Last year's Berlin & Beyond Film Festival (B&B) was deemed festival non grata by a number of Bay Area cinephiles. Troubled by the Goethe Institut's forced retirement of B&B founder Ingrid Eggers and annoyed at B&B's shift from January to an already festival-stuffed October, they lent support to an unofficial boycott. The weak-willed amongst us, however, couldn't resist skulking into the Castro Theatre for at least a taste of the latest German-language cinema, including the outstanding duo of The Robber and The Silence, plus Germany's Oscar® submission When We Leave (which, in a decidedly minority opinion, I ended up really, really hating).
Fast forward one year and it looks like the fences have been mended. At the press conference announcing this year's line-up, both Festival President Sabine Erlenwein and Director Sophoan Sorn made a point of mentioning that Eggers was in the audience. Now everyone is free to enjoy a guiltless 16th annual Berlin & Beyond, which runs from October 20 to 26 in San Francisco, with a San Jose Encore Day on October 29. As for Ingrid Eggers' three-year-old counter-fest, German Gems, it's slated for a full-day Castro takeover on January 14, 2012. Several important new German-language films are missing from this year's B&B, so let's hope Ingrid has gotten her hands on them.
There are 23 narrative and documentary features in this year's fest, of which I've seen seven (via DVD screener except where noted). The strongest is The Day I Was Not Born (Das Lied in mir), an intense, noteworthy debut from director Florian Cossen. While waiting for a connecting flight in Buenos Aires, a young German woman mysteriously recognizes a Spanish lullaby. She learns that not only is she the child of parents "disappeared" by Argentina's military dictatorship, but the circumstance of her adoption by German parents is reprehensible at best. Cossen ups the ante by giving us a somewhat unsympathetic heroine who is aided in her search by a suspicious, German-speaking cop (effectively played by Rafael Ferro, the long-distance swimmer in Veronica Chen's Agua). Equally memorable is Beatriz Spelzini as an aunt who demands justice. Her scenes are heartbreaking.
A newish trend at Bay Area festivals has been the screening of genre films in Late Show time slots, with 3rd i South Asian and SF Jewish Film Festivals being recent examples. B&B gets into the act with Michael Steiner's Sennentuntschi, an atmospheric Swiss creep-fest. It's a film I'm certain many non-genre fans like myself will be happy they stayed up late for. The Sennentuntschi is a woman of Alpine folklore, created to service men's "needs" and constructed from straw, rag and a broom. She's given life by Satan and her revenge is a bitch. In a wordless performance, French actress Roxane Mesquida (Catherine Breillat's Sex is Comedy and Fat Girl) perfectly embodies the creature's ferity and vulnerability. While never less than engaging as a solid genre piece, the film isn't immune to goofing around. Serge Gainsbourg and T. Rex pop up on the soundtrack and the plot embraces absinthe consumption, psychotic priests, stillborn babies and worse.
There's also a macabre element at play in Chris Kraus' (Four Minutes) The Poll Diaries, a historic epic set on the shores of the Baltic Sea. In the days leading up to WWI, a spirited teenage girl hides a wounded Estonian anarchist not only from the Russian and German armies, but also from her disciplinarian father, a disgraced scientist with a penchant for human dissection. The film ultimately becomes a bit silly and laborious, but the real attraction here is the setting—an enormous mansion built on stilts overlooking the sea. I caught The Poll Diaries at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and can only imagine how great it will look on the Castro's big screen in 35mm. It's the most sumptuously photographed film I've seen this year. And speaking of 35mm, B&B deserves big kudos for once again making its audience privy to every film's screening format.
This year's opening night film is Yasemin Samdereli's Almanya—Welcome to Germany (Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland), a big-hearted family dramedy about three generations of Turkish Germans road-tripping to Anatolia whilst flashbacking upon family history. It'll provide crowd-pleasing entertainment on opening night, but those looking for a thoughtful depiction of immigration, cultural identity and assimilation are advised to look elsewhere. The festival closes a week later with Andres Veiel's If Not Us, Who (Wer wenn nicht wir ), which was screened at the B&B press conference. It follows the path of 60s / 70s revolutionary Gudrun Ensslin (an intensely watchable Lena Lauzemis)—from her complicated relationship with radical writer / publisher Bernward Vesper, right up to her infamous association with militant RAF leader Andreas Baader. The telling is rather flat, however, lacking the urgency and dynamism that made The Baader Meinhof Complex a compelling watch.
