Vita & Virginia: directed by Chanya Button, script by her and Eileen Atkins, on whose theatre play of the same name the movie is based, starring Gemma Aterton as Vita Sackville-West, Elizabeth Debicki as Virginia Woolf, Rupert Penry-Jones as Harold Nicolson (Vita's husband), Peter Ferdinando as Leonard Woolf, and Isabella Rossellini cameoing as Vita's thoroughly unplesant mother, Lady Sackville. I liked this film a lot, though not as much as I hoped I would, not least because it does betray its theatrical origin a bit too much as opposed to being thoroughly cinematic. By which I mean, for example: when Vita and Virginia are writing to each other, we see the heads of the actresses speaking the words in close up. This kind of thing works on stage, because, well, monologue, but not so much in the movie. (As a point of comparison, when Stephen Frears adapted Christopher Hampton's play Dangerous Liasons, which in turn was an adaption of a novel consisting entirely of letters, he kept letter writing scenes, but always used them to make additional characterisation points, for example Valmont writing on the back of his mistress du jour.) I also had suspend some disbelief in terms of physicality, which is the exact reverse to the originals - i.e. real Virginia was smaller than real Vita, who was tall, whereas Gemma Aterton is tiny and makes Elizabeth Debicki look really tall.

But these are minor points, in the end. As far as I can tell, Eileen Atkins' major additions to the rl material she was working with was to insert some drama and obstacles, i.e. instead of falling in love and later gradually transitioning back to friendship, we get Harold, Vita's husband, at first objecting more than he did in rl, and instead of some gradual passion fading, Virginia writing Orlando comes across in part as her exorcising her passion for Vita via recreating her as "a man who turns out to be a woman who in the end is a fiction". (Vita's son Nigel Nicolson called "Orlando" "the most charming love letter in literature", whereas in the play it's that but also a goodbye letter (to the love affair, not the friendship), and a succcessful power struggle where Virginia via her creative skill takes control of the relationship which previously has been Vita's. Who flirted with Virginia from the get go and did all the initializing and pushing of the relationship up to that point, but also is presented as a female Don Juan no more monogamous with Virginia than with anyone else.

Knowing a bit about the people involived going in, I knew this would be that rarity, a historically based same sex relationship depicted without a tragic ending for anyone (I correctly guessed the movie would not touch on Virginia Woolf's suicide which happened many years later). I was also curious abouut how much or little it would specifically deal with the leads being writers. Answer: a lot, though it varies how, not least because we start in Vita's pov and end in Virginia's, which means that one of Vita's initial reasons for approaching the Bloomsbury set in general and Virginia specifically, wanting to be taken serious as a writer instead of writing bestsellers but being dismissed as a dabbling aristocarat (which doesn't happen - Leonard Woolf agrees to publish a book of hers with the Hogarth Press, but basically just for the cash) never gets a real pay off, whereas Virginia's writing is a central subject throughout - the problem of both writing the moment and being in the moment (how?), and as I said, the regaining of emotional control via fictionalising what has taken it. We see Virginia writing, and struggling with it, while we see Vita fllirting, seducing and occasionally arguing with people, so in a way, the movie implicitly shares the opinion of the Bloomsbury's of Vita the aristocractic dabbler versus Virginia the true artist.

Having chided the direction for the occasional staginess, I must also applaud it for makng the most of Knole, Vita's beloved ancestral home (which she couldn't inherit, due to being a woman, and which Virginia gave to Orlando forever), which is short gorgeously, as is the surrounding landscape. And there's one scene where the Woolfs and the Sackville-Nicolsons all four watch an eclipse elsewhere which is breathtakingly beautiful. (BTW, the way back to London in the train also includes the only scene where Virginia and Harold talk (while Leonard and Vita have dozed off on their respective shoulders), and it's one of the most interesting scenes in the film, because they're discussing biography (she's reviewed one he's written) and at the same time Vita and what biography does to a person.

Another neat thing is that the various sexualities on display aren't given any "As you know, Bob" justifrication/explanation scenes but simply presented, including for the supporting characters like Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell and her relationship with the otherwise mainly gay Duncan Grant. Leonard Woolf is the only one depicted devoted to only one person (incidentally, this take on Leonard is like all other's I've seen or read a very sympathetic one - he has to be that rarity, the spouse of a feminist icon not seen as confining or damaging but supporting her throughout), but he doesn't judge anyone else. And lastly: everyone looks great in their 1920s costumes. In conclusion: enjoyable, but not a must in a "omg you HAVE to see this movie" way.

