ARTS: Scorsese Sets Film Festival Rolling

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Feb 8 2008 (IPS) - The 58th International Berlin Film Festival was given a rousing start when Martin Scorsese’s vibrant Rolling Stones documentary ‘Shine a Light’ was chosen to kick off the ten-day movie extravaganza Thursday evening.

Dieter Kosslick, the Berlinale’s effervescent director, was all smiles as he strolled up the Palast Cinema’s red carpet along with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones. They cracked jokes and chatted with hordes of fans ahead of the world premiere of New York based director Martin Scorsese’s out-of-competition film.

“The Rolling Stones film succeeds in bringing to the big screen the pure essence of a cult band,” said Kosslick.

The film, based on two Stones concerts given at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2006, contains rare behind-the-scenes footage of the four band members who flew here, together with Scorsese, for the movie’s launch.

After an earlier screening of the documentary for movie critics, lead singer Mick Jagger told journalists the movie experience had been “a lot of fun.” It resulted, said guitarist Keith Richards, after a bond was made over the years with Oscar-winning movie-maker Scorsese.

For his part Scorsese said: “Music is a part of my life. The sound of the music…the entire feel of the music inspired me greatly. I always said I wanted to capture a Stones performance on film, but it took me 40 years to do so.”

An award-winning camera team shot more than half a million feet of footage to capture the raw energy of the world’s most famous rock n’roll band.

“Sixty thousand Berliners were at a Stones concert at the city’s Olympic Stadium in the summer of 2006, and tonight just as many fans would have been here if the cinema had been big enough to seat them,” said Kosslick, himself a former pop band member.

When the Rolling Stones were gaining fans around the world in the 1960s, Berlin’s festival chief was a member of a Pforzheim, German-based band, called The Meters.

“Our last big gig was at the Palace of Tears (Traenenpalast) on Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse in the early 1990s,” said Kosslick, who still plays a Stratocaster guitar and, if encouraged, will sing you early Mick Jagger hits.

The Palace of Tears served as a grim East German checkpoint for westerners wishing to enter the (then) communist east when the Berlin Wall was in place. “Not until after Berlin’s reunification were pop concerts held there,” said Kosslick.

Besides scoring a first with the Scorsese film, Kosslick pulls off another coup by luring music icon Madonna to Berlin. She makes her director’s debut with the movie ‘Filth and Wisdom’, a comedy relating the dreams of ordinary people seeking to find a way out of the drudgery of daily life.

The 2008 Berlinale is packed with music-related movies, with two of them featuring famous U.S. rock poet Patti Smith and Canada’s veteran singer Neil Young. In the film ‘Heavy Metal in Baghdad’ made by Eddie Moretti and Suroosh Alvi, the plight of a band called Acrassicauda (‘Black Scorpions’) is traced to the Iraqi capital.

Until the summer of 2006 the band’s members were leading a scary existence in Baghdad, pursued by death threats from rebels and religious fundamentalists. To some, Acrassicauda’s music sounds raw, but Moretti and Alvi claim it contains “the hopes and emotions of an entire generation in Iraq.”

Today all four Acrassicauda band members live as refugees in Damascus.

Music also plays a strong role in Christian Karim Chrobog’s documentary ‘War Child’. It tackles the spectacular rise of Emmanuel Jal from former Sudanese child-soldier to international hip-hop star. Jal, who was born in southern Sudan in 1980, is in Berlin to present his movie.

When a small boy, he was taken to Ethiopia to be trained as a child soldier after his mother died. Later smuggled to Kenya, he developed into a hit singer known throughout Africa, singing in English, Arabic and Swahili and two Sudanese languages. Today he is also spokesperson for an organisation called Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.

Some 21 movies from 19 countries including Japan, Iran, China, Europe, Brazil, Mexico and the U.S. chase the top 2008 Golden Bear award. Fourteen of them have their world premieres in Berlin.

Even before the start of the festival, controversy has swirled around the in-competition movie ‘Hearts of Fire’ by Luigi Falorni, which dates back to the 1980s Eritrean war of independence against Ethiopia.

Adapted from Asmara-born singer-actress Senait Mehari’s best-selling autobiography published in 2004, the film describes how a small child and her sister are given by their father to one of Eritrea’s liberation armies in the 1980s, where they survive hunger, loneliness and hard labour at a camp.

Recently, however, a Berlin court issued an order against the singer after witnesses disputed claims Mehari had made in her book. She is appealing the court ruling. Now further complaints have been lodged by a Frankfurt lawyer against Mehari and her Munich publisher in a Hamburg court.

For Falorni, whose film ‘The Story of a Crying Camel’ was nominated for an Oscar in 2005, such publicity is embarrassing. Curiously, the row breaks at a time when another African author – Ishmael Beah – faces suggestions that his best-selling memoir ‘A Long Way Gone’ is not the true story of a child soldier in Sierra Leone as claimed.

His book sold almost 700,000 copies and transformed Beah from a penniless orphan to millionaire writer. He became UNICEF’s poster boy for its global campaign to keep children out of warfare.

‘The Australian’ newspaper recently claimed that Beah hoodwinked people about his true age when be became a soldier in the 1990s, and that he was 15, not 13, at the time he took up arms for “two months” – not the two years he’d claimed in his book.

Beah, who has lived in the United States since fleeing Sierra Leone at age 17, says the newspaper’s report is inaccurate. “I don’t worry about it. For me, my story is accurate and I stand by it.”

Child-soldier dramas, along with movies about street gangs, ghetto kids and youth criminality, figure strongly in Berlin. Among the 384 films from 59 countries being screened in Berlin are also a raft of films from Israel, which mark the 60th anniversary of the creation of the Jewish state.