If Not Us, Who co-stars Alexander Fehling as Andreas Baader. The popular actor reappears in the title role of Young Goethe in Love, which is the main event of B&B's Encore Day in San Jose. The festival desperately wanted to show this new Philipp Stölzl (Northface) film at the Castro, but distributor Music Box Films nixed screening it in any theater with more than 500 seats (the film opens at Landmark's Clay Theater on November 18 and recently played the Mill Valley Film Festival). According to Festival Director Sorn, the Castro's size is also the reason why Tom Tykwer's 3 (Drei) got relegated to San Jose. This is rather weird considering the film's June Frameline showing at the Castro, as well as a recent theatrical run at the Sundance Kabuki. (My Frameline review of 3 is here). Filling out the San Jose line-up are the aforementioned The Poll Diaries and Peter Luisi's The Sandman (Der Sandmann ), an absurdist tale about a priggish stamp dealer whose body starts excreting mountains of sand. While reasonably entertaining and well acted, The Sandman's titular metaphor is overburdened and would probably work best as a short.
Of all the films I hope to see during the festival proper, Andreas Dresen's Stopped On Track (Halt auf freier Strecke) sits at the top. Dresen is no stranger to B&B. His film Cloud 9 (aka "the geriatric sex movie") played here in 2009 and I believe one or two others have been featured at the fest. Stopped on Track employs a mix of actors and non-professionals—all speaking improvised dialogue—to tell the story of a postal worker's last months before dying of a brain tumor. The film was co-winner (with Kim Ki-duk's Arirang) of the top prize in Cannes 2011's Un Certain Regard sidebar. Of possible related interest is Michael Schaerer's Bold Heroes (Stationspiraten), B&B's 2011 Centerpiece Film about five teenage boys with terminal diseases all living together in a Swiss clinic.
Documentaries are generally a good bet at B&B and this year's festival offers seven. All five German docs are personal profiles of sorts: urban guerilla turned Foreign Minister Joseph Fischer (Joschka & Mr. Fischer (Joschka und Herr Fischer)), Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle (100 Years Hollywood: The Carl Laemmle Story (100 Jahre Hollywood)), wildlife conservationist Jane Goodall (Jane's Journey (Die Lebensreise der Jane Goodall)), championship boxing brothers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko (Klitschko) and five former East German citizens incarcerated for attempting to flee to the West (Face the Wall (Gesicht zur Wand)). From Austria there's a look at teenage immigrants who've left crisis regions for a home in Europe (Little Alien) and a story of extreme mountain skiing (Mount St. Elias). Finally, six German language shorts will be screened before select features, in lieu of being grouped into one program. This is a welcome format for folks like me who (regrettably) rarely attend shorts programs.
Cross-published on film-415.
It is, perhaps, a belabored cliché to consider how films speak to each other across time and space; however, it's difficult not to observe when films speak to each other contemporaneously for being proximate in space by being programmed in the same film festival. Such was the case at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) where three stylistically distinct films addressed the suffering source of poetry: South Korea's Poetry (Shi, 2010), the German / Austrian / Estonian co-production The Poll Diaries (2010), and the Russian film Silent Souls (Ovsyanki, 2010). In a word, Poetry was incandescent, Silent Souls elegiac, and The Poll Diaries morbid (though beautifully so). I'm quite pleased that all three will be speaking across to each other once again at the 2011 Palm Springs International Film Festival.
The Poll Diaries (Germany / Austria / Estonia, 2010)—I've spoken with Chris Kraus regarding his fourth feature The Poll Diaries, a semi-fictional narrative set in turn-of-the-century Estonia depicting the effect of tumultuous historic events upon the tender sensibility of Oda Schaefer, a young girl whose destiny as a poet is influenced by her interaction with a wounded Estonian anarchist she nurses back to health. Reconciling her family's aristocratic indiscretions with a compassionate concern for the downtrodden, Oda's innate poetic sense is enflamed when she is forced to acknowledge scientific inhumanity, political injustice and social inequality.
Poetry / Shi (South Korea, 2010)—In their brief synopsis for Lee Chang-dong's most recent masterwork, TIFF quipped: "Rhyme and crime intertwine in Poetry, the moving portrait of an elegant old lady in the initial stages of Alzheimer's, as well as a lyrical take on creative discovery and an upsetting look at juvenile violence."
