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selenakMore Munich Film Festival contributions. Most of these films came with their directors who were available for Q&As later, which is part of the appeal of a film festival, along with the screening of international films. This year's Munich Film Festival has a Far East and Middle East focus point ("I've never understood this expression Middle East," says Cairo citizen Tareq in Cairo Time, "middle of what?").
Natarang, so both the director, Ravi Jadhav (whose first feature film this is), who was present, and the program said, was a Marathi film, not a Bollywood one, but while I've visited India twice, Indian cinema is still something of a mystery (I've seen two or three films, no more than that), so the distinction was lost on me, and I had to look up Marathi cinema (check out the link if you have the same problem) afterwards. I looked it up at once, though, because the film was very captivating, and I wanted to know more.
It's the kind of movie which you hope will never go through a Western remake, because the potential for offensiveness in the treatment of the topics is enormous, and yet this film manages to avoid it; also, it's hard to imagine another actor replicating the amazing central performance quite so well. The story sounds deceptively simple: Guna Kagalkar (Atul Kulkami), farm worker and muscular village wrestler, is a big fan of "Tamasha", a Maharashtrian dance/comedy entertainment. When the local rich man buys some new machines and thus several of Guna's friends in the village lose their jobs, Guna persuades them to start their own Tamasha group, with him as the leader (he plays the king, of course). They even after some failures manage to persuade a female dancer, Naina (played by Sonali Kulkami) to join them. So far, so Full Monty. But Naina points out that every successful Tamasha group also has a "Nachya", an expression which the English subtitles of the film translate first as "female impersonator" and then as "pansy". None of the men in the group wants to take that role, and they can't find anyone else in the village, either. At which point Guna's love for the Tamasha and fervent wish to make the troupe work win over pride and anxiety, he gives up playing the king and becomes the "Nachya", ´with Naina training him to move, dance and sing like a woman.
Up to this point, the unspoiled audience, including yours truly, was basically thinking they were following a cheerful musical with familiar theatre tropes, and then our collective jaws dropped because we got also served a really effective and affecting questioning of sexual identiy in a rural environment. Guna's personality (or orientation, for that matter) doesn't really change, but everyone's reactions to him do. His father and wife are horrified. His son, now bullied by the other boys of the village, soon comes to loathe him. Meanwhile, the audience loves the new Tamasha group and they soon get contracts elsewhere in the province, win awards, and Guna-the-Nachya is ragingly popular... but when he writes a play in which, using an episode from the Mahabaratha, he casts himself as Arjuna (who in said episode disguises himself as a woman) and thus first appears as a man, the audience turns against him, ridicules him and vicious insults fly.
Atul Kulkarni's physical transformation alone is amazing, from the stocky, muscular body (often displayed barechested and thus really not faked) to the lithe figure of the second part of the film, but the body language changes as well (in the training montage when Naina teaches Guna, he still has his wrestler physique but you can see him adapting more and more her moves). When you see him for the first time in complete feminine get-up, it's stunning because while he was just okay-ish comely as manly-wrestler-Guna, he's drop dead gorgeous as androgynous!Guna, really beautiful (and that's when Naina starts an affair with him whereas she was immune to his charms as long as he was still macho man). The paradoxical reactions - love and applause from the audience, but loathing and ridicule in every day situations and at home - as well as a situation where he finds himself using his "feminine" persona off stage in order to persuade a contractor to hire the troup, flirting easily instead of being one of the boys as he used to - disturbs him and makes him question himself, but the conclusion he arrives at - that "there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man", and that what he's doing is right - is one he holds to even after disaster strikes. Highly recommended, with the caveat that the film while having a happy ending for Guna goes to some dark places in between, and I mean really dark; were this fanfiction, there would be warnings for triggery situations.
Cast Lead is an Italian documentary set during, you guessed it, "Operation Cast Lead", i.e. the roughly three weeks of the Israeli incursion of Gaza in January 2009. While journalists were barred from filming in Gaza, Italian former archaelogist Stefano Savona managed to get in with faked papers, his camera, an interpreter and a lot of luck, and thus film footage of the last five days.