Rih Rabani/Divine Wind: an Algerian movie with French, Libanese and Quatar co-producing, directed by Merzak Allouache who also wrote the script. Essentially a two person movie in black and white which heightens the Archaic atmosphere. The two people in question are terrorists, one (male) newly recruited, Amine, and one (female) a hardcore veteran, Nour, who arrives somewhat later in the film, Nour. The actress who plays Nour, Sarah Layssac, was present for a Q & A afterwards, and her performance was incredible, conveying the hardcore fanaticism by body language and expression even before Nour opens her mouth for the first time - Nour is frightening throughout - yet also never making her less than human and giving her moments of vulnerability as well. (Usually when no one else but the audience is present to observe them. It's characteristic that when Nour in an internet café gets her orders for a suiicide mission, she is visibly shaken, but later when conveying those orders to Amine - whom we see cry at the very start of the movie already, and who gets to be the openly emotioal one in this film throughout - , she's ruthlessly driven again, not allowing herself to show the tiniest bit of doubt.) The film keeps its politics simple - the group Nour and Amine are with is never named (could be IS, could be another fundamentalist Islamist group), it's not even said the country they're in is Algeria though the mix of languages (Arab and French) suggests that), and there isn't a Westerner in sight. (The forces after the terrorists are local - and for that matter, Muslim - as well, which fits given that most of Islamic terrorism actually kills other Muslims.) It's no big spoiler to say this one doesn't have a happy ending, but it's a fitting one.

Notes from the Q & A: Sarah Layssac did watch some videos of female terrorists early on but then abandoned that since she didn't want to do impersonation, deciding to get into Nour's psyche by using just the clues the script provides and accessing her own darker emotions. Developing a body language for Nour first helped. What she really needed a coach for were the Qu'ran recitations in classic Arabic since she speaks modern Algerian Arabic, which sounds differently.

XY Chelsea, directed by Tim Travers Hawkins (who was present for a Q and A afterwards), documentary about Chelsea Mannig, the Private and IS specialist who leaked US Army documents to Wikileaks in 2010, got sentenced to 35 years in prison, got her sentence commuted by Obama in his last week in office, and at the end of April this year got imprisoned again for contempt of jury. (Since she refuses to testify in the impending Assange procedure.) The portrait is unabashedly pro Chelsea; Tim Travers Hawkins started originally a different type of movie while she was still in prison, which was supposed to deal with the challenge of documenting people who are inaccessible for the camera, with her as one of the cases, then when her sentence was commuted (and he lucked out since he was filming her lawyer when the phone call came!) decided to do a full feature of her. It starts with the commuting of her sentence and was supposed to end with her decision to withdraw from public life post brief and bungled Senate run but due to events overtaking life now ends with her being in prison again, with her lawyer pointing out that the US can use this "contempt of jury" ploy endlessly (Chelsea Manning got released for six days in between, then rearrested) to in effect imprison her without a sentence forever. There is a certain flashback structure - her deployment to Iraq and decision to leak documents is told in retrospect a third into the film, and details about her seven years in prison are spread throughout the movie as flashbacks while the readucting post release makes up the main, present day story. And it's a very personal take making no bones about where the documentary's sympathies lie - i.e. we hear from Chelsea Manning herself and her support structure - lawyers, friends -; there aren't interviews with the people condemning her actions, who are presented via tweets scrolling out on screen instead.

Now, if you show such a documentary at a German Film Festival, where the question "should US war crimes be made public?" is guaranteed to be answered with a thundering "hell YES!", this is no problem. (Full disclosure: this is my reaction as well. For "American", you can also substitute any given nationality, of course, the answer doesn't change.) But in the Q & A, the director mentioned being slightly disappointed that the reaction to his movie was entirely predictable (i.e. the Guardian loved it, the right wing press hated it), and when he said this, I thought: well, then maybe you should have dealt with the accusations against Chelsea more in depth than very briefly mention the "were names of Aghan informants also released and thus endangered?" question. Then again, trying for balance did not get anyone anywhere with the right wing in the recent decade or two or three, and I found it impossible not to admire the courage and endurance it must have taken Ms Manning to a) leak the war crimes info, and b) cope with the aftermath - the deprivation of sleep (23 of 24 hours) immediately after, the repeated solitary confinement, being trans in an all male prison. Personally, I'd have gone insane.If I had the courage to act in the first place.

What struck me upon viewing the movie at once was how very very young she came across in the footage from right after her release. (I also thought about the depressing fact that whistleblowers are treated horribly in general - we had one German soldier last year who went public about right wing extremists in the army and he was almost dismissed dishonorably before people intervened.) And how John Bolton, one of several main contributors to the Iraq War, is in power again, while Ms Manning is back in prison for having principles. (In the Q & A, someone brought up Assange and Hawkins said it's no accident that Assange is in the documentary only via two newsclips very very briefly. Firstly, Assange's story has been told and he tends to make everthing about himself if you give him the slightest chance by interviewing him anyway. Secondly, Chelsea Manning never met him, is not a little appalled of how Wikileaks developed since 2010 (when it was one of the organisations knowing something about cryptography and able to post the material without leading people back to the source, which was why she chose it for the upload), and doesn't refuse to testify out of any sympathy for Assange as a person but because "she thinks the entire trial, prosecuting someone for publishing information like that, is bullshit which has to be objected too and stopped". (BTW, this is also the attitude of our media over here - Assange obnoxious, US lawsuit unfair and big step against democracy and free press.)

