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Festivals

The best films from the Tran­syl­va­nia Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val 2017

14 Jun 2017

Words by Patrick Gamble

Face of a woman wearing a blue headscarf, looking pensive as she peers through a barred window.
Face of a woman wearing a blue headscarf, looking pensive as she peers through a barred window.
A film about Stalin’s Space Mon­keys’ and a par­tic­i­pa­to­ry doc­u­men­tary were among the high­lights of this year’s festival.

While the Tran­sil­va­nia Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val con­tin­ues to pro­mote the type of slow-burn­ing social real­ism its nation­al cin­e­ma has become renowned for, not all Roman­ian films are styl­is­ti­cal­ly iden­ti­cal and there are count­less film­mak­ers attempt­ing to rede­fine the map of Roman­ian cinema.

Take Alexan­dru Solomon, whose doc­u­men­tary Tarzan’s Tes­ti­cles received its world pre­mière at this year’s fes­ti­val. The film takes us inside the Insti­tute of Exper­i­men­tal Pathol­o­gy and Ther­a­py in Abk­haz­ai, the for­mer Sovi­et region still recog­nised by the major­i­ty of UN (with the excep­tion of Rus­sia) as a Geor­gian ter­ri­to­ry. The insti­tute was estab­lished in the 1920s by the Sovi­et Union to cre­ate a man-ape hybrid, and lat­er used dur­ing the Sovi­et Space pro­gramme to train chim­panzees to go into space. Pon­der­ing the rela­tion­ship between apes and humans, Soloman’s film ini­tial­ly feels like a straight­for­ward obser­va­tion­al doc­u­men­tary about the heavy toll the Geor­gian-Abk­haz war has had on the pri­mate test­ing cen­tre, a place once cel­e­brat­ed as the birth place of Stalin’s Space Monkeys’.

Won­der­ful­ly alive to the eccen­tric­i­ties and com­plex­i­ties of the peo­ple, places and pri­mates on screen, breath­tak­ing images of the sur­round­ing land­scape are jux­ta­posed with dif­fi­cult scenes of ani­mal rights vio­la­tions. The par­al­lels between how we treat ani­mals and peo­ple is clear, but it’s the moments when Solo­man leaves the con­fines of the cen­tre and explores the Abk­haz­ai cap­i­tal of Sukhu­mi where the film real­ly comes alive; blos­som­ing into a poignant inves­ti­ga­tion into the frac­tured iden­ti­ty of a region rav­aged by a war that bred a fierce form of nationalism.

An exper­i­men­tal por­trait of post-Sovi­et iden­ti­ty, Tarzan’s Tes­ti­cles thank­ful­ly offers a slim glim­mer of hope through the rela­tion­ship between one of the institute’s elder­ly zookeep­ers, and the aban­doned infant mon­keys she looks after. Refus­ing to let them be test­ed on, she cares for these mon­keys as if they were her own chil­dren – a touch­ing ges­ture that feels like a small mer­cy in the midst of such cruelty.

This year’s fes­ti­val pro­gramme was notable for its vari­ety of for­mal­ly inno­v­a­tive doc­u­men­taries from across the globe, films that cel­e­brat­ed how the evo­lu­tion of non-fic­tion film­mak­ing has allowed the para­me­ters of art and activism to expand. The most strik­ing of which was Ever­ar­do Gonzalez’s Devil’s Free­dom, a deeply unset­tling study of the vio­lent kid­nap­pings and bribery that have become epi­dem­ic in Mex­i­co. A kalei­do­scope of men­ace told with sav­age detach­ment, the film is com­posed almost entire­ly of first per­son inter­views with both the vic­tims and per­pet­u­a­tors of the violence.