Dispatching to MUBI from Poetry's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Danny Kasman observed: "Films about artists or someone creating art are incredibly difficult to pull off. It has something to do with audience verification—if we just hear that someone is a great painter or writer, we can take the film's word for it, but if we see them painting or writing, suddenly the viewer can cast instant judgment on that work and thereby the character and thereby the honesty of the film itself. Lee's film risks it all by including both artistic creation—we see our heroine thinking about and composing poetry—and the art too, since she eventually reads to us her composition. And the film wildly succeeds on both accounts, and at something even more challenging too, which is by painting Yun Jung-hee's character as an almost simple-minded or daft free spirit, which makes the believability of composition, creation, and exposition something requiring terrific subtlety and nuance. That her work is moving even before she finishes her poem, simply in her looking at the world around her and the way her new observations start to trickle through her conversations, is a resounding accomplishment for director and actress." Also at MUBI, David Hudson rounded up the subsequent Cannes reviews (where Poetry won Best Screenplay), as well as the resoundingly favorable reviews from the film's screening at the New York Film Festival (NYFF).
Myself, I caught the film at its North American premiere at TIFF. Straight off, I was struck by how frequently cinematic narratives spring from the body of a dead girl; a thematic domain—if not a genre—unto itself. In Poetry, it is the corpse of teenage Agnes floating down the river. She's committed suicide after being raped by a gang of boys. Somehow it is her spirit that informs Mija's desperation to write one poem before she loses her mind to Alzheimer's. In the role of Mija, Yoon Jeong-hee—who came out of a 16-year retirement—permeates her performance with a wistful sweet sadness.
One of my favorite images from Poetry is when Mija—struggling for inspiration—sits beside the river staring at the bridge from which Agnes leapt to her death. With notepad in hand, Mija sits poised to write; but, a sudden rain arrives before inspiration. The white pages of Mija's empty notepad become startled by dark drops of rain; the cinematic image itself sheer poetry.
Further, the fugacity of human experience is aligned with the natural cycle of growth and decay, which easily becomes one of the most fundamental templates of poetic expression; i.e., the fate of flowers and fruit becomes the fate of human beings or—as Mija herself says in a moment of senescent insight—"apricots are sweetest once they have fallen from the branch."
Silent Souls / Ovsyanki (Russia, 2010)—Aleksei Fedorchenko's third feature film aligns thematically with Lee Chang-dong's riverside reveries in his mesmerizing focus on the obscure pagan practices of a small community of Finno-Ugric people, the Merya, who—as Dimitri Eipedes explains in his official description for TIFF—"never got over their infatuation with water, settling along riverbanks whenever and wherever they could" and all because "they believe death by drowning to be the ultimate release." Silent Souls becomes the filmic version of a novel written on a father's silted typewriter perched on the sides of dead fish: to drown, to drown, to drown....
Again at MUBI, David Hudson has rounded up the reviews from Venice and Toronto 2010, then again from NYFF. Likewise at MUBI, Danny Kasman weighs in independently from TIFF's North American premiere, observing that art cinema hazards blowing small filmic subjects out of proportion with distorting grandeur. He praises that Fedorchenko "keeps the sense of scale intact" and remains steadfast to his simple story about two men dispersing the ashes of a woman they both loved. "Compositions are in wide screen," Kasman describes, "but it is always roads, rivers, doors and paths that extend down the center and into the distance; the weight of solemn grey fixed camera shots lifted to a tranquil, almost nostalgic tone by this continual hint at journey and death."
Cross-published on Twitch.
Chris Kraus was born in Goettingen, Germany and studied at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin, where he now teaches. Already a noted scriptwriter before making his debut as a director, Kraus scored a notable success with his first feature, Scherbentanz (Shattered Glass, 2002), which was awarded two Bavarian Film Prizes, among other awards. His second film, Vier Minuten (Four Minutes, 2006), was one of the most successful German films of past years and won over 50 German and international awards, including the Audience Prize at San Francisco's 2007 Frameline Film Festival. In The Poll Diaries (2010) [official German site], Kraus continues his tradition of introducing sensational young talents to the movie-going public: after Hannah Herzsprung in Four Minutes, it is now Paula Beer's turn to shine as Oda von Siering, the adolescent protagonist of The Poll Diaries, which boasted its world premiere at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and is now poised for its U.S. premiere in the World Cinema Now sidebar at the 2011 Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF).