The result is striking, if very odd in terms of aesthetics; there is no narrator's voice explaining or commenting (though inserts tell you where the footage takes place, mostly in Rafah and at the very end in Gaza city), or attempt at context other than newsclips at the beginning and at the end, both times showing Israeli officials declaring the war is against Hamas and not the Palestinian people. Said news clips framing a bulk of images where in scene after scene bombed-out-of-their houses, desperate for food families are suffering and/or burying their dead is of course a comment in itself. But I wouldn't say Savona was unfair in his selection, because one of the most chilling interviews is with a father whose children we've just followed through the rubble, and then the father says: "I'm for Hamas. They are the only ones who'll get our land back. I would sacrifice my children for this. Yes, I would. Either the Jews kill them with bombs or the Jews kill them after they killed some Jews, so that way they can make a difference at least. They will die either way. God has created the Jews to kill us." And this father is not alone. Another man interviewed says, with a twelve-years-old boy's bloody body nearby, "there used to be weddings; now we go to funerals. We are a nation of martyrs, now. But we will not leave! We will get our land back! Even if there are a million more martyrs!"
So the whole vicious circle in interlocking mentalities comes across loud and clear; the bombs flaming hatred leading to more violence leading to more bombs leading to more hatred. The complete absense of hope in a life that ends non-violently for any of the young people is one of the saddest and most terrible aspects of the situation depicted. At the end, when there is a cease-fire and Savona was able to get into Gaza City itself, the bombed-out city scape looks like a urban collection of moon craters, and the people wandering through it trying to find their houses again are like living ghosts. There is a woman lamenting "we never had anyone in the resistance, not with the PLO, not with Hamas, not with Fatah, so why did they do this to us? Why?", which causes a man to interrupt (presumably because there is a camera present?) hurriedly with "what are you saying? We are grateful to Hamas! We're with Hamas!", but the woman only keeps insisting "but none of my family was ever with Hamas, never, and I have lost everything; I had to beg for the clothes on my body, because I had to run out of the house naked when the bombs fell. Why?"
In the Q&A later, Stefano Savona said getting this particular scene on camera was a lucky coincidence. When news came that Gaza City was open again, he rushed there and filmed two or so hours of footage while only understanding fragments of what was said; his Arabic is mostly of the asking-for-directions type, but the interpreter wasn't with him on that occasion. Later, when he reviewed the footage, the interpreter, having caught up with him, told him what was said, and how rare it was to get something that could be seen as even remotely critical during wartime on camera. The majority of the time he spent in Rafah, which is directly after the border to Egypt. There were no Israeli ground troups there and thus the life was somewhat better than at the centre - there was even a market of sorts - but there was non stop bombing 24 hours a day because Rafah of course is where the smuggling tunnels from Egypt end, which the Israeli airforce were trying to destroy. (The film opens with a Palestinian in Egypt who says he got ouf there while the tunnels were still passable. They were just 50 centimetres at points and you could feel the earth vibrating, but he wanted to get out of Gaza so much that he risked it anyway.) He's now working on a documentary about life in Gaza in general, and is still in contact with many of the people he interviewed for this one. One audience member asked whether the film has been shown in Israel, and Savona said not so far, though of course he would welcome the chance.
As opposed to all the other films I've seen so far, Taste of Cherry by Iranian flimmaker Abbas Kiarostami isn't a new film but from 1997, having one the Palm d'Or in Cannes that year and already something of a modern classic in terms of Persian cinema. It's very minimalistic; Mr Badii (Homayon Ershadi) drives through the suburbs of Tehran looking for someone to do a job for him, for which he's willing to pay a considerable sum of money. As it turns out, he's planning on committing suicide and needs someone to cover his body with earth afterwards. Most of the film takes place in Badii's car and only sometimes outside of it, as he talks to various candidates - a young Kurdish soldier, an Afghan guard, then his friend, an Afghan seminarist, an Azeri taxidemerist. All of whom but the last refuse; the taxidemerist, played by Abdolrahman Bagheri, tries to talk him out of it, but is willing to help. We never find out why Badii wants to kill himself; in a way, his is the story we never find out, as opposed to the others, who all tell him something about their lives. While Homayon Ershadi has a very expressive face, and you could see Badii's emotional response to everything clearly without having it spelled out, this had the result that I found myself more interested in all those other stories and everyone else as well, especially the taxidermist who gives the film its title in a poetic and moving story about his own wish to kill himself years ago and how and why he reconsidered.
Not a film I think I'll rewatch, but I'm glad I did watch it.