Chelsea Manning being trans is an element of the documentary but not what it's all about. Everyone except for her mother in the one scene she's in refers to her with the correct pronouns and her chosen name, and the mother saying "Bradley" and "he" is immediately followed by her correcting herself and saying "I'm learning, it's difficult". (The woman had a stroke, and it really doesn't come across as spite a la Nomi's mother in Sense 8.)

In conclusion: sympathetic, in all senses of the word, and very watchable. Sadly will not reach people who don't already consider Chelsea Mannig one of the good ones, I'm afraid.

The day I lost my shadow, directed by Soudade Kaadan, a Syrian-Libanese (with additional French and Quatar money) movie. Soudade Kaadan, who was present, was until now exclusively a director of documentaries; this was her first feature film. Naturally, one of the questions asked was why the switch. She said that she couldn't experience the war in Syria and keep filming - "I can't film people dying or bodies torn apart, I put my camera away when that happens to be with the people. I had to go to fiction to deal with the war."

Although her movie still doesn't contain torn apart bodies. The horror of war - and of living in a dictatorship - in this story, which is set in 2012 when the war in Syria was just warming up, is conveyed by other means. Sana, our heroine, starts the film racing with her small son Khalil to her flat because there will be a short precious time with both running water and electricity, and they need to wash their clothing. En route upstairs, their IDs are controlled, you only see the gun and the lower body of the soldier doing the controlling, and there is constant background noise - bombs falling from the air. (Evidently the people of Damascus already are past going to air shelters.) That's just the opening sequence. Sana is a pharmacist, and her place of work is devastated the next morning, not because of the bombing but because soldiers did a raid. (Her boss has mysteriously disappeared.) The gas in her oven is the next thing to go and so she joins a friend and her brother on a trip outside of Damascus to get some gas. They split the money for the Taxi (since petrol is rare, a lot of money is needed), but the Taxi has problems at the first check point they run into because Jalal (the brother) is a bit sarcastic and then the Taxi driver (who as it turns out has a camera in the taxi he shouldn't have) panics. Events spiral from there. Jana, the fiery Reem (who has already lost one brother who didn't come back from prison and is afraid to lose Jalal, with whom she argues all the time but whom she clearly loves deeply) and Jalal all come across vividly.

For a movie that deals with war and dictatorship keeping a country in a state of constant terror, the film is amazingly kind about human nature. Some of the soldiers our heroines encounter en route are quickly offended, but they're clearly terrified themselves (doesn't make them less dangerous), and late in the movie, there is a terrific scene between Sana and a soldier who starts out threatening to shoot her and ends up joining her longing for snow since snow stops the war everywhere (impossible to see anything). Also, all the civilians Sana encouters are helpful to her and her friends, full of hospitality despite having little themselves .(In a Hollywood movie, I guess either Sana or Reem would have been threatened with rape at least once.) One of the most devastating sequences starts out in such kindness: the family where Sana found shelter for the night splits up, the older women going outside to perform a mysterious task, and the little girl who remained with Sana offers to show her; turns out the women are digging graves, because everyone knows before the day is over, there will be more dead. They just don't know who will die this time.

The director, who is Syrian herself and now lives in Libanon, said that while the three adult leads are professional actors, practically everyone else are amateurs from the refugee camps, including the boy who plays Sana's son Khalil. "He has these beautiful big yes. But when I met him, he had the skin of a ninety-years-old man, at six years, because his camp only had salt water to use. I thought: If my movie does nothing else, it will help this kid get ouf of there! And so I cast him, and it did. He's now a recognized refugee and safe, along with his family."

The title refers to the one "magical" element of the movie - Jalas is missing his shadow at the start, and the longer the movie takes, the more characters lose their shadows as well. To me, it felt like they were losing their shadows once they were at an emotional point where being afraid all the time had peaked and gone and now they were past fear, but Soudade Kaadan said she left the interpretion of the shadow losses to the viewer. She did find it interesting that in countries which had a recent war, like Croatia, people never asked what it meant, only in countries without a recent war, like Germany. She got the idea from being haunted by the photographs of Hiroshima post bombing, with only shadows left of the people. In her movie, the reverse happens.

It's an intense and compelling film, and so far, I'd say, the best of those I've watched at this year's festival. I hope it will be released in a lot of countries.