As synopsized by PSIFF: "On the eve of WWI, 14-year-old Oda Schaefer (Paula Beer, mesmerizing)—soon to grow into the real-life German poet—journeys by train to live with her estranged and discredited doctor father. She brings with her two 'gifts': her dead mother's body and a two-headed fetus. So begins Chris Krause's strange and deeply affecting drama that examines the chaotic home life of the poetess-to-be against the backdrop of civilization coming apart at the seams. Oda's father has little regard for human life—he is more concerned with furthering his disturbing studies on biology and destiny. Her stepmother is carrying on an affair. A wounded anarchist brings out Oda's maternal side, as she secretly nurses him back to life. Meanwhile Archduke Ferdinand has been shot and the world is sliding inexorably into war….
"Observant and profoundly humanist in belief and act, Oda serves as the audience surrogate, allowing us entry into a harsh and mysterious time, a time when the sacred sat alongside the profane, when the bizarre and gory were countered by the beautiful and the deeply felt. The Poll Diaries is a singular work, not easily forgotten."
I thought now would be a good time to revisit my interview with Kraus and I want to once again thank Stephen Lan for arranging time for Chris Kraus and I to sit down at the Toronto International to discuss his latest project. I likewise remain grateful to Sebastian Keismueller of Bavaria Film International for access to the film's production stills, including Jim Rakete's portrait of Kraus.
* * *
Michael Guillén: You have been working on The Poll Diaries (2010) for close to 14-15 years: from the original idea, through development and pre-production, to the actual filming. That's an unusually excessive amount of time to be working on a project and—since people change over time....
Chris Kraus: Yes, that's true.
Guillén: ...how was that for you? Did your approach to the project change over the years, as I assume you changed? Can you speak to the pros and cons of having such a length of time to develop a film?
Kraus: I like this question, I must say. I never thought about it but it's true. In 1995, I wrote the script because in 1993—shortly after the freedom of Estonia—I traveled to Estonia and visited Poll. The story went through an interesting process because at the beginning I just wanted to give the script to another director. After a while, I became a director and—after all my efforts to bring the script to another director fell through—suddenly the possibility developed that I could work on it myself.
At that point the script itself went a little bit darker. Over time it became darker. That was the process. At the beginning, it was a story about a girl's adventure where at the end the anarchist escapes and she grows up; it was a coming-of-age story. Nothing really changed except the community in which the story was set. By the time I decided to direct the story myself, it had darkened, there was more tragedy, more pain. In retrospect, I'm glad that this film wasn't made when I was a young guy because now it's filled up with the ambivalency of being neither good nor bad, which is a theme of interest to me. Also, the idea of how luck can bring a person to the right decision and not the wrong. Allowing the script to mature to incorporate my personal interests was better for the project.
Guillén: This tragic shadow that fell over the script over time, was it truer to the source memoirs of German-Baltic author Oda Schaefer (1900-1988)? Or were these tragic concerns more in league with your own personal development?
Kraus: Yes, absolutely, because when I began writing the script based on Oda Schaefer's memoirs, I felt that there was something wrong with this woman's story, like something was missing. I felt something had happened that she hadn't included in her memoirs. So I decided to create the world that she never talked about in her memoirs. Admittedly, my creation of Oda's world was incorrect—Poll was never destroyed and some of the information at the end of the film is incorrect—but, I wanted to play with this balance between fiction and non-fiction. Though the character of Oda Schaefer is real—she was a famous lyric writer in the 1950s—she is almost unknown today, though she remains real for my family. During her time at Poll, Oda Schaefer discovered her own identity. So perhaps it's safe to say that the way of her story and the way of my own story are not so far away from each other.
Guillén: That you both became writers surfaces as a common element? I'm aware you studied literature at the university, but what prompted the shift to scriptwriting? At what point did you choose film over literature?
Kraus: There's not a direct link. Yes, I started at the university studying two years of literature; but, then I did a lot of other things, my life was mixed up, I stopped my studies, and only ten years later was lucky enough to study four years at a film school. To make a long story short, I decided to be a writer because I came from a background of writing. In those days at the film school everyone wanted to become a director. I never wanted to become a director. I had children I had to feed.
Guillén: Well, I'm glad to say you became a director, I'll put it that way.
Kraus: You're very charming.
Guillén: In your director's statement in the press notes, you state: "I wasn't interested in a world of the past, but in the onset of a period that we live in to this very day." Can you expand on that? What are the characteristics of this period we now live in that were introduced by the historical precedent of your story?
