/ARTS WEEKLY/: Berlin Film Festival Produces Surprises

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Feb 22 2005 (IPS) - In a major surprise, the South African-made movie ‘U-Carmen eKhayelitsha’ hoisted the top Golden Bear award at the 55th Berlin International Film Festival last week.

Few critics at the Festival had reckoned with the movie’s success, as more attention had focused on two other African-made movies about the genocide horror in Rwanda ten years ago.

Shot in the township of Khayelitsha in Cape Town last spring, director Mark Dornford-May’s film is based on Bizet’s opera Carmen, and tells a visceral tale of love, hate, jealousy, revenge, erotic obsession, desire and madness.

The movie was co-written and translated into a South African context by two actors in collaboration with Dornford-May. For the film’s soundtrack, the opera lyrics were translated into Xhosa.

The movie stars the celebrated opera singer Pauline Malefone as Carmen. When jury member Franka Potente – herself a well known German actress – announced that ‘eKhayelitsha’ had scooped the main Festival award, many of the surprised critics in the packed Hyatt Hotel conference room leapt to their feet to applaud.

By transposing a previous stage production into a feature-length film, Dornford-May manages successfully to set the story of the love affair between Carmen and Don Jose against the hardship suffered by those living in a South African township. ‘U-Carmen eKhayelitsha’ is a Dimpho Di Kopane production, made in association with Nando’s and Spier Films, and is entirely sung and spoken in Xhosa.

More predictably, 36-year-old Marc Rothemund was awarded the Festival’s Silver Bear for best director for his film ‘Sophie Scholl – Die Letzten Tage’ (‘Sophie Scholl: The Final days’), which tells the story of the last six days in the life of Scholl, a courageous member of a Munich student anti-Hitler resistance group.

Scholl was beheaded by the Nazis in the spring of 1943 along with her brother, Hans, and other heroic students who opposed Hitler. Sixty pages of recently discovered transcripts of her Nazi interrogation inspired Rothemund to base a movie around her fate.

Julia Jentsch, who gives a compelling performance as Sophie Scholl, won the Silver Bear best actress award. Scholl who was arrested in 1943 after she and her brother Hans distributed anti-Nazi leaflets at the city university, at first outwits Gen Alexander Held, her Nazi interrogator – played by Robert Mohr – by maintaining her innocence, but later she is forced to admit her opposition to Hitler.

Tried by the notorious People’s Court judge Roland Freisler – who was himself later killed in an allied bombing raid – Sophie Scholl screamed on leaving the dock, "You’re hanging us today, but tomorrow it will be your heads that will roll."

The jury’s Grand Prix Silver Bear award went to Gu Chang wei, one of China’s most well known cinematographers, for his film ‘Kong Que’ (The Peacock), which depicts the everyday life of three siblings in a small town in Henan province, and extends from the end of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s through to1984.

"I wanted to make a film investigating human existence," said Gu Chang wei, making his debut as a director.

A film which attracted considerable attention at this year’s jamboree was Palestinian film-maker Hany Abu-Assad’s ‘Paradise Now’, depicting the final 24 hours in the lives of two suicide bombers.

The film, which was given its world premiere in the main feature section in Berlin, tells the story of two young Palestinians – Khaled and Said – who get recruited for a suicide bombing mission in Tel Aviv. But the operation does not go according to plan after bombs are attached to their bodies.

"Making a film about the last 24 hours in the life of someone who is going to kill himself didn’t just have to be a thriller," Abu Assad said in Berlin, hinting that its philosophical background was more that of two young men Said (Kais Nashefd) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) trying to find a purpose in life than the story of Islamic fundamentalists.

A Nazareth-born aircraft engineer-turned film director, Abu Assad said making the film was no easy experience. "We experienced trouble every day. Both the Israelis and Palestinians were used to news crews of a few people. But we didn’t have a small crew that could shoot film and run. There were 70 people and 30 trucks, we couldn’t run and hide with that."

Assad said some Palestinian gunmen had the idea that they were making a film against the Palestinians. "However, other groups and factions supported the film because they thought we were fighting for freedom and democracy."

The film won the Blue Angel Award as "the best European film."

In 2002 its producers had approached the Israeli Film Fund for production funding. Katriel Schory, head of the Israeli Film Fund, championed the film on the basis of its script – written by Abu-Assad and Dutch producer Bero Beyer – but the fund board at that time turned it down. "You have to remember this was two and-a-half years ago," said Schory in Berlin.

Now, in the wake of the recent Middle East summit in Egypt, a cinematic olive branch has been extended to Abu-Assad by the Israeli Film Fund, which now promises support -if it manages to find a distributor in Israel. "The Fund will provide print and advertising support when it finds a distributor in Israel," said Katriel Schory.

‘Paradise Now’ also won the Berliner Morgenpost Readers’ Film Prize, donated by a city daily newspaper.

A Silver Bear for "outstanding artistic contribution" was awarded to the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang for the script of his Berlin competition entry ‘Tian Bian Yi Duo Yun’ (‘The Wayward Cloud’), depicting aimless encounters in deserted high-rise buildings.

Ming-Liang is billed as an "erotic, sexual and sensitive" film-maker, and his latest film certainly lived up to that with its explicit sex scene footage. "My main theme is the body," he said in Berlin. "Pornography is for me only a method I use to portray things as I see them in social and private life." His movie also won the Alfred Bauer Prize awarded in memory of the Berlinale’s founder for "taking the art of film in a new direction."

Other Silver Bear awards in Berlin went to Lou Taylor Pucci for his role in Mike Mills’ U.S. competition film ‘Thumbsucker’ and to Alexandre Desplat for the music in Jacques Audiard’s French full-length feature, ‘De battre Mon Coeurs S’est Arrete’ (‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’).

Terry George’s out of competition movie ‘Hotel Rwanda’ starring Don Cheadle as a courageous Kigali hotel manager who saved the lives of some 1,200 fugitives, and talented London-based actress Sophie Okonedo, who played the manager’s wife, won plaudits in Berlin, as did Raoul Peck’s Rwandan film ‘Sometimes in April’ about a Hutu soldier who defies the murderous orders of his superiors during the genocide horror a decade ago.

Another film hailed in Berlin was ‘Sorstalansag’ (‘Fateless’), based on the autobiographical novel by Imre Kertesz, the 2002 Nobel literature laureate, about a 14-year-old Hungarian Jew who survives the Nazi concentration camps.

Lajos Koltai’s film tells the story of a boy coming of age in Nazi concentration camps and follows young Gyury Koves (Marcell Nagy) who is netted in a round-up of Hungarian Jews on June 30, 1944, and deported first to Auschwitz, then to labour camps in Germany.

Koves survives near starvation, but then suffers a shock when he finally gets home to Budapest. He finds his father has been killed, and the family home occupied by strangers who promptly ask him to "move on".