Harun-Arun is a explicitly billed for children, the majority of the audience were children, and this meant that there was also a translator present (the film is in Gujarathi with English subtitles, but most of the kids attending didn't yet have English in school or not enough for subtitles) who kept dubbing the dialogue for the young audience, like a narrator for a silent movie. It was an odd way to see a sound film! The children didn't seem to mind, though, as they stayed for the Q&A with the director (Vinod Ganatra) afterwards, and immediately started to ask questions.
The story: Harun's grandfather is one of the people who in the 1957 partition between India and Pakistan left for Pakistan, but now wants to return to India to spend his old age in his old home in Lakhpat, with his grandson. Crossing the border illegaly, he becomes separated from Harun who runs into three Indian children who decide to hide and protect him. At first behind their mother's back, but once Valbai, the mother, discovers the boy, she adopts him as well. Until, that is, she finds him praying and realises he is a Muslim...
The film is pretty obvious in its plea for reconciliation and tolerance; a clear morality tale, but charmingly told, and the children, most of which, Vinod Ganatra said when asked later, never were in a movie before, come across very much enjoying themselves in their roles. So does the actress playing Valbai, a vibrant character who raises her children on her own, earns money via needlework and is in a feud with the local exploiter, having organized the other women against him, but for all that isn't perfect but has to battle her temper and very deep prejudices. Seeing this in an audience with mainly children and only a few other adults was interesting because while the adults knew enough to get at once the significance of Harun in Muslim praying position and why the Hindu Valbai suddenly had a horrified expression on her face, the children didn't understand anymore than Harun did and were very distressed when Valbai threw him out, and, like Harun, not sure they could trust her again when she repentantly took him back. One of the children asked Vinod Ganatra "but why are Pakistan and India in conflict?"
Oh boy, thought I. Poor director. He didn't try for an extempore lecture on Indian history, let alone Hindu/Muslim conflicts, with an eight-years-old but said that there were a lot of family and friends connections across the borders stil, but sadly the politicians in both countries were keeping the conflict alive for their own power-gathering reasons.
Another question was how the film was received in India, and Mr. Ganatra said that it hadn't been shown in cinemas there yet because most cinemas had a bias against "children's movies" and thus didn't show them, so paradoxically his film was shown in festivals and released outside of India before he could get an Indian release date. I hope he gets one; not a future classic, this film, but an endearing and entertaining movie by all means.
Natarang, so both the director, Ravi Jadhav (whose first feature film this is), who was present, and the program said, was a Marathi film, not a Bollywood one, but while I've visited India twice, Indian cinema is still something of a mystery (I've seen two or three films, no more than that), so the distinction was lost on me, and I had to look up Marathi cinema (check out the link if you have the same problem) afterwards. I looked it up at once, though, because the film was very captivating, and I wanted to know more.
It's the kind of movie which you hope will never go through a Western remake, because the potential for offensiveness in the treatment of the topics is enormous, and yet this film manages to avoid it; also, it's hard to imagine another actor replicating the amazing central performance quite so well. The story sounds deceptively simple: Guna Kagalkar (Atul Kulkami), farm worker and muscular village wrestler, is a big fan of "Tamasha", a Maharashtrian dance/comedy entertainment. When the local rich man buys some new machines and thus several of Guna's friends in the village lose their jobs, Guna persuades them to start their own Tamasha group, with him as the leader (he plays the king, of course). They even after some failures manage to persuade a female dancer, Naina (played by Sonali Kulkami) to join them. So far, so Full Monty. But Naina points out that every successful Tamasha group also has a "Nachya", an expression which the English subtitles of the film translate first as "female impersonator" and then as "pansy". None of the men in the group wants to take that role, and they can't find anyone else in the village, either. At which point Guna's love for the Tamasha and fervent wish to make the troupe work win over pride and anxiety, he gives up playing the king and becomes the "Nachya", ´with Naina training him to move, dance and sing like a woman.
Up to this point, the unspoiled audience, including yours truly, was basically thinking they were following a cheerful musical with familiar theatre tropes, and then our collective jaws dropped because we got also served a really effective and affecting questioning of sexual identiy in a rural environment. Guna's personality (or orientation, for that matter) doesn't really change, but everyone's reactions to him do. His father and wife are horrified. His son, now bullied by the other boys of the village, soon comes to loathe him. Meanwhile, the audience loves the new Tamasha group and they soon get contracts elsewhere in the province, win awards, and Guna-the-Nachya is ragingly popular... but when he writes a play in which, using an episode from the Mahabaratha, he casts himself as Arjuna (who in said episode disguises himself as a woman) and thus first appears as a man, the audience turns against him, ridicules him and vicious insults fly.