Kraus: I'm not sure. Your questions are very complex and with my limited English I'm not sure I can be on the same level; but, I'll try. I don't believe the connections are details of time. It's more a feeling of insecurity that has been passed down to us from that time. Further, the changes in time from then to now are not as big as we think. On one hand, when we think of 1914 it seems almost the same as considering the ancient Romans—it seems so far away—but, on the other hand, all of the emblematic characteristics of the 20th century were already there in 1914: science, the cars, the beginning of psychology, all of those aspects of modernity were already in place. What I meant in my director's note was that 1914 was just the beginning of a modern age that we experience moreoreless today.
Guillén: To return to your earlier comment regarding your concern with the ambivalency of right and wrong and how seemingly straightforward events can lead to right or wrong decisions, what I found difficult to watch in The Poll Diaries was the characterization of Oda's father Ebbo von Siering (in a disturbing performance by Edgar Selge). Here is a man desperate to be acknowledged within a mainstream academic community who begins to scientifically experiment on human beings, which—historically, of course—we know led to the heinous practices that occurred during WWII. But it comments even further on the genetic splicing being explored today. That scientific impulse of experimenting with the human body, once started, has never stopped and I was wondering if this was the "onset of a period" that you were referencing? Or as Cameron Bailey phrased it in his program notes: "Posing a range of ethical questions, the film offers a compelling commentary on a morally bankrupt brand of reasoning that would come to underlie some of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century."
Kraus: I wanted to choose one part of the early turn of the century that would tell us about ourselves today. I chose science. I could have chosen other things as well. I could have chosen psychology, for example. The real existing Ebbo on whom my character was based was actually a journalist and—though he began his writing career with some interesting pieces—he was eventually unsuccessful as a writer. Filled with hate and resentment over his failed career, he became anti-Semitic. I gave that lack of success to my character Ebbo as well to show how he became more and more radical and extreme. When a man is not successful in life, he feels pressured and begins to resent and hate the times that work against him. I chose science as a way to articulate this theme of conflicted modernity. As a filmmaker, of course, you choose what will allow the most imagery and I felt I could do more with Ebbo as a scientist than I could if he were a journalist.
Guillén: One of the things I found most compelling about The Poll Diaries was precisely your directorial intent to create a historical drama that speaks to modern audiences. I'm continually intrigued by what makes such a historical drama contemporary. Do you feel The Poll Diaries is a contemporary film?
Kraus: It's hard for me to answer that; but, I think the characters are modern. Do you know what I mean? It's like trying to imagine what it would be like to live in the 16th Century or—in the specific case of The Poll Diaries—the transition from the 19th to the 20th Century. For me, as a German, with a family background in National Socialism, what I imagine as modern is what it would feel like for me to be this adolescent girl Oda? Although I never met her, I liked her a lot. It was forbidden to talk about her in my family.
Guillén: Oda Schaefer was your great aunt?
Kraus: Yes, she was my great aunt and—because of that—that's the modern connection. The same family dynamics occurring during Oda's adolescence in 1914 are the same dynamics occurring in my family today. I'm pretty sure my family doesn't like my film.
Guillén: I was going to ask you how they felt about your championing the black sheep of your family.
Kraus: No, no, no, they are absolutely against this film.
Guillén: They didn't want anyone to know about her, right?
Kraus: No, that's not exactly right. They're not really interested in her; but, they're interested in the status of her own tradition and because I show a German-Baltic who is a bad guy doing bad things to people. Actually, I don't think of him as a bad guy. He's an ambivalent personality. Maybe he could have been a good guy?
Guillén: If he'd been academically successful?
Kraus: Maybe? Or maybe Oda could have turned out to be a bad girl? Because I've staged that ambivalency, my family is totally against this film. I'm sure no one in my family could have imagined this, coming from an aristrocratic background with its tradition of pride. But to return to your question: this is the modern thing. This is what's contemporary about the film. The attitudes of my family. We even tried to work with German-Baltic organizations but it wasn't possible. They read a small treatment of the script and rejected participation. That reaction alone tells me that there is something in this story that is not just a fairy tale.
Guillén: At a large international festival like TIFF where I'm watching so many different movies from different countries—which is such a compressed, almost artificial way to watch movies—one of the welcome delights is how certain movies begin to speak to each other. Your film The Poll Diaries speaks to two others I've seen at TIFF: Lee Changdong's Korean feature Poetry and Aleksei Fedorchenko's Russian feature Silent Souls. All three films concern individuals who—in their struggle against social constraints and personal tragedies—become poets. And though all three films are stylistically different, it's through the tragedies of their individual lives that their poetry emerges. In The Poll Diaries Oda is encouraged to become a poet through the influence of the Estonian anarchist "Schnaps" (handsomely played by Tambet Tuisk). Is this one of the fictional elements you added to the life of your great aunt Oda Schaefer?
