Looking back on my long list of movies I had the chance to watch in July it looks like I was pretty lucky to spend so much time with screenings covering a variety of topics, styles and languages. The movies in the German language were my main criteria of choice, but besides I had the opportunity to explore some old authors and new topics and I can only be grateful for my freedom of spending my time (mostly) as I really want to, busy with various cultural thoughts and activities.
Greta directed by Armando Praça
Listening to Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese, makes me always feel good. But Greta by Armando Praça is anything but ´feelgood´ movie. Pedro, the 70-year old gay nurse, taking care of Daniela, her dying transgender friend. In order to safe a hospital bed for her, he helps escape a sought-criminal to whom he grows fond of. A simple fact of life, often taken for granted, develops into a fine drama of loneliness and the hearthbreaking trauma of hidden identity.
Rating: 4 stars
The Perfect Candidate directed by Haifaa al-Mansour
Haifaa al-Mansour is Saudi Arabia´s first - and probably only - film director. One year ago, I´ve watched Wadjda, a simple story about a girl who wants to ride a bicycle in a society that until very recently not too long ago sent women daring to drive into prison. The Perfect Candidate is about a woman doctor forced to challenge her fellow citizens and authorities to answer a call for repairing the roads around her hospital where she works as a doctor.
It´s a men´s world and Maryam is only guided by her stubborness to change something. Besides, this movie reveals so many ongoing clashes between tradition and modernity, focused mostly around the role the women were forced to assign. It´s both a good movie - which I streamed on MUBI - and a window into a different world which is worth seeing if interested in the Middle East topics.
Rating: 4.5 stars
Deep Web documentary directed by Alex Winter
I watch a documentary every couple of days, but Deep Web directed by Alex Winter deserves a written mention. Although it focuses - way too much, in my opinion - on the cracking down of the Silk Road, a marketplace used for illicit, under the Internet radar exchanges of all kinds, it is also a testimony of an episode of libertarian thought. In practice though, as it is happening right now with the crypto, such movements cannot stay away from state involvement, of different kinds which may control, infiltrate or simply destroy such alternative online spaces because they have the means and the influence and particularly, the power. In many respects, libertarianism is just another mind creation, whose greatest danger is to start being put into practice.
The documentary has many interesting testimonies and points of view, but I was even more interested in more philosophical/ethnical discussion.
Rating: 3 stars
Jibril directed by Henrika Kull
Maryam is an independent divorced mother of two living in Kreuzberg´s Berlin. A second-generation Iraqi Muslim she is easygoing not necessarily looking for someone but charmed by Lebanese soap operas she is watching every evening after work. Until she met Jibril a young man who cannot ofer her anything but raw feelings. They fell in love despite the warnings and advices trying to convince her that stability may be more important than feelings. Jibril (very good played by Malik Adan, also playing in the popular Tatort) is the least recommended candidate given his very special situation, but I will not spoil more of the story for those interested to watch the movie.
Although I am not so good when it comes to such personal choices and most probably will say a strong YES to stability and normality, the movie is not bad at all and worth watching and not only if you are looking to improve your German language skills. The film director has a very neutral stance, allowing the characters to freely move within their human emotional spaces.
Rating: 3.5 stars
Die Kommune directed by Thomas Vinterberg
Die Kommune is running very far away from my intellectual comfort zone but my curiosity is always winning. When the architect husband of a famous TV star inherits a huge bourgeois house his wife convince him to build up a comuna, gathering old and new friends. The decisions are taken together and the daily tasks are distributed. Peace, flowers and happiness, and a couple of swimming by night all together naked. Until the unempathic architect wants to bring in his much younger student, half his age at least, as his lover, but not loved enough to break with his wife.
I am very very old style when it comes to relationships and also when it comes to sharing my living space - living room included - and the poor emotional shapes of the characters haven´t make it easier to accept those differences. (Seriously, your son just died and you are up and again the next day to discuss about organisational directions in the comuna?).
I watched it without any previous research and was not sure if it was a time well spent, but at least pushed me to think a bit about relationships and how selfishly humans inflict emotional trauma to one another.