Jane Fonda in Five Acts: directed by Susan Lacy, a documentary on guess who. using old and new footage well. Jane Fonda's constant reinventing of herself sometimes eerily goes with the decades in question - 60s: girl next door turns sex symbol, 70s: political activist, 80s: wife of billionaire - and has the kind of happy ending uniting all the previous incarnations (Jane in her eighties having a hit show, Grace and Frankie, while also being back on the barricades against the Orange Menace) which Hollywood loves. This is an affectionate take on its subject, meaning that while there are plenty of anti-Fonda voices heard as well growling "Hanoi Jane" in her general direction (including, hilariously, Richard Nixon's at the very start of the movie, with his own variation of "why must my sex symbol talk politics!"), the Jane-positive voices far outweigh them. The Richard Nixon "whatever happened to Jane Fonda?" outburst caught on tape ends with "I feel sorry for Henry Fonda". Susan Lacy decidedly does not. Having read Peter Fonda's memoirs, I was familiar with the truly Gothic family backstory; Jane's and Peter's mother cut her throat with a razor after repeated stints in an institution, no one ever told the kids who had to find out years later via the media, and Henry in general was great at expression of emotion only with a script and utterly incapable of doing so without one, so Jane in the end literally scripts her venting and their reconciliation via On Golden Pond, and of course he plays it very well. Lacy's film keeps coming back to the family damage, complete with Jane acknwledging she screwed up with her daughter Vanessa as well (who is notably the sole child not interviewed; Jane's son, step-daughter and adopted daughter all are) and hopes Vanessa will forgive her; and yet, there's a lot of humor in it, not least in Jane Fonda's summaries, with a great sense of comic timing in the verbal delivery, of the various men in her life. (Where she makes fun of herself, not them.) Same goes for the filming anecdotes (making the zero g scene for Barbarrella with ample drinking, then, because it had to reshot, the next day with a thundering hangover), and the tale of her slow political awakening (the first time Vadim tells her in the mid-60s that the US will never win in Vietnam, all-American girl Jane thinks "just because you French couldn't..." and does not believe him in the slightest, until her friendship with Simone Signoret starts to clue her in) and her son Troy's description of his trying-to-save-the-world-all-the-freaking-time parents at the height of their activism.

All in all, a charming character portrait also reflecting on the various eras its subject lived through. I doubt it will sway anyone disliking her, but if you like her or know nothing about her and have no emotions one way or the other, it's very enjoyable and occasionally touching.

Razzia, directed by Nabil Ayouch, produced in Morocco and France. This one was an anthology film mostly set in Casablanca, and anthology films - i.e. movies telling the stories of a hunge ensemble of people who are either losely connected or not at all - sometimes work for me and sometimes not so much. This one, trailing five different characters - has some powerful segments - the very first story, for example, the only one not set in Casablanca, about a teacher in a village who in the 80s gets the order to teach solely in Arabic (as opposed to Berber, which is what the children actually speak), which changes his lessons from something the kids participate joyfully in into numb repetition of something they don't comprehend, and it breaks him. Later, in Casablanca, there's also the tale of a Jewish restaurant owner whose joie de vivre always has a touch of sadness in it as well and comes with the awarenes that there aren't many Jews left in the city (his old father fears there won't be enough for a proper burial rite once it's his turn) and he's living on a powder keg, and the musician who so desperately wants to be Freddy Mercury. Frustratingly, the two female characters - a wife feeling trapped and frustrated in her marriage, and a teenager with a teenage identity crisis - are also the two most passive ones, and I often wished we'd have seen more of Yto, the old woman who used to be the teacher's landlady and in love with him in the village and later went to Casablanca with her son, where we reencoutner her in her old age in the trapped wife's plot thread, because every time she did show up, she struck me as far more interesting, plus the actress has great charisma.

There's a boiling rich-poor tension in the city throughout the movie which explodes in the final sequence, but that story felt oddly unfinished to me, as did most of the characters. The movie is richly atmospheric, and has great cinematography, and I don't regret having watched it, but I doubt I'll watch it again.

Ammore e Malavita ("Love and Bullets"), directed by Antonio and Marco Manetti, produced in Italy. This one was a hilarious farce expertedly parodying all the Mafia (well, Camorra, since the whole thing is set in Naples) story clichés and mixing them with (also very funny) songs, the first of which is delivered by the corpse in the opening funeral scene, so that gives you a taste of what the movie is like. I was in stitches throughout. Reccommended if you want to have a blast for two hours.

Parting (Raftan), directed by Navid Mahmoudi, is an Afghan-Iranian drama about a young Afghan couple trying to make it to Europe via Iran. The director himself arrived in Iran as a child, the film is dedicated "To my immigrant parents", most of the cast consists of lay Afghan workers living in Iran - the leading lady was one of the few who had professional actor training, but the leading man in rl is an Afghan worker in Teheran -, and Mahmoudi, who was present for a Q & A after the movie, said he knew he wanted to make the film when he saw the news in 2015.

Our hero and heroine are Nabi and Fereshtre, who fell in love back in Afghanistan, but because her family was against it could not be together. Her father then moved the family to Teheran. The couple remained in contact and made plans which were accelarated when Nabi's brother killed someone, which started a blood feud, which meant Nabi had to get the hell out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later and thus is in Teheran sooner than expected. That's when the movie starts, with Nabi arriving in an overfilled vehicle in Teheran, where Fereshtre wants to join him. She hasn't told her family, but they are planning to go to Europe on the dangerous Turkey-Greece route. Nabi's sister knows, is horrified (news of drowned people being everywhere), and tries to reach them via phone at different points in the film, which takes place during a single day.