Kraus: I thought about the character of my great aunt and wondered why she was not like the rest of the family? The answer is: because she became a writer. When you're a writer, you're never sure of the conditions of living and have to live with a certain insecurity. You have to be content to ask and perhaps not know the answers. When you begin to ask questions, when you begin to think about things, perhaps at the end of your questioning there will be no answer; but, because of all the questions you have asked, you maybe learn who you are. If you're a slave to family traditions, you will never find yourself. Speaking personally, that's the tragedy of my own family. So many members of my family have been so far away from themselves; but, my great aunt Oda tried to find herself. She spoke honestly of her feelings and that made a difference. That's also what interests me in other people.
Guillén: The Poll Diaries is sumptuously filmed. It's visually beautiful. The entire production design is stunning. I was bemused reading the production notes that most of your production team is female.
Kraus: [Laughs loudly.]
Guillén: Your director of photography Daniela Knapp, your production designer Silke Buhr, your make up supervisor Susana Sánchez, your costume designer Gioia Raspé, your editor Uta Schmidt, your original music by Annette Focks, your casting director Nina Haun, even your producers Meike and Alexandra Kordes: all women. This is somewhat unusual and commendable. I respect this. What was this like for you to be surrounded by such an ensemble of feminine creative talent informing the film?
Kraus: I like to work with women! They add another sensitivity. The truth is that most of my team began with my career. We have grown together. It just happened.
Guillén: I appreciate that you use the term "sensitivity" because the voice that comes out of this film, this young girl's voice, is a strong, feminist voice. The role you have given Paula Beer to play possesses admirable agency. It's a great debut performance for a young actress. I'm curious if the fact that you have such creative women working with you has helped develop and strengthen that feminine voice, not only here in The Poll Diaries but with your previous feature Four Minutes (2006)?
Kraus: It's just the way my life happened. When I began with my first film Scherbentanz (Shattered Glass, 2002), it wasn't that I said, "I only want to work with women." It just happened. I've planned a trilogy of films about my family. Scherbentanz was about my mother and The Poll Diaries about another female character. I think today that's very modern. Female characters now are more interesting because today they can do things; they're not victims anymore.
Guillén: Which reflects the central theme you're admittedly interested in of how an individual can find him or herself against all odds and despite opposition from the social environment.
Kraus: Yes. For men, of course, in our male world, it's normal; but, for women it's a challenge. Even for a woman to become a cinematographer is a challenge. Your question reveals to me that this is a theme in my work and I apologize for laughing so loudly. Why did you look at that? Why did you check that out?
Guillén: Because I personally relate to that feminine struggle for independent agency. I am one of those men who believe that the emancipation of women sets us all free. And I've met enough people in the film world to know how difficult it is for women to get a toehold in the industry; thus, I admired your production ensemble, which has served you well. Four Minutes was internationally successful.
Kraus: Yes. I see.
Guillén: Returning to the production, this house that serves as the main location in your film, this incredible Palladine-style manor, is an incredible presence in your film. As Cameron Bailey described it in his program notes, it's "a character in its own right, a hulking, neoclassical manor that hovers on stilts above the sea." Can you speak to how you and your production team came up with this structure?
Kraus: The decision to build that house was mine. It was the only possibility to bring it alive. Even though at first we looked for an existing structure in Estonia. But the details of the house, its construction, was the work of Silke Buhr.
Guillén: Who, again, worked with you on Four Minutes, as well as on Florian Henckel von Donnersmarcks's The Lives Of Others. This house that Buhr designed, I'd never seen a house like this before.
Kraus: That's because it doesn't exist.
Guillén: So it was more an aesthetic concept rather than an architectural reconstruction of a historical structure?
Kraus: It has more to do with imagination. It's a house that could have existed. We thought about how we could bring it alive and it depended upon a character who could imagine such a house. A king in the 16th century, let's say, might say, "I want a mosque as a house" and he would have it built. Silke Buhr and I thought, "Okay, 100 years ago there might have been a grandfather in Alaska who wanted to bring a Palladine-style manor to Alaska." We decided that—though such a structure didn't exist—it could exist, especially if we had a character such as Ebbo von Siering who was crazy enough to build it. Thus, this somewhat fairy tale house came alive. I heard today, in fact, that some people found it admirable that we had found the house in Estonia!