Rating: 2.5 stars
Shelter - Aus nächster Distanz - directed by Eran Riklis
Shelter - in the German translation Aus nächster Distanz - is a reunion of good things. First, the two actresses - the Iranian-born exiled Golshifteh Farahani which is such an emotional - in the very good sense of the word - presence, the Israeli Neta Riskin - who had a role in Shtisel, among others, and also coached Natalie Portman for the role in A Tale of Love and Darkness - and the Israeli film director Eran Riklis whose Lemon Tree movie has an important role in challenging my former narrative on the Middle East.
The story unfolds from Lebanon to Tel Aviv and Hamburg, where a Mossad spy - Golshifteh - is under protection and ungoing dramatic physical changes in order to be saved from the long arm of Hezbollah, dispatched in Europe to punish her betrayal. It is a complex take on good and bad and responsibility and motivation which is fascinating. However, I´ve found a bit too easy and unreliable that their hidden nest in Hamburg was found so fast. I know, I am nagging all the time and rarely happy with a story as it is...
Rating: 3.75 stars
Morgen sind wir frei - Tomorrow We are Free - directed by Hossein Pourseifi
And one more movie based in the Middle East. Especially as based on a true story, Morgen sind wir frei - Tomorrow We are Free - is even sadder. The Iran-born living in Hamburg Hossein Pourseifi picked up a story of a Toudeh - the former Communist Party of Iran, once the biggest in the Middle East - militant and journalist - enchanted by the fall of the Shah to return in the country with his GDR scientist wife and daughter. His belief in the revolution - most probably not an ´Islamic´ one - was so great that blinded his sense of survival and he will end up being eaten up by the movement that was blindly supported without someone being able to endeavour its tragic development - except a very few who actually were in control from the very beginning.
It was a pleasure to watch to great play of actors like Reja Brojerdi, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi (one of my favorite actors in this movie) and Katrin Röver.
How many tomorrows will pass until freedom, real freedom will even happen?
The Notebook directed by János Szász
Movies set in a very complex political and historical context are always sad. The Notebook by the Hungarian film director János Szász, after a bestseller book by Agota Kristof, is deeply troubling. I rarely watch movies set in WWII as the real story about those terrible times I grew up with are enough for me. I don´t need any fictional representation either in books or movies.
However, I did it this time. The Notebook was revelatory for focusing the story mostly on the two twins growing up during the last years of the war with a stone-hearted grandmother they never met before, in a lost village at near the border. The soul can be hardened so fast and for ever. It takes shorter to turn a heart into stone than it takes to make it into flesh again. The hardships of the separation from their parents created a well of traumas that they learn to fight by all human means to counter. But there is one last trauma that took longer to live with: their own separation.
It is a sad and heartbreaking movie revealing the suffering of a whole post-war generation. My only solace was to be able to hear again the Hungarian language.
Rating: 4 stars
The Young Marx directed by Raoul Peck
Last but not least, let´s finish my movie marathon with some nice Marxist talks. I was familiar with the film director, the Haitian Raoul Peck which has a movie-worth life himself, from a documentary about Patrick Lumumba which despite some clear bias is nevertheless a good contribution to the leftist film representations. The Young Marx features the late 20s of the founder of communism, the beginning of his friendship with Friedrich Engels, with accurate references to the outstanding pressure of the new social class of the proletariat brought up by the Industrial Revolution.
I would never refuse a discussion about the state of the world - proletariat included - while sipping from a glass of champagne on a comfy leather chair. With a revolutionary music background, probably. But let´s be honest: proletariat should leave their own social class if they want to turn into game changers. Otherwise, the daily hard work will never allow them the priviledge of spending not even an hour free of the capitalist pressure of producing - something, anything.
In the movie, Marx wanted to spend his time writing and was a legitimate wish, while Engels was enabled to do as the son of his industrialist father. I am not too much into historical movies but I think that it is useful to watch The Young Marx for the discussions and some name dropping and the idea of beautiful intellectual friendships. Yeah, I know, I cannot run out of the profit-oriented (including intellectually) kind of life.
Rating: 3 stars
That´s all for July, but my long list of August movies is already in the making...
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