As with other Iranian movies I've seen (all at the Munich Film Festival, as it happens), this one sticks to certain censorship rules - no kisses, despite Nabi and Fereshtre being an established couple (he introduces her as his wife to the various people they encounter, but technically she isn't, due to her father's objection), or other physical contact that could be deemed erotic, for example. But the movie doesn't need it, as the longing looks between them and gestures like Nabi covering Fereshtre with his jacket carry all the tender familiarity that is needed to indicate the state between them. That said, later during the Q & A you could see somewhat of a culture clash happening when a German viewer (male) said Fereshtre was such a passive character and didn't decide for herself, and an Afghan viewer (female) protested that Fereshtre by deciding to be with Nabi was already doing something very transgressive because leaving the family is such a strict no. The Afghans in the audience generally voiced much approval; one man said he'd taken the same route to Europe Nabi and Fereshtre want to take in the movie, and the behavior of the smugglers was very much as it had been for him.

This is very much an working immigrant movie - Fereshtre's family seems to be doing okay, but she's still working at a tailor's who doesn't pay his employees their promised salaries, very aware that most of them aren't there legally; Nabi's one friend who is already in Teheran as well as some other contacts work in construction, and are considerably poorer. And most of them either arrived as refugees themselves or have family who is trying to make it further, to Europe. At one point, one of them finds out his brother was on the latest ship that went down and whose passengers drowned, and despite the audience not having spent much time with this character, it's heartrendering. Of Teheran, we see only what the characters see - mostly construction sites, or fragments of a city through the air holes in car boots. The colour palate of the movie is thus mostly brown and sandlike yellow, with the occasional red via the women's headscarves, and some blue and grey inside half finished buildings where there are improvised meals and hot tea sharing. ( Spoilery observation for the ending. )

Gook, directed by Justin Chon, who also wrote the script and stars as one of the main three characters. The title, as Chon informed his German audience which didn't know that in a short speech before the movie started, is an US-Englsh racial slur against East Asians, while the same word in Korean simply means "country". This movie takes place during the Rodney King riots twenty five years ago, and Chon in the same brief introduction speech mentioned his family's store was looted on that occasion as well, when he'd been 11, so he does have personal memories, but that wasn't the sole reason for making the movie - as important was that their store getting looted was pretty much typical because Korean immigrant shops were a primary target during the riots. Chon first wrote the script and imagined someone else would direct it, but the people in question all wanted at least one white character in the story to give a famous actor the chance of an audience-drawing cameo, preferablyly someone who says "you gotta go, there are looters coming". Whereas, quoth Cho, the cops had left to their fates d during the riots, and besides, another reason why he wanted to make the movie was because Asian Americans stiill don't get many roles in the US media, "and if they show up, they're usually good at match and all go to Harvard, and well - not true for anyone I grew up with!"

The result is a movie featuring solely Korean-American and African-American characters, mainly from two families - the brothers Eli (played by Chon himself) and Daniel (David So), who sell shoes in South Central Los Angeles, eleven-years-old Kamilla (Simone Baker, who is amazing in the part) who loves to hang out there, and, in minor but important supporting roles, her older brother Keith and older sister Regina. Also important: the cranky old Korean shop owner on the other side of the road who exists in a state of mutual loathing re: Eli and Kamilla.

(Kamilla, btw, started out as a boy named Kamal when Justin Chon wrote the first draft, but then, he said in the Q & A after the movie, he realised that black girls were as underrepresented as Asian males, and changed the kid's gender.)

Daniel and Eli have inherited the shoe store from their father (there's a backstory there which is only revealed in the last third of the movie, but it's just one factor in a complex pattern) and are just barely getting by, with some fraternal tension because Daniel would rather do something else; Kamilla and her older siblings are orphans (see also: slowly revealed backstory) and she's not really supposed to be at the store, but has made the brothers into her other family. All of which is put to the test when after the judgment in the Rodney King trial Los Angeles explodes.

Chon spreads the trial news through the early part of the movie, keeps it in the background, and mostly lets the fragments speak for themselves except for one heavy irony scene when one of Keith's pals says that now there are cameras everywhere, cops won't get away with beatiing up people anymore; but when the judgment itself is announced, we see all of the movie's characters react, and it's the big turning point from which the pace accelerates as the situation becomes more and more dangerous. Even before that, though, the racial tensions are ever present, both in blunt form ("Gook" getting sprayed on Eli's car) and more subtly (Kamilla, who helps out Eli and Daniel at the store, makes a joke about being held against her will, and all at once the three (black, female) customers who a moment ago had been chatting with the guys fall silent and narrow their eyes in suspicion, until it becomes clear Kamilla was kidding.

