This year’s Berlinale Forum grappled with… | Little White Lies

Festivals

This year’s Berli­nale Forum grap­pled with humanity’s fraught place in the world

24 Feb 2022

Words by Patrick Gamble

Silhouetted figure on a dimly lit, raised platform against a dark brick wall.
Silhouetted figure on a dimly lit, raised platform against a dark brick wall.
Emerg­ing from the pan­dem­ic, film­mak­ers exper­i­ment­ed with form and nar­ra­tive to pose deep­er ques­tions about our past, present and future.

The deci­sion to hold this year’s Berlin Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val as a phys­i­cal event was her­ald­ed as a return to nor­mal. But as the Berli­nale strived to recre­ate its past glo­ries, the films in this year’s Forum side­bar cel­e­brat­ed how the pan­dem­ic has cre­at­ed a spike in cre­ative thinking.

Now in its 52nd year, The Forum is known for pre­sent­ing films that rev­o­lu­tionise and reshape our vision of cin­e­ma. Per­haps the best exam­ple of this was Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s Jet Lag; a deeply per­son­al film of frac­tured iden­ti­ties and shift­ing tem­po­ral­i­ties. Neat­ly cap­tur­ing the puz­zling process of try­ing to fig­ure out who you real­ly are, Xinyuan’s jour­ney begins in Aus­tria as she embarks on a jour­ney back to Chi­na in the midst of the pan­dem­ic. The film also focus­es on an ear­li­er trip to Myan­mar to find out what hap­pened to her great-grand­fa­ther, who fled Chi­na in the 1940s and nev­er returned. Xinyuan depicts real­i­ty like a dream; leap­ing back and forth through time, com­bin­ing videos cap­tured on her smart­phone with old DV CAM footage and zoom con­ver­sa­tions with her cousin about the recent coup in Myan­mar. These frag­men­tary trails beau­ti­ful­ly coa­lesce into a dis­cur­sive med­i­ta­tion on famil­ial love and our desire for mean­ing­ful connections.

Explor­ing the inter­play between his­to­ry and place, Jerón­i­mo Rodríguez’s The Vet­er­an also begins with the search for a miss­ing per­son. The film fol­lows Julio and Gabriel, two direc­tors try­ing to make a film about an Amer­i­can priest who moved to Chile after drop­ping the atom­ic bomb on Hiroshi­ma. The pair are nei­ther seen nor heard through­out the film, instead their dis­cus­sions are recount­ed via a third-per­son voiceover played over sta­t­ic shots of the places they dis­cuss. The film’s digres­sive style brings to mind the nov­els of Rober­to Bolaño, whose semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal sto­ries often revolved around imag­ined artists and the inescapable vio­lence of mod­ern life in Latin Amer­i­ca. As the film pro­gress­es it becomes clear that the pair have seri­ous artis­tic dif­fer­ences. Gabriel wants to make a con­ven­tion­al biopic about the priest, while Julio wants to explore how his sto­ry speaks to a broad­er polit­i­cal nar­ra­tive and the recent protests in Chile. Unable to agree on an approach the pair even­tu­al­ly decide to part ways, leav­ing the graf­fi­tied streets of San­ti­a­go to fin­ish their story.

Pensive woman in dark clothing sitting at a wooden desk, with a serious expression on her face.

Films made dur­ing the pan­dem­ic typ­i­cal­ly share cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics: small crews, minus­cule casts and lim­it­ed loca­tions. Tyler Taormina’s sopho­more fea­ture Happer’s Comet con­tains all of these, yet feels like noth­ing we’ve seen before. Pre­sum­ably named after the eccen­tric bil­lion­aire and ama­teur astrologer in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, Taormina’s fol­low-up to Ham on Rye was shot over mul­ti­ple nights in his home­town. Eschew­ing any­thing close to a con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive we observe as teenagers creep out of their bed­room win­dows to go rollerblad­ing and moments of spon­ta­neous sur­re­al­ism like a mechan­ic who gets the urge to do push-ups while lis­ten­ing to John­nie Frier­son Have You Been Good To Your­self”. Dri­ven by an inchoate desire to escape the bland homo­gene­ity of sub­ur­bia, Taormina’s noc­tur­nal por­trait of alien­ation elo­quent­ly speaks to our recent col­lec­tive loneliness.

Anoth­er film that used the social dis­tanc­ing restric­tions of the pan­dem­ic to its advan­tage was Philip Scheffner’s Europe. Best known for his essay­is­tic doc­u­men­taries Scheffner’s first for­ay into fic­tion fol­lows Zohra, a young Alger­ian woman who suf­fers from a severe case of sco­l­io­sis. She is played by Rhim Ibrir, who fea­tured in Scheffner’s 2016 film Havarie, in which the direc­tor stretched a 3min cell phone video of a boat cross­ing the Mediter­ranean into a 93 minute fea­ture that forces the view­er to look more crit­i­cal­ly at the images we are shown of the migrant cri­sis. Not long after Zohra’s doc­tor informs her that she no longer requires surgery she dis­cov­ers that her res­i­dence per­mit has been revoked. After an infu­ri­at­ing inter­view with her case work­er the screen fades to black, mark­ing a turn­ing point in the film. From this moment on Zohra dis­ap­pears from our view; either obscured by fur­ni­ture or stood just out­side the frame. At a time when news sto­ries about immi­gra­tion are spun to vil­i­fy migrants, Scheffn­er har­ness­es the iso­la­tion we’ve all expe­ri­enced dur­ing the pan­dem­ic to high­light society’s blind­ness to the lived expe­ri­ence of those seek­ing asylum.

Con­tem­plat­ing the begin­nings of human­i­ty and it’s uncer­tain future Jorge Jácome’s Super Nat­ur­al was orig­i­nal­ly planned as a the­atre show before the pan­dem­ic. A humor­ous inves­ti­ga­tion into the rela­tion­ship between melan­choly and desire, Jácome’s fea­ture-length debut was shot in Madeira in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Teatro Pra­ga and the Dançan­do com a Difer­ença; a dance com­pa­ny that encour­ages peo­ple with and with­out dis­abil­i­ties to work togeth­er on artis­tic projects. Chal­leng­ing the audi­ence to recon­sid­er what inclu­sion means, Super Nat­ur­al shifts freely from a con­ver­sa­tion with the cos­mos into a sen­so­ry fan­ta­sia of scream­ing drag­on fruits and shim­mer­ing mer­maids, with Jácome pro­vid­ing us with a glimpse of what a post-pan­dem­ic world might look like if we opened our eyes to new possibilities.

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