The film sits along­side Matthew Heineman’s Car­tel Land and Bernar­do Ruiz’s King­dom of Shad­ows in its damming expose of the US-Mex­i­co drug war, but what makes Devil’s Free­dom unique, is the way Gon­za­lez pro­tects the iden­ti­ties of his sub­jects. All of his inter­vie­wees are filmed wear­ing the same mask; an eerie cross between a skin-toned bal­a­cla­va and a Mex­i­can wrestler’s dis­guise. This lends the film a haunt­ing qual­i­ty, but also make a sim­ple and ele­gant point: with these fea­ture­less faces blur­ring into the col­lec­tive phys­iog­no­my of a soci­ety whose basic free­doms have been extin­guished by the stran­gle­hold of the country’s drug cartels.

Sim­i­lar­ly inti­mate and upset­ting are the tes­ti­monies of the archi­tects, builders and actors of Raed Andoni’s Ghost Hunt­ing. In an attempt to come to terms with the mem­o­ries and fears of when he was impris­oned, the Pales­tin­ian direc­tor placed an advert in a news­pa­per ask­ing for trades­men and actors who were also for­mer inmates of the Mosko­biya inter­ro­ga­tion cen­tre. What unfurls is a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­play between space and past tragedy, with Andoni direct­ing his recruits to con­struct a repli­ca of the prison inside an aban­doned warehouse.

The men open­ly dis­cuss the phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­ma of their expe­ri­ences, and recre­ate the humil­i­at­ing inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques they endured, with Andoni clear­ly believ­ing that the best way to over­come the trau­ma of the past is to relive it. But as the film pro­gress­es it becomes unclear who is get­ting more out of this exper­i­ment; the crew, look­ing to exor­cise their demons or the direc­tor, sat on the fringes, push­ing for a reac­tion. There’s nev­er any real indi­ca­tion or sign of cathar­sis from these men, and it could be argued that Andoni triv­i­alis­es their expe­ri­ences pure­ly for dra­mat­ic effect, with Ghost Hunt­ing ulti­mate­ly awak­en­ing more demons than it vanquishes.

Screened out­doors on the banks of the Someșul Mic riv­er, to a pre­dom­i­nant­ly Roman­ian audi­ence, Mil­ton Guil­lén and Maple Razsa’s The Mari­bor Upris­ings, was billed as an audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion doc­u­men­tary and didn’t dis­ap­point. Through­out the film the direc­tors ask the audi­ence to decide through a demo­c­ra­t­ic vote how the nar­ra­tive will unfold. Like a choose your own adven­ture’ book, recon­fig­ured for the big screen, the result is a pas­sion­ate depic­tion of close-range jour­nal­ism, and also a fas­ci­nat­ing por­trait of human inter­ac­tion and the psy­chol­o­gy behind mob mentality.

The film puts the view­er at the heart of the 2012 Mari­bor protests, a civ­il upris­ing born out of a grow­ing dis­gust with the aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures and sur­veil­lance meth­ods imposed by a cor­rupt gov­ern­ment. Shot by five mem­bers of a film­mak­ing col­lec­tive that unit­ed to counter what they felt was a skewed media nar­ra­tive of the upris­ing, the film paus­es at ran­dom points, and the audi­ence is asked to vote for which path they want to take – do you choose to leave the riots and learn more about the con­text behind the upris­ing, or do you fol­low the angry mob head­ing towards the frontline?

It says a lot about the cin­e­ma audi­ences of Cluj that we came away learn­ing a lot about the cor­rup­tion and inequal­i­ty in Slove­nia, but as the film pro­gressed a sense of cama­raderie began to fos­ter in the audi­ence, and when giv­en the choice between fight­ing to defend the square or lis­ten­ing to the sto­ries of those seek­ing safe­ty, there was an almost unan­i­mous vote to con­front the armed police.

Although lack­ing the haunt­ing inten­si­ty of Sergei Loznitsa’s obser­va­tion­al doc­u­men­tary Maid­en, about the protests in Kiev’s Inde­pen­dence Square, or the breadth and depth of infor­ma­tion about the cas­cad­ing series of rev­o­lu­tions and coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tions that shook Egypt in Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, The Mari­bor Upris­ings is a fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ment in audi­ence engage­ment that under­lined the festival’s pen­chant for films that pro­voke crit­i­cal thinking.

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