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My neighbor, my brother

INNOVATIVE / Experimental short films occupy the main scenes of the Berlin 2019.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Berlin does things its own way. Last year, at the venerable film festival in the hipster capital, the jury created a lot of furor by giving the Golden Bear a hybrid film that linked documentary and fiction, an outsider film that few thought of as an important award candidate: Adina Pintile's intimate essay on sexuality and body image, Touch Me Not. Twelve months later, the three-man field responsible for assigning the festival's short film variant – also a golden bear – went even further.

Koyo Kouoh (Senegal), Vanja Kaludjercic (Croatia) and Jeffrey Bowers (USA) decided on a non-narrative experimental candidate, which is a bold choice for a festival with such a high profile. Umbra by the German duo Florian Fischer and Johannes Krell is a semi-abstract, alluringly enigmatic 20 minute exploration of natural darkness, where they especially take advantage of the remarkable shadow effects that can occur during a solar eclipse. "Our formal ambition in all our films," commented the directors, "is to create an audio-visual experience that is as close as possible to dream dreams or lucid dreams - thus exploring the limits of sensory power. ”

Swan Song

While the film itself is dimmed and andante, the award of the Golden Bear is a short film that Umbria striking, and in addition, the first "home victory" since Helke Sander won for West Germany in 1985 – and a sensational final in the Berlinale career of Maike Mia Höhne, who has been head of the short film section since 2007. Unlike other sections of the Berlin – a fluid monster of an event that many consider to be crazy after Dieter Kosslick became artistic director in 2001 – the short film section has always shown intelligence and demonstrated a well-considered, disciplined and focused curation (only 26 films came through the eye this year) with a special emphasis on the innovative and avant-garde.

IN-BETWEEN

There is a certain irony in the fact that Höhne will retire to take over the Hamburg short film festival – just when the ingenious and brilliant Kosslick (who is a wonderful guy, although he does not correspond to anyone's meaningful concept of a film fan) is on his way out the door. The incoming Carlo Chatrian will take over for the 2020 festival and bring with him a significant reputation that he has built up at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland. Locarno is also known for its great short film program, and there are therefore good and encouraging odds that the biennial will be able to maintain its strong position in the area.

In Between is a free-spirited dive into village life in today's Kosovo.

This year, two films stood out for their vastly different treatments of masculinity in the Balkans. The first was Manuel Abramovichs Blue Boy, built around a series of interviews with young Romanian sex workers at the bar of the same name as the film's title, a legendary gay club in Berlin. The other film, Samir Karahodas In Between (No. Mes), which is about a strange social phenomenon where a number of families in Kosovo build identical houses that traveling brothers (reportedly) should be able to live in.

Male sex workers in Berlin

Blue Boy, which won the Silver Bear as second place, is an 18-minute exercise in humanistic expansion of sympathy, captured in seven separate chapters. In each of them we follow a young regular guest at the bar, located in Kleiststraße in the hip Schönberg area and known as one of the friendliest gay-oriented establishments in the definitely gay-friendly German capital. Each of them stares into the camera as he listens to a recording of himself, probably made just before the scene. A couple of the cast have trouble staying serious, especially "Razvan" in the second part, where he listens to his own rendition of a typical straight-on, explicit exchange between an "escort" and his potential client.


Blue Boy

But otherwise the tone is rather dark when the various participants discuss sexual preferences (most describe themselves as hetero, and sex work has more to do with financial needs than with personal inclinations), identity and, in the last part, an event that triggers a significant emotional movement. Abramovich (who is also a producer) takes the job as a photographer himself and presents the guys in juicy widescreen images with flashing unfocused lights from the bar in the background.

Blue Boy has the compact tightness that often characterizes
the best short films.

The fifth part, which is dedicated to "Marius", captures the interviewee in a gaudy romantic pink light. He is the most philosophical of the seven ("our world is nothing but a scene, we are like dolls") – and the Dietrich-like glamor in the atmosphere is disturbed only by a fly, which also appears in other segments. By virtue of the editing of the prominent Romanian editor Catalin Cristutiu (best known for collaborating with the prominent feature film-oriented author-director Radu Jude) Blue Boy the compact tightness that often characterizes the best short films.

Abramovich, who is reportedly working on an extension of the project to feature film format, is wise not to try to paint a full picture of Berlin's escort scene, but to concentrate on shaping sensitive and sharply observed images of these individuals brought together by the outside world. circumstances. The Argentine director is perhaps best known for the film Light Years (2017), which depicts the recording of Lucrecia Martel's Arthouse success Zinc alloy (in a way that could be argued to be more satisfying than the film, which has caused so much uproar).

Abramovich often likes to focus on younger people: La Reina (The queen) from 2013 is one of the decade's finest short films – a growing heartbreaking nine-minute insight into beauty pageants for children where the pressure is enormous. He is a productive and adventurous director who – in his own words – loves short films because they are “like a game. I just need to come up with the rules, and for a few minutes I invite the audience to take part in the game.

Village life in Kosovo

As a 31-year-old, the prolific Abramovich has already created a significant niche as a director. Karahoda, on the other hand, is a debutant – and ten years older. So far he has been better known for camera work, where he has merits back to 2007 – and he has been involved in several films about Kosovo – (most of them short films) since the country declared independence from Serbia in 2008. He is also thoroughly involved in Dokufest, the highly respected film festival in his hometown of Prizren, which has always given due space to short films alongside more talked-about works in "conventional" feature film length.

Despite the somewhat solid title is in Between a free dive into the village life in today's Kosovo, where many families are largely dependent on financial contributions from offspring working in richer countries such as Germany and Switzerland. (The latter country's football team, for its part, is known to have become dependent on "imported" Kosovars.)

While Abramovich takes advantage of the fashion grip of the time (which is objectively crazy), the documentary technique in which the participants stare into the camera as if they were being photographed, Karahoda uses this grip repeatedly and completely without irony. We hear several patriarchal families explaining how the family's wealth has been divided up to build identical houses on neighboring plots. These houses are usually at least three storeys high, bearing in mind that the more similar they are, the less jealousy and conflict will arise – which is understandable given the history of the former Yugoslavia – and we see these "family fathers" posing proudly for posterity.

As a showcase for Karahoda's talents as a film photographer In Between particularly striking where he uses the widescreen format to display the houses in their entirety – three, four, five, six – and at one point nine identical houses, scattered systematically along the film section – presented in front of an underpopulated landscape of fields and meadows. Dark gray clouds hang over them in the sky, the prayers of a minaret resound in the landscape, the light from the southern twilight of the Balkans glitters gently on the edge of labor-intensive fields.

The production ends with a noisy wedding celebration, the first feature of women in this old-fashioned male society; five brothers show up, all at work far away, and rarely visiting home. "Only weddings and funerals gather us," comments one of them, bringing in the twelfth hour the interesting question of how many of these houses will ever be used as planned.

Neil Young
Neil Young
Young is a regular film critic for Modern Times Review.

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