Atul Kulkarni's physical transformation alone is amazing, from the stocky, muscular body (often displayed barechested and thus really not faked) to the lithe figure of the second part of the film, but the body language changes as well (in the training montage when Naina teaches Guna, he still has his wrestler physique but you can see him adapting more and more her moves). When you see him for the first time in complete feminine get-up, it's stunning because while he was just okay-ish comely as manly-wrestler-Guna, he's drop dead gorgeous as androgynous!Guna, really beautiful (and that's when Naina starts an affair with him whereas she was immune to his charms as long as he was still macho man). The paradoxical reactions - love and applause from the audience, but loathing and ridicule in every day situations and at home - as well as a situation where he finds himself using his "feminine" persona off stage in order to persuade a contractor to hire the troup, flirting easily instead of being one of the boys as he used to - disturbs him and makes him question himself, but the conclusion he arrives at - that "there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man", and that what he's doing is right - is one he holds to even after disaster strikes. Highly recommended, with the caveat that the film while having a happy ending for Guna goes to some dark places in between, and I mean really dark; were this fanfiction, there would be warnings for triggery situations.
Cast Lead is an Italian documentary set during, you guessed it, "Operation Cast Lead", i.e. the roughly three weeks of the Israeli incursion of Gaza in January 2009. While journalists were barred from filming in Gaza, Italian former archaelogist Stefano Savona managed to get in with faked papers, his camera, an interpreter and a lot of luck, and thus film footage of the last five days.
The result is striking, if very odd in terms of aesthetics; there is no narrator's voice explaining or commenting (though inserts tell you where the footage takes place, mostly in Rafah and at the very end in Gaza city), or attempt at context other than newsclips at the beginning and at the end, both times showing Israeli officials declaring the war is against Hamas and not the Palestinian people. Said news clips framing a bulk of images where in scene after scene bombed-out-of-their houses, desperate for food families are suffering and/or burying their dead is of course a comment in itself. But I wouldn't say Savona was unfair in his selection, because one of the most chilling interviews is with a father whose children we've just followed through the rubble, and then the father says: "I'm for Hamas. They are the only ones who'll get our land back. I would sacrifice my children for this. Yes, I would. Either the Jews kill them with bombs or the Jews kill them after they killed some Jews, so that way they can make a difference at least. They will die either way. God has created the Jews to kill us." And this father is not alone. Another man interviewed says, with a twelve-years-old boy's bloody body nearby, "there used to be weddings; now we go to funerals. We are a nation of martyrs, now. But we will not leave! We will get our land back! Even if there are a million more martyrs!"
So the whole vicious circle in interlocking mentalities comes across loud and clear; the bombs flaming hatred leading to more violence leading to more bombs leading to more hatred. The complete absense of hope in a life that ends non-violently for any of the young people is one of the saddest and most terrible aspects of the situation depicted. At the end, when there is a cease-fire and Savona was able to get into Gaza City itself, the bombed-out city scape looks like a urban collection of moon craters, and the people wandering through it trying to find their houses again are like living ghosts. There is a woman lamenting "we never had anyone in the resistance, not with the PLO, not with Hamas, not with Fatah, so why did they do this to us? Why?", which causes a man to interrupt (presumably because there is a camera present?) hurriedly with "what are you saying? We are grateful to Hamas! We're with Hamas!", but the woman only keeps insisting "but none of my family was ever with Hamas, never, and I have lost everything; I had to beg for the clothes on my body, because I had to run out of the house naked when the bombs fell. Why?"