Kamillla is a great character, endearing without being saintly, and sometimes in the wrong (she steals from the cranky Korean shop owner across the street), fierce and joyful, with a temper of her own. Asked how he cast the young actress, Chon said at first he looked at young professoinal Disney actors, but they were already too polished and he wanted someone more raw, and then he found Simone at a community art center. I hope she'll keep acting; she does some amazing stuff in this movie, and is really the heart of it. The film is an ode to friendship across those invisible dividing lines, but be warned: your heart will also be broken.

The movie is shot in black and white, both, as Chon frankly confessed, for budget reasons and to make any anachronisms about South Central Los Angeles that's supposed to look like 25 years ago less obvious. At first it feels a bit odd, especially since I remember Los Angeles at that time, but now I can't imagine the movie in colour. Not least because the black and white really allows for a stark picture of just how poor the neighborhood is. Music wise, it uses both original music and one or two hits of the day. It makes for an intense, captivating whole.

Aka what consumes my days these days, as every year around this time. Of course, every year doesn't have Bryan Cranston as one of the guests of honor, so there was this additional perk.:) (Here's an article about the award ceremony he was there for.)




(Question: is the young man in one of the photos a fan is holding out to be signed truly Cranston some decades ago? Yikes, I wouldn't have recognized him.)


The director of Wakefield, one of his movies which are shown this year in honor of him (and yes, of course several Breaking Bad episodes are s hown as well), Robin Swicord, joked that both she and Cranston have German grandparents, and: "I don't know why they left, but you know, I think the fun is over. Might be a good idea to come back now, and I think you all know why. So thank you for welcoming political refugees." Former opera director Sir Peter Jonas outed himself as a Breaking Bad fan, complete with Heisenberg t-shirt, and held a speech praising the glories of narrative arc driven television. My only irritation with that one wasn't the series he singled out (other than BB) for being exceptionally good at this - The Sopranos, Oz, The West Wing and The Good Wife - , but the one he didn't mention. Babylon 5 still doesn't get as much credit in breaking ground with its narrative arc tellng format as it deserves.

Anyway, Bryan Cranston's own speech was lovely, mostly about the way being a storyteller is the best vocation (I agree), with both wry humor and sincerity. After the ceremony, Wakefield was shown, but due to an unshakeable real life obligation, I could only watch the first hour. Mind you, I had mixed feelings anyway. Because I could see why Cranston was cast (excelling as he does in playing dislikeable characters whose pettiness isn't air brushed away who are still interesting to watch) , and I enjoyed seeing Jennifer Garner again (playing his wife), and found the concept something of a suburban Hitchcock satire without crime (Howard Wakefield, lawyer, due some circumstances ends up disappearing into his own attic, watching his wife and family carry on without him with the bickering zest of a true voyeur while literally reduced to eating garbage) in a clever way, it still made my skin crawl. Because in the hour I watched, most of Howard Wakefield's voyeurism and assholery was directed against his wife, and while I knew the narrative was absolutely on the same page with me here, it still felt very disturbing to watch, and so it didn't exactly break my heart that I had to leave early. (Otoh I missed the Q & A with Cranston afterwards that way, alas.)

On to movies I could watch completely:

La Familia, a movie from Venezuela, directed by Gustavo Rondón Cordóva, currently stuck in Caracas and thus unable to make it to the festival, though he might make it to the Latin American directors general Q & A on Monday. This was a taut, intense story starting in the poorest quarters of Caracas. Our two main characters are Pedro, a twelve years old boy, and his father Andres, who works several jobs at once to make ends meet and thus hardly sees him. The introduction sequence has Pedro (Reggie Reyes) playing with some other children, and the playing has that edge of violence, those moments when shoving at each other suddenly threatens to become more, which has you sit up already. And sure enough, various scenes later, which establish Pedro's day with best friend Jonny and minus his father (who sleeps like a stone on those rare occasions when he's home), violence does explode, as a child threatens Pedro and Jonny with a gun and Pedro ends up seriously hurting the other child. His father Andres understands the implication at once because the child in question has revenge hungry people, and goes on a run with his estranged son, which is the plot line for the rest of the movie. "Going on a run", however, doesn't mean what it might were this a US film, because Andres still needs that money for Pedro and himself to survive, so he takes Pedro with him to his various jobs on the other ends of the city - they just don't go back to their own quarter, though Pedro urgently wants to because he's worried for Jonny, which makes for a big confllct with his father.

This is a movie which trusts its actors (Giovanni García plays Andres), because the dialogue is terse and rare, and you experience the shifting father and son relationship mostly through physical interaction, looks, gestures. Andres doesn' have a "killing is bad" conversation with his son, or a "how do you feel about what happened?" conversation - that's just not how they interact. And yet you can watch them becoming closer throughout the film, and at the end they truly understand each other, and even in their desperate situation have some hope for the future.


