Critics’ Week unknowingly served as a fitting tribute to the avant-garde filmmaker in the city of Berlin where she was born before (after a time in Austria) she moved to Patagonia, Argentina at the age of nine for a long life’s journey and work.
Day Eight - Hard, Fast and Beautiful
The final debate session of the 2024 edition of Berlin Critics’ Week was called Hard, Fast and Beautiful. The objective of the session was to understand where we are now in cinema, thereby conscientiously facing up to the past, as well as the optimism for the potentialities of brave new mediums in the film world. Within the nuances of film genres and all their clichés, they focused on the (newly rekindled) obsession with the Western genre, the avant-garde, museums, galleries and installations, with all representing differing forms that counter the hegemonic order that is to be predominantly found in conventional or institutional narrative cinema, with a countering of this residing not least in the feminist, postcolonial, and digital revisionism of historical texts.
Two directors from the screenings were in attendance; Clara Winter, director of Wikiriders (2024), and Catarina Vasconcelos, director of Nocturne For A Forest (2023), both of whom would subsequently have to contend with the obligatory notational questions related to which adjective best describes their respective films: hard, fast, or beautiful? They were joined by Gala Hernández López, who was also presenting her new 19-minute double-screen film, for here am I sitting in a tin can far above the world (2023), in this year’s Berlinale Forum Expanded section. In her essay films López likes to observe people and the world through a technical lens, looking to the potential influence that virtual alter egos and new forms of communication are having on consciousness and gender roles today. Her current work is exemplary of this because it addresses the connections between crypto culture and cryogenics technologies as future economic resources. Furthermore, it also attempts to prophesise the effects of this through science-fiction, 3D animations, saturated social media, and not least financial and speculative governance. Making up the panel was Eytan Ipeker, editor and experimental filmmaker (notably for Burning Days (2022), and with moderation by film scholar and curator Amos Borchert, one of the collective responsible for the artistic direction of Critics’ Week.
One film in the program where the director was not present (on this occasion) was the Austrian-made Pistoleras (2023) by Natalia del Mar Kašik, a two-minute take on symbolism related to the cowgirl, and containing no dialogue. This was also the second film to be shown in this year’s Critics’ Week for the director after Horse Girl. In Pistoleras the symbolism is erotically charged, and musical, where symbolic awakening meets experimentation, while inference confronts ambiguity. Running at a total sixteen minutes, Nocturne For A Forest, by Catarina Vasconcelos, is a stylish and hypnotic film, particularly in its juxtaposition of sound, music and image that combines to a stylised climatic effect with animated colourised plants representing the spirits of women who passed away close to a monastery in 17th Century Portugal, a place where the Carmelites had caused controversy by displaying a painting considered indecent. Finally, at 60 minutes, the borderline feature-length Wikiriders, co-directed by Clara Winter, Miiel Ferraez and Megan Marsh in their debut feature, looks at the historical obsession with the Western genre, rendered here as an ironic road movie and serving as a critique on the colonial legacy.
After the screenings the debate panel attempted to assimilate, deliberate, as well as differentiate the three films. Eytan Ipeker felt that all three films had an element of humour in them and commended the semi-improvisation of Wikiriders as well as its use of sound and post-production aesthetics. Catarina Vasconcelos also highlighted the humour but as serving in a direct way and linked Wikiriders to her own Nocturne For A Forest in that she saw both films as weapons of artistic expression. While Clara Winter considered her Wikiriders film to be full of humour, she also hinted at the idea that some of her films contain elements that she is proud of and other elements she may regret later, the result of the editing process and a consequence of choices made. She was also complimentary of Catarina Vasconcelos film and its use of inter-titles. Gala Hernández López went further by considering Wikiriders as ecological, deconstructing hegemony, and a strong feminist work with the presence of three directors working together shining through like a family.
By Steven Yates