In the Q&A later, Stefano Savona said getting this particular scene on camera was a lucky coincidence. When news came that Gaza City was open again, he rushed there and filmed two or so hours of footage while only understanding fragments of what was said; his Arabic is mostly of the asking-for-directions type, but the interpreter wasn't with him on that occasion. Later, when he reviewed the footage, the interpreter, having caught up with him, told him what was said, and how rare it was to get something that could be seen as even remotely critical during wartime on camera. The majority of the time he spent in Rafah, which is directly after the border to Egypt. There were no Israeli ground troups there and thus the life was somewhat better than at the centre - there was even a market of sorts - but there was non stop bombing 24 hours a day because Rafah of course is where the smuggling tunnels from Egypt end, which the Israeli airforce were trying to destroy. (The film opens with a Palestinian in Egypt who says he got ouf there while the tunnels were still passable. They were just 50 centimetres at points and you could feel the earth vibrating, but he wanted to get out of Gaza so much that he risked it anyway.) He's now working on a documentary about life in Gaza in general, and is still in contact with many of the people he interviewed for this one. One audience member asked whether the film has been shown in Israel, and Savona said not so far, though of course he would welcome the chance.
As opposed to all the other films I've seen so far, Taste of Cherry by Iranian flimmaker Abbas Kiarostami isn't a new film but from 1997, having one the Palm d'Or in Cannes that year and already something of a modern classic in terms of Persian cinema. It's very minimalistic; Mr Badii (Homayon Ershadi) drives through the suburbs of Tehran looking for someone to do a job for him, for which he's willing to pay a considerable sum of money. As it turns out, he's planning on committing suicide and needs someone to cover his body with earth afterwards. Most of the film takes place in Badii's car and only sometimes outside of it, as he talks to various candidates - a young Kurdish soldier, an Afghan guard, then his friend, an Afghan seminarist, an Azeri taxidemerist. All of whom but the last refuse; the taxidemerist, played by Abdolrahman Bagheri, tries to talk him out of it, but is willing to help. We never find out why Badii wants to kill himself; in a way, his is the story we never find out, as opposed to the others, who all tell him something about their lives. While Homayon Ershadi has a very expressive face, and you could see Badii's emotional response to everything clearly without having it spelled out, this had the result that I found myself more interested in all those other stories and everyone else as well, especially the taxidermist who gives the film its title in a poetic and moving story about his own wish to kill himself years ago and how and why he reconsidered.
Not a film I think I'll rewatch, but I'm glad I did watch it.
Harun-Arun is a explicitly billed for children, the majority of the audience were children, and this meant that there was also a translator present (the film is in Gujarathi with English subtitles, but most of the kids attending didn't yet have English in school or not enough for subtitles) who kept dubbing the dialogue for the young audience, like a narrator for a silent movie. It was an odd way to see a sound film! The children didn't seem to mind, though, as they stayed for the Q&A with the director (Vinod Ganatra) afterwards, and immediately started to ask questions.
The story: Harun's grandfather is one of the people who in the 1957 partition between India and Pakistan left for Pakistan, but now wants to return to India to spend his old age in his old home in Lakhpat, with his grandson. Crossing the border illegaly, he becomes separated from Harun who runs into three Indian children who decide to hide and protect him. At first behind their mother's back, but once Valbai, the mother, discovers the boy, she adopts him as well. Until, that is, she finds him praying and realises he is a Muslim...
The film is pretty obvious in its plea for reconciliation and tolerance; a clear morality tale, but charmingly told, and the children, most of which, Vinod Ganatra said when asked later, never were in a movie before, come across very much enjoying themselves in their roles. So does the actress playing Valbai, a vibrant character who raises her children on her own, earns money via needlework and is in a feud with the local exploiter, having organized the other women against him, but for all that isn't perfect but has to battle her temper and very deep prejudices. Seeing this in an audience with mainly children and only a few other adults was interesting because while the adults knew enough to get at once the significance of Harun in Muslim praying position and why the Hindu Valbai suddenly had a horrified expression on her face, the children didn't understand anymore than Harun did and were very distressed when Valbai threw him out, and, like Harun, not sure they could trust her again when she repentantly took him back. One of the children asked Vinod Ganatra "but why are Pakistan and India in conflict?"
Oh boy, thought I. Poor director. He didn't try for an extempore lecture on Indian history, let alone Hindu/Muslim conflicts, with an eight-years-old but said that there were a lot of family and friends connections across the borders stil, but sadly the politicians in both countries were keeping the conflict alive for their own power-gathering reasons.
Another question was how the film was received in India, and Mr. Ganatra said that it hadn't been shown in cinemas there yet because most cinemas had a bias against "children's movies" and thus didn't show them, so paradoxically his film was shown in festivals and released outside of India before he could get an Indian release date. I hope he gets one; not a future classic, this film, but an endearing and entertaining movie by all means.