Clair Obscur, a Turkish-German-French-Polish coproduction (yes, these do exist) directed by Yesim Ustaouglu. With a female Turkish director and two female main characters, this movie explores, among other things, various ways of what it means to be a woman in Turkey. Our two heroines live completely different existences - Shendaz is a psychiatrist with a seemingly good relationship with her boyfriend, living in very well off circumstances at the Meditterranean coast, while Elmas is still a teenager imprisoned in a marriage to a much older man who revolts her, serving him and his mother in their small flat in a skyscraper. The two storylines eventually connect when due to various spoilery circumstances Shendaz becomes Elmas' therapist; by that time, the cracks in Shenaz' own life have been revealed, but refreshingly for therapists who tend to be either demonic or incompetent when presented in a fictional story, she's still able to truly help Elmas (especially once she figures out how young Elmas really is), and eventually finds away to escape the mess in her own life as well.

The director and several of the actors were there, though not the two leads. The actress who plays Elmas' mother-in-law said whhen she read the script, she thought that this was the best discussion of female sexuality in a Turkish movie. The sex scenes aren't just surprisingly frank in the case of Shenaz (with Elmas, who does not want to have sex, the camera stays on her agonized face, and later goes with her to the restroom because the aftermath is also very painful to her), but always make a character point. In the Q & A the director was asked whether the movie could be shown like this in Turkey, and she answered she had to cut around two minutes for the general release version (though she was allowed to show the full length in Turkish festivals), which since she knew this would happen in advance she could do without taking away the meaning from the scenes in question. Mostly the general release cuts avoided the full nudity of the complete version. Since the only Muslim women showing up in Western media tend to wear headscarfs and/or hijabs, in short, live Elmas' life, I suspect the fact that Shenaz is sucessful in her profession, has unmarried sex and enjoys wine when dining with her boyfriend (who does the cooking) would be as startling as the sex and the nudity if this movie gets a release in the US or Europe. At the same time, there's the awareness that Erdogan's government and party is doing its best to make Elmas, not Shenaz' life more common again in Turkey, and that subtext is also there if you're sitting in the audience watching this film.

Shenaz is played by Funda Eryigit, Elmas by Ecem Uzm, and they're both delivering terrific performances. In the Q & A, Ms. Ustaoglu mentioned that the incredible scene in which Shenaz gets Elmas to roleplay a dream she has (which finally allows Elmas to vocalize the pain in her life) needed only two takes, one for Elmas, one for Shenaz, that the actresses were that good. And having seen this movie, I believe it.

Actually, I watched Andrzej Wajda's Walesa: Man of Hope in between these two, which was a good thing, because while it's not a must but an entertaining biopic, it provided a breath of air between emotional pummelling by more original films for me. If you want a review, basically: what he said .

On to more directing debuts which are currently going through the film festival circuits, only one of which has already a release date and a distributor but both deserve to be watched by many people of many nations:

L'Chaim!: The title is a pun between the Jewish toast "To Life!" and the name of the subject of this captivating documentary, Chaim Lubelwski, shot by his cousin, first time director Elkan Spiller, over a period of about seven years, according to the Q & A afterwards. At its heart is the relationship between Chaim and his mother (Ne)Chuma, who was a concentration camp survivor (as was his father; their parents and a good deal of the rest of the family perished), whom he took devoted care of until she died at age 97. The movie follows Chaim between Antwerp - where he lived with his mother, because the climate in Israel was too hot for her -, and Israel, where he also spent and spends part of the time. He used to travel the world as a young man, seeing no point in regular life and employment, and still manages to be both a hippie and religious, passionate about chess, dope (Antwerp in Belgium also had the advantage of being close to Holland, where you can get it legit) and above all his parents. At the start of the film, his sister Lotti had died of an overdose which the mother never found out because he pretended to her Lotti was in a rehab clinic in Israel; the truth, says Chaim, would have been unbearable to Chuma, who at night when insomniac talked to her parents all the time. Chuma in the first half of the film is coherent and alert, and she and Chaim make each other laugh repeatedly, but the sense of what was done to her and her family is there all the time, too. Late in the film, there is a point where she sings the first few lines of our former national anthem (explanatory note for non-Germans about the national anthem: post World War II, the national anthem as sung by Germans starts with the third verse - "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit" etc. -; the first verse, "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles" etc. having been irrevocably tainted by the Nazis, it goesn't get sung by anyone but Neonazis, or American and British tourists on occasion who make one cringe that way; but of course the original form was used pre-Nazis already by both the second Empire and the Weimar Republic), and adds "we believed that; we were doing good, weren't we? But they beat us, they beat us and killed and why...". And the entire horror of the Holocaust and its legacy hit me all over again. The film is very much about what it means to be the child (the by now senior-citizen-aged child) of a Holocaust survivor. Chuma was born in Poland, but she and Chaim - as well as Chaim and his cousin Elkan, the director, who lives in Cologne - talk German to each other -; there's the occasonal Hebrew and Jiddish in Israel and New York, and some English and French later when Chaim visits friends in France, but mostly the film is in German, and it made the emotional rawness of such scenes as Chuma's memories or later, after her death, Chaim's loss hit me double and triple. Also, in a different way, the humor with Chaim's chatty interactions with everyone, and that sense of warmth in the voice. For the Q & A after the film, we got both the director, Elkan Spiller, and Chaim Lubelswiski himself, and it was there as well. (He also got to comment on the film, which he'd seen for the first time during this festival; he said the only thing he wished his cousin hadn't filmed were the scenes from his mother's funeral; at the time, he was too out of it to notice but now they feel too intimate to have on film. The rest was okay for him since having a relation around with a camera wasn't that unusual; it happens, in families.) The film strikes a delicate balance: there is no pat assurance of an happily ever after because Chaim's central focus in life was his mother, and with 70 something there won't be a new one, and he says he's "vegitating", but when in the final scenes you watch him playing chess, meeting friends and contemplating nature, you're glad this remarkable person is still around. Since this is the film without a general release date (yet), I hope the festival will get it the necessary attention from the companies because it's certainly so very much worth watching.

