By Sascha Krieger
Mé el Aïn (Competition / Tunisia, France, Canada / Director: Meryam Joobeur)
The wound won’t heal. After two of her sons disappear to join ISIS, Aïcha cuts herself in the kitchen. The blood won’t stop – the film’s central image for the wounds left by violence. A piece of naturalistic surrealism ensues, a ghost tale in which everybody ends up haunted. Dark dirty flashback, a grayish ominous present, a kitschy summer hue – these are the three corners of the palette the film uses. Again and again, the objects and characters literally go out of focus, the camera lurks from behind or goes painfully close. There is no perspective to be found, stories emerge and and exposed as lies. The redness of blood waits everywhere, is even foreshadowed by the brothers‘ appearance. A film full of symbolism, a little heavy at times, a story not to explained in any way possible. There remain open ends, fractures in the narrative, open wounds. Another one of this Competition’s somewhat heavy-handed films but one that is compelling in its restless searching for a meaning in all this, this violence, all this death. A search, a sense of being lost the audience shares.
Khamyazeye bozorg (Encounters / Iran / Director: Aliyar Rasti)
An old lonely man and a young homeless guy. The quintessential odd couple on a road trip through Iran. Ostensibly looking for something constantly eluding them, mostly because the search really is for something else. A purpose, something to fill the void. Rough unpolished images of an unwelcoming deadly countryside set the scene for two more and more exhausted faces and bodies who cannot stay and cannot leave. Until they can, towards different, open futures that might or might not exist. The film tells life as a journey not just into the unknown but into nothing. The characters are sketched in short, often hostile dialogues that say just about enough if that much. An age-old story re-told in a world that seems to offer nothing and where nothingness might be the only way out. A little repetitive, including a rather distracting side story and a disappointingly lazy starting point, The Great Yawn of History (English title) is portrait about life (not only?) in Iran and dry as the desert. Keeping its distance most of the time, the film nevertheless manages to shed a light of human longing – for togetherness, a purpose, a way out.
Sayyareye dozdide shodeye man (Panorama Documents / Germany, Iran / Director: Farahnaz Sharifi)
“Im addicted to recording“: In her film, exiled Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi explores the battle between remembering and forgetting, keeping the past alive and taking it away by changing it, between her and their „planet“. In amateur footage from her own and nameless, countless others’ pasts she has rescued by collecting abandoned, the films left behind by those who had to flee Iran or had to hide their past, she preserves all those lives hidden from view, lived on their own private „planets“, the worlds of their homes as opposed to the oppressed lives forced by the Islamic Republic. She tells her story and theirs, from the first protests again the mandatory hijab shortly after the islamic revolution to those of the present, both not filmed by herself as he had her world taken from her (My Stolen Planet is the film’s English title). She adds scenes from her, her friends’ and her family’s private lives: forbidden parties, family scenes, protests to a Facetime call from her mother’s funeral and her friends saving her belongings from her apartment. The film ends with that ultimate act of defiance: unnamed, forgotten people dancing, captured on film that is memory, individual once, collective now. The regime fought and still fight for forgetting, but memory remains, resists, triumphs. A deeply personal film by and about a woman who has lost her planet yet cannot leave it as well as the resilience and resistance by generations of Iranian women, the power of freedom – entirely personal and unashamedly universal at the same time. A poetic and forceful document of a journey in which the personal is political, the individual, collective, the private revolutionary, a journey somewhere between departure and arrival, past and future, there and here.
Teaches of Peaches (Panorama Documents / Germany / Directors: Philipp Fussenegger, Judy Landkammer)
Teaches of Peaches follows the 20th-anniversary tour of the album of the same name. It peeks in at the rehearsals and some of the shows, features interviews with the legendary artist as well as collaborators, friends and colleagues and mixes this with archival material, for example mixing current concert footage with that from the time of the record’s release, demonstrating development and continuity in Peaches’s in the most direct of ways. Her path to the album is mirrored by her path to the tour, painting an impressive portrait of a trailblazing artist who throughout her career has injected feminist, queer, emancipatory perspectives into music, defying genre limits as well as any strict definitions. The film is fast-paced, pulsing with the rhythm of the still explosive music but also taking the time to have her and the people who know her tell her story. A highly entertaining as well as informative portrait of an extraordinary artist that will satisfy hardcore fans as much as newcomers.
Stage and Screen 