Guillén: Speaking of Estonia, what was it like to film there? The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival has become one of my dream destinations. I've heard their cities hold the old world charm of Prague. Was it a special experience for you to film there?
Kraus: Yes, it was a special experience; like filming here in the wilderness of Canada. We filmed in a nature reserve away from civilization. I haven't seen much of Estonia. I've mainly just seen its forests. When we filmed from the helicopter, it was amazing to see nothing but wilderness as far as the eye could see. This is uncommon for middle Europe so I was delighted to use this footage. For me, Estonia was archaic. That would be the word: archaic.
Unfortunately, with regard to the old world charm of Tallinn, they have polished it up. It's too new now. It's very nice; but, when I saw it in 1993, everything was wonderfully wrecked.
Guillén: It had character?
Kraus: Unbelievable character. It was like stepping back into the past 100 years. But it's not like that anymore.
Guillén: Can you speak to how you worked with your director of photography Daniela Kapp to create the pastoral atmosphere of The Poll Diaries? The look of the film is gorgeous, all that late afternoon low-angled amber light reflected off the surfaces of things. If I walk away from a movie with even just one image seared into my mind, I am happy and with The Poll Diaries it was that amber light glinting off of spider webs wavering in late afternoon breezes and those busy black ants trafficking over the coarse bark of trees. I'm sure you didn't place those spider webs or anything; but, I admire how your DoP had an eye for such pastoral detail.
Kraus: Though The Poll Diaries was my fourth film, I wasn't able to work with Judith Kaufmann who was my DoP on Four Minutes. Daniela arrived in Estonia five weeks before shooting began so it was just a process of bringing her into the project. And though, yes, you are right, we did not place the spider webs on the set, the ants were placed by four people who brought them in.
Guillén: [Laughs] Ant wranglers!
Kraus: Yeah, really. [Laughs.] Absolutely. I think it was wonderful that Daniela had the same vision. She contributed some very good ideas. But sometimes communication doesn't have to do with speaking. Of course you talk and all that, but you also communicate on another level and, perhaps, this is again that special thing of working with women. It's easier. With men, something else happens. You never have such problems working with women. You have other problems; but, not the ones you have with men.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Last year's Berlin & Beyond Film Festival (B&B) was deemed festival non grata by a number of Bay Area cinephiles. Troubled by the Goethe Institut's forced retirement of B&B founder Ingrid Eggers and annoyed at B&B's shift from January to an already festival-stuffed October, they lent support to an unofficial boycott. The weak-willed amongst us, however, couldn't resist skulking into the Castro Theatre for at least a taste of the latest German-language cinema, including the outstanding duo of The Robber and The Silence, plus Germany's Oscar® submission When We Leave (which, in a decidedly minority opinion, I ended up really, really hating).
There are 23 narrative and documentary features in this year's fest, of which I've seen seven (via DVD screener except where noted). The strongest is The Day I Was Not Born (Das Lied in mir), an intense, noteworthy debut from director Florian Cossen. While waiting for a connecting flight in Buenos Aires, a young German woman mysteriously recognizes a Spanish lullaby. She learns that not only is she the child of parents "disappeared" by Argentina's military dictatorship, but the circumstance of her adoption by German parents is reprehensible at best. Cossen ups the ante by giving us a somewhat unsympathetic heroine who is aided in her search by a suspicious, German-speaking cop (effectively played by Rafael Ferro, the long-distance swimmer in Veronica Chen's Agua). Equally memorable is Beatriz Spelzini as an aunt who demands justice. Her scenes are heartbreaking.
A newish trend at Bay Area festivals has been the screening of genre films in Late Show time slots, with 3rd i South Asian and SF Jewish Film Festivals being recent examples. B&B gets into the act with Michael Steiner's Sennentuntschi, an atmospheric Swiss creep-fest. It's a film I'm certain many non-genre fans like myself will be happy they stayed up late for. The Sennentuntschi is a woman of Alpine folklore, created to service men's "needs" and constructed from straw, rag and a broom. She's given life by Satan and her revenge is a bitch. In a wordless performance, French actress Roxane Mesquida (Catherine Breillat's Sex is Comedy and Fat Girl) perfectly embodies the creature's ferity and vulnerability. While never less than engaging as a solid genre piece, the film isn't immune to goofing around. Serge Gainsbourg and T. Rex pop up on the soundtrack and the plot embraces absinthe consumption, psychotic priests, stillborn babies and worse.