White Shadow: shot in Tanzania, starring exclusively Tanzanian actors (professionals and lay people), with an Israeli Berlin based director, Noaz Deshe, and both Italian and German money involved in the production, so it's tricky to name a country of origin, but: it's disturbing and gruelling and captivating. Sometimes hard to watch, both because of the content and the style - it's not linear in the middle section, and frequently makes you feel trapped in a hallucination -, which, however, matches the point of view, that of teenage boy Alias who is one of the ca. 150 000 albinos in Tanzania and who has to watch his father, also an albino, getting slaughtered in the opening minutes. The lucrative trade with albino body parts is a real problem, to use a awfully euphemistic term, not just in Tanzania but all over East Africa. Post-flm, the director, present for a Q & A, said the most recent known (and there are far more unknown than known) case in Tanzania happened only two weeks ago, and one of the people in the film's production was approached with a "can you get me one of the albinos?" question. The young actor playing the main character, Hamasi Bazili, was 15 at the time of shooting, and had a backstory not dissimilar from his character in that he, too, had to flee his village and go to the city. He also was abandoned by his father, while in the movie Alias' mother, fearing for his safety, sends him with her brother in the big city (not named, but presumably Daar-as-Salaam). Alias' uncle has debts which gave me a bad feeling from the start, and while Alias temporarily ends up in a community with some other albino children and also has a tentative romance with his cousin Antoinette - their reconciliation scene in the middle of the big city garbage heaps which are scavanged for useful computer parts by traders, and Alias' playing with his friend, the Albino child Salum, are among the film's brief joyful interludes where Alias has the chance to be just a kid - , but the sense of menace waiting never really leaves. And sure enough, the hunters are there.... While this movie has some terrible things to say, it is, amazingly enough, anything but cynical. It's one of the very few stories I can think of where the big catharsis, in as much as there is one, is for the main character to not do what's been done to him. It is, like I said, not an easy to watch, and definitely not one where you can go on to have pizza afterwards. But it's definitely one watching nonetheless.

Sidenote: I couldn't help but wonder about the main actor and what future he'll have because I thought: he's so good in this, but how many roles are there for an adolescent albino Tanzanian actor? Then again, the director during the Q & A mentioned that the adult actor who plays his father at the start of the movie, Tito D. Ntanga, leads an acting/dancing/storytelling company for albinos in Tanzania. So there is a possible professional future, and that's good to know - if he won't become one of the victims of the body parts trade.

The Munich Film Festival started yesterday. I'm not sure how many reviews I'll manage, but the first film I saw (today), The Tour was so great I had to post immediately. If you're a Babylon 5 or Lost fan, you might be interest to learn that Mira Furlan (Delenn on B5 and Danielle Rousseau on Lost) has a central role in it and is absolutely fantastic. First time I saw her performing in her own language (the film is subtitled), and I'll get to the difference that makes in a minute. But even if you're unfamiliar with either show and/or hated every minute Mira Furlan's characters spent on screen, you'll want to watch it. Because it's the best film to have a troupe of actors confronting the absurd horror and the horrible absurdity of war since Ernst Lubitsch made To Be Or Not To Be. Because it's set in Bosnia in 1993, and it's not a film made by Americans, Germans, English, French or any "outside" nation but one made in Serbia in 2008. Because it's an ensemble film, with affection for all its characters who consequently feel immensely real. Because it manages that rare thing, to unite comedy, black humour and respect for human life, and the tragedies through which its heroes stumble, a troupe of actors from Belgrad who were supppposedly hired just for a quick troupe entertaining gig but end up being dragged through three war zones. Because it's deeply humanist in its conclusions, without ever being preachy.

( All the world is not a stage, but we all might be players anyway )