Berlinale 2022 Film Highlights

“Unrest” by Cyril Schäublin

In the 1870s, Russian geographer Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin travelled to Switzerland’s Jura mountains for cartography purposes and returned to Russia some time later as a convinced anarchist. So what happened? Kropotkin had come into intensive contact locally with organized anarchistic watchmakers – encounters that had left a profound impression on him.

In “Unrest”, Cyril Schäublin traces that time and presents the struggle for a future socio-political orientation within the framework of capitalist industrialization. Work breaks are stopped to the second, watches synchronized, times calculated. In impressive macro-shots, Schäublin shows time and again the meticulousness of the watchmakers, particularly in the production of the “Unrueh” of the film’s original German title, which was the oscillating system of mechanical watches. Its constant oscillation between two poles, which makes the watches tick and thus, in a way, makes time possible in the first place, here becomes symbolic of the dialectic of history: the conflict between political polarities in the search for a more reasonable world.

“Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush” by Andreas Dresen

In 2002, Murat Kurnaz from Bremen was picked up on his trip to Pakistan and shipped without charge to the then new CIA prison of Guantanamo. Andreas Dresen focuses on the experience of Kurnaz’s mother during this time and turns it into a modern David-and-Goliath tale. “Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush” is perhaps not the best film Dresen has produced thus far, but it’s a great joy to watch and entirely devoid of political-drama kitsch. The film also skirts the question of whether Murat Kurnaz was actually guilty or not. Dresen’s interest in the so-called “little people”, to whom the filmmaker has always devoted himself with unbounded empathy and not a hint of sentimentality, collides here with very big global politics.

Meltem Kaplan, who works as a comedian, can barely conceal her main profession even in the role of Rabiye Kurnaz. Her occasionally somewhat overzealous performance, however, is still a pleasure to watch thanks to her fantastic presence on screen. Not least, this film is also about an extraordinary rapprochement: that between Rabiye Kurnaz and her lawyer Bernhard Docke (a role in which actor Alex Scheer disappears completely). Their lives could hardly be further apart, but in their greatest helplessness the two sides of German reality unexpectedly meet and form something like a friendship.

Cinema release scheduled for April 16.

“Rewind & Play (‘It’s not nice?’)” by Alain Gomis

The video tape fast-forwards. Back. Play it again. Who can we see? The American Thelonious Monk (1917–1982), one of the world’s greatest jazz musicians and one of its first hipsters: eccentric, congenial as a composer, monosyllabic as a guest in interviews, which he was decidedly reluctant to give. And yet he patiently answered questions on French television in December 1969. The tapes of those recordings have surfaced only now. “Rewind & Play” collages an experimental documentary from the archive material, in which we nevertheless see the same scenario over and over. Together with the camera, the eyes of the audience wander in close-up shots across the sweaty face of the musician, over his curly beard, lips, nose, and eyes.

Watch as he is asked to answer the same question from the moderator over and over again, because yet another take wasn’t satisfactory. Bear witness to the way the film crew bluntly states it will cut out Monk’s critical objection that he was paid less for his appearance than his French musician colleague. But what view are we actually following here? Why the bizarre interest of the camera in the protagonist’s skin, which seems almost like a physiognomic study? Why is there no one to wipe the beads of sweat from the TV guest’s forehead, to adjust the spotlight? Suspicions stir without ever being confirmed or verified. Would a white musical star be treated the same way? A vexing work that draws its power solely from the montage of curated archive footage.

“Rimini” by Ulrich Seidl

All alone, a beefy, quirky-looking man in a heavy coat walks along desolate, rainy streets until he finally reaches his destination: a nondescript suburban family house, where his brother is already waiting for him. Their mother has died and her sons are taking care of the final formalities. The following day, the man heads back to his adopted home of Rimini. He is the washed-up pop star Richie Bravo, who has taken up residence here, and Ulrich Seidl shows the meager remains of his existence, in which every day is like the next – filled to bursting point with grand delusions, alcohol addition, and financial worries. Even with his nightly concerts to groups of pensioners, which are supposed to evoke happy, long-gone days, the singer can barely keep his head above water and so turns to ever more drastic measures of self-preservation, from prostitution to blackmail.

With Richie Bravo, Seidl unsparingly, but never unempathetically, pursues to the bitter end a somber swan song to the generation of children of post-war, economic-miracle affluence, together with their carefree, unworldly insouciance. The Italian seaside resort likewise appears merciless, bleak, and abstracted – just like the story that never quite wants to come together from many fragments and threatens to dissolve, along with its protagonist, into almost total meaninglessness and insignificance.

Cinema release scheduled for May 19.

“A German Party” by Simon Brückner

This documentary is about one thing, as is felt in every other shot: how to ultimately achieve the outward effect you strive for. In this hour and a half, PR and marketing are discussed with far more passion than political substance. It’s surprising how open-heartedly the “Alternative für Deutschland” allows documentary filmmaker Simon Brückner insight into its day-to-day operations, whereby Brückner’s shots remain entirely free of comment, without once even displaying the names of those appearing. Unspectacular party meetings alternate with visits to the old founding father of Croatian nationalists, who explains to the mild-mannered young member that modern right-wingers should no longer rely on “Hollywood Nazis”.

Even if some of the participants may have held back in front of the camera here, “A German Party” offers interesting insights into a purgatory of vanities in which workers and academics confront each other with just as little understanding as East and West, local and federal politics, self-declared national Bolshevists, right-wingers and neo-libertarians. Holding it all together, it seems – albeit with some personal exceptions – is, not least, anti-Western resentment. This contempt for the promise of equality, which historically unites bourgeois society, then stands in solid opposition to the external perception the party strives for. And it is precisely in this respect that it has illuminating parallels with current discourses even beyond the political right.

“Ta farda (Until Tomorrow)” by Ali Asgari

Two people wander through the cold city, desperately seeking refuge for themselves and a baby. One might almost consider “Ta farda” a modern Christmas story – albeit without a happy ending and with two female friends instead of a mother and father: Single parent Fereshteh urgently needs to find care for her young daughter, but only until the next day because her parents have announced a visit. They must not know anything about the child. In Iran, personal lives are inevitably political, and so neighbors, hospital staff, and the doorwoman of the student residence of Fereshteh’s best friend Atefeh all quickly become suspicious of the young woman without a husband. Consequently, both protagonists can only help themselves in this odyssey, which is reminiscent of films like Jafar Panahi’s “Ayneh” in its laconism. According to its director Asgari, “Ta farda” is an atmospheric picture of present-day Iran, in which young women in particular no longer want to give any thought to the rigid religious guardians of morality – and at the same time have little hope of escaping the country’s leaden heaviness anytime soon.