There's also a macabre element at play in Chris Kraus' (Four Minutes) The Poll Diaries, a historic epic set on the shores of the Baltic Sea. In the days leading up to WWI, a spirited teenage girl hides a wounded Estonian anarchist not only from the Russian and German armies, but also from her disciplinarian father, a disgraced scientist with a penchant for human dissection. The film ultimately becomes a bit silly and laborious, but the real attraction here is the setting—an enormous mansion built on stilts overlooking the sea. I caught The Poll Diaries at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and can only imagine how great it will look on the Castro's big screen in 35mm. It's the most sumptuously photographed film I've seen this year. And speaking of 35mm, B&B deserves big kudos for once again making its audience privy to every film's screening format.
This year's opening night film is Yasemin Samdereli's Almanya—Welcome to Germany (Almanya—Willkommen in Deutschland), a big-hearted family dramedy about three generations of Turkish Germans road-tripping to Anatolia whilst flashbacking upon family history. It'll provide crowd-pleasing entertainment on opening night, but those looking for a thoughtful depiction of immigration, cultural identity and assimilation are advised to look elsewhere. The festival closes a week later with Andres Veiel's If Not Us, Who (Wer wenn nicht wir ), which was screened at the B&B press conference. It follows the path of 60s / 70s revolutionary Gudrun Ensslin (an intensely watchable Lena Lauzemis)—from her complicated relationship with radical writer / publisher Bernward Vesper, right up to her infamous association with militant RAF leader Andreas Baader. The telling is rather flat, however, lacking the urgency and dynamism that made The Baader Meinhof Complex a compelling watch.
If Not Us, Who co-stars Alexander Fehling as Andreas Baader. The popular actor reappears in the title role of Young Goethe in Love, which is the main event of B&B's Encore Day in San Jose. The festival desperately wanted to show this new Philipp Stölzl (Northface) film at the Castro, but distributor Music Box Films nixed screening it in any theater with more than 500 seats (the film opens at Landmark's Clay Theater on November 18 and recently played the Mill Valley Film Festival). According to Festival Director Sorn, the Castro's size is also the reason why Tom Tykwer's 3 (Drei) got relegated to San Jose. This is rather weird considering the film's June Frameline showing at the Castro, as well as a recent theatrical run at the Sundance Kabuki. (My Frameline review of 3 is here). Filling out the San Jose line-up are the aforementioned The Poll Diaries and Peter Luisi's The Sandman (Der Sandmann ), an absurdist tale about a priggish stamp dealer whose body starts excreting mountains of sand. While reasonably entertaining and well acted, The Sandman's titular metaphor is overburdened and would probably work best as a short.
Of all the films I hope to see during the festival proper, Andreas Dresen's Stopped On Track (Halt auf freier Strecke) sits at the top. Dresen is no stranger to B&B. His film Cloud 9 (aka "the geriatric sex movie") played here in 2009 and I believe one or two others have been featured at the fest. Stopped on Track employs a mix of actors and non-professionals—all speaking improvised dialogue—to tell the story of a postal worker's last months before dying of a brain tumor. The film was co-winner (with Kim Ki-duk's Arirang) of the top prize in Cannes 2011's Un Certain Regard sidebar. Of possible related interest is Michael Schaerer's Bold Heroes (Stationspiraten), B&B's 2011 Centerpiece Film about five teenage boys with terminal diseases all living together in a Swiss clinic.
Documentaries are generally a good bet at B&B and this year's festival offers seven. All five German docs are personal profiles of sorts: urban guerilla turned Foreign Minister Joseph Fischer (Joschka & Mr. Fischer (Joschka und Herr Fischer)), Universal Pictures founder Carl Laemmle (100 Years Hollywood: The Carl Laemmle Story (100 Jahre Hollywood)), wildlife conservationist Jane Goodall (Jane's Journey (Die Lebensreise der Jane Goodall)), championship boxing brothers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko (Klitschko) and five former East German citizens incarcerated for attempting to flee to the West (Face the Wall (Gesicht zur Wand)). From Austria there's a look at teenage immigrants who've left crisis regions for a home in Europe (Little Alien) and a story of extreme mountain skiing (Mount St. Elias). Finally, six German language shorts will be screened before select features, in lieu of being grouped into one program. This is a welcome format for folks like me who (regrettably) rarely attend shorts programs.
