Gepostet von Cinema is the greatest mirror of humanity’s struggle. You see this alternative world, but you’re part of it. Everybody is part of it. This is our world.
Lav Diaz
John Berger writes that „we only see what we look at and to look is an act of choice“ and I think he is saying that there are so many things that we see everyday, be it in the streets, our neighborhoods, or on social media that we yet turn away from, either unconsciously or by choosing „blissful“ ignorance. Cinema for me, however, has this inevitability that makes the choice not to look almost impossible. The darkness of the cinema hall, the giant screen, and the feeling that time and space don’t exist for a moment, that the world stops spinning usually make me leave the cinema a bit dizzy. One would expect this sensation to be much stronger after a fast-paced James Bond style action film set in a fictional world that doesn’t have much in common with my mundane life but in my experience the realization after a documentary that these weren’t images from a far away planet – which Hollywood has taught us to think – but that the people on the screen, their suffering and joy are real, is much harder.
At this year’s Berlinale I watched films which took me from Belgium to France and Palestine – films from courageous filmmakers who chose to look and to turn the camera to the social fabrics of resitance and solidarity which glue together a world which to me feels overwhelmingly fragile these days. Four of the films I saw were especially moving, creative, and powerful and this is supposed to be written collage of my impressions.
hold on to her
It´s dark on the Belgian highway. Cars are speeding through the night. An atmosphere of trepidation and uncertainty dominates the film as the camera seems to be chased by the approaching cars. As the uncomfortably familiar landscapes of highways winding through the lush pastures of the Belgian plains bring back childhood memories of family roadtrips, I start to have an uneasy feeling of foreboding. The documentary by the filmmaker Robin Vanbesien explores the materiality of violence against undocumented people on the move across the French Belgian border. He documents a recent case of police violence in which Mawda Shawri, a two year old girl, was shot dead by a border patrol officer. The film takes us to imagined places in the past. Simple shots of landscapes are accompanied by a voice narrating memories of Mawda’s parents and sister. In the present it follows a collective hearing of both undocumented and documented resident activists and traces a lived social network of care, solidarity, and resistance, denouncing the impunity of the state as border patrols systematically violate the rights of people on the move. Finally, through vocal performances, interviews, and slow shots of the highway where the car chase took place in 2018 the director lays out a future of collective struggle.
The theme of the chase is at the core of the film. The long shots and repeating sceneries create a sense of inescapability matched by a very particual audiovisual grammer. Vanbesien skillfully interweaves poetic vocal performances with sober reports of racist violence. He plays with light and darkness and the speakers acknowledge a ghostly haunting they feel since the murdering of Mawda, especially because of the pain that no justice is done. Forensic reconstructions of the night the girl was shot are met by vocals which challenge what is heard and whose voices are silenced. This becomes especially clear as the narrators read out headlines about the murder which later will prove to be entirely false claims showing the dehumanizing mass media manipulation working on behalf of the state apparatus. „Indignation makes us human“, says the director during the Q&A session, inviting us to break the silence and to build spaces for collective mourning and healing to resisit the system of deadly racist violence and migrant criminalization.
DIRECT ACTION
From the title you would probably not expect a 3,5 hour slow film with some shots being between 5 and 10 minutes long. While at first the scenes felt exhaustingly slow as I was impatiently waiting (quite literally) for some action the directors‘ approach enabled a particular immersive experience. The film is set in an anarchist community in France which resisted the expansion of an airport and multiple evictions. It is a portrait of a contemporary anticapitalist mass movement which uses direct action, meaning sabotage, ocupation, and the destruction of fossil infrastructure. While it shows footage of mass protest actions in the beginning, it mainly moves through long shots which capture the daily life in the community. It follows its members as they cut wood in the forest and take care of the gardens and animals, almost in real time it feels, when we watch a horse waiting to be taken to work in the woods or cows plodding down a long canopy road.
Time doesn’t seem to be a scarce resource for the villagers and somehow the subject of the film or as the director later grinned and said „I was excited for it to be longer, we had a cut that was 5 hours long and it felt exactly right“ He mentions the crews attempt to really take the time to live in the community they filmed and to portray their conception of time. Watching the community cook and garden together the state’s allegations they were eco-terrorists seem quite absurd. Then the film moves to footage of violent encounters between heavily armed police and protesters. The still camera captures the protesters running to escape the smoke-bombs and artillery as police cars catch fire.
no other land
„I started filming when we started to end“, with this Basel Adra begins to chronicle the Palestinian struggle in the occupied West Bank in his home Masafer Yatta in the Southern Hebron hills. His community is facing mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation forces. As they raid nearby villages and brutally crush Palestinian resistance, the camera becomes a means of survival for Basel who later meets the Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham. The two start working together and create a powerful documentary with images that speak for themselves. As more and more of Adra’s ancestral land is being destroyed and the villagers have nowhere to go, the filmmakers record images of indignation, despair, and vanishing hope.
The intense, jolting impact of the film’s intense sequences of Palestinian-Israeli confrontation — often shot on phone cameras, to the consternation of army officials, and violent enough to shock many complacent fence-sitters on the issue into angry awareness — is balanced with more composed, observational scenes of Adra, his family and his neighbors trying to live an everyday life on ground that keeps getting pulled out from under them. Hope is fading that the next generation might retain their ancestral land; if they do, they’ll likely inherit Adra’s activism with it.
Guy Lodge
The documentary shocks, especially the footage shot on phone cameras with rifles pointed at them. While Basel lives under military occupation and with the risk of death increasing from day to day, Yuval can move freely and leave the West Bank whenever he wants. In the Q&A session the two talk about their relationship which is strained by this extreme inequality and about how the unfolding of Israel’s genocidal military campaign after October 7 has dramatically changed the parameters of the films recipience.
Amid the contentious atmosphere of this year’s Berlinale taking place in Germany where criticism abounded regarding the censorship of discourse on the showcased films, it is essential to highlight both no other land’s exceptional quality and the bravery exhibited in its creation. What left me speechless were the recent news about a perplexing clarification from the German Ministry of Culture, suggesting that the Culture Minister Claudia Roth’s applause during the awards ceremony was exclusively directed at the Israeli filmmaker. The blatant racism in this statement points to Germany’s failure of its highly vowed Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the hipocrisy of its so-called Staatsräson.
Just like the scenes of demolished villages and dead Palestinians in no other land the response to the director’s statement speaks for itself.
The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactely what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in, it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
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