This year’s DOCU/BEST program will impress in the audience a different perspective on Africa, on revolution, on life – however pretentious that may sound, tells film critic Oleksandr Teliuk.
A new perspective on Africa can be found in the documentary horror We Come As Friends. It is a striking video essay about contemporary neocolonialism by Hubert Sauper, an expert in visual research about Africa. In his movie, the director filmed South Sudan exactly at the time when it was separating to become a new sovereign state. However, it is certainly not a film about a political redrawing of the Dark Continent. The African tour seen through Hubert Sauper’s eyes is rather a panorama view of the existential desperation of contemporary geopolitics. South Sudan looks like a ‘Noah’s ark’ of current global contrasts. Here we can meet hungry children and Christian missionaries, Chinese oil workers and TV lectures from Hillary Clinton, lost post-Soviet pilots, grotesque NGOs and armed fanatics. In this film, Africa is once again presented as the topos of never-ending wars and genocides under the helpless patronage of UN peacekeepers.
We Come As Friends interprets Africa as a separate planet; the film is a diagnosis of the radical difference between an African and a European, which balances on the edge of a self-accusation of racism. It reflects on the fact that the crippled chatting in English, which is not native to anyone here, cannot be considered communication; and the selective sponsorship of pro-Western political movements cannot pass for diplomacy.
A more Europeanized version of Africa can be seen in the Egyptian film I Am the People. This film addresses one of the key subjects in recent documentaries – revolution. In Ukraine alone, dozens of movies have been made on the topic this year. Usually the authors of such films choose one of two ways of presenting revolutionary events – either a directly naturalistic recording of street clashes (Tahrir in Egypt, Maidan or All Things Ablaze in Ukraine), or a representation by means of new media (Silver Water in Syria). However, the debut film by Anna Roussillon has managed to do the impossible – to find a third way.
When she tells the story of the last few turbulent years in Egypt, the author presents not the fire of Cairo’s squares, but the everyday life of a village on the Nile. All the key turning points of the Arab Spring, from the first protests against Mubarak to the clashes with the military and the early elections, reach the villagers only through TV and radio broadcasts during the short breaks in their work in the fields. The villagers also follow the revolution emotionally but, being truly the people of the soil, they depend more on their own labor or even on the weather than on political regimes.
Paradoxically, this distance kept by the author from the epicenter of popular protest reveals the family curse of revolutions of all kinds – that even the most massive protests usually remain the concern of a minority. Thus in a way, the story about the lives of the Egyptians who were not directly involved in the protest events, but depended on their outcomes, tells us more about the revolution than the scrupulous documentaries streamed directly from the city squares.
The trajectory related to the Arab revolutions is continued by Point and Shoot. This film brings to our screens a new type of a hero – a soldier who holds a Kalashnikov in one hand and an iPhone with a video camera in the other.
Like most American teenagers, Matt Vandyke loved adventures, video games and films about Africa when he was a kid. At some point he decided to take an extensive course in growing up, so he bought a motorbike and a portable camera, and went to Africa. In a couple of years, Matt traveled all across the Arab world, got involved in the civil war in Libya, was captured as a prisoner of war, escaped, and had to pass a test for humanism.
The trouble which Matt gets into would be enough for a couple of lives, but the film squeezes them into an hour and a half of cascades of edited shots, accompanied by Matt’s own dry narrative voice. Presenting the horrible events of war this way is anthropologically authentic on the one hand, but on the other hand it has a suspicious romantic flavor in the spirit of Hemingway’s rhino hunting.
Marshall Curry, the director of Point and Shoot, may be familiar to the Kyiv public, because he visited the capital of Ukraine in 2012 to present a retrospective of his films.
Another American adventure and interview film, Citizenfour, is one of the biggest hits of this year’s Docudays UA Festival. The film that is on everyone’s lips, the documentary that won an Oscar, the story that stirred up America.
After these pretentious lines, I must note that after all, the best scene of the film was when Snowden, a former system administrator in the world’s most secret organization, sits quietly on the edge of his bed in a room of the Mira hotel in Hong Kong. In the silence of this scene, the drama of the person who gave up the slightest trust in the future for a state of constant paranoia becomes tangible.
The rest of Citizenfour consists of lengthy interviews with Snowden, the proceedings of investigative committee sessions, breaking TV news reports, and politicians’ speeches. It is know that Snowden himself chose journalists whom he trusted to present his story. Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras did an excellent job. By working on Snowden’s story, the former strengthened the Guardian’s reputation as the most liberal media outlet in the world. The latter has made a sensuous and critical film, inspired by American political thrillers of the 1970s no less than by the sensational act of the most famous refugee of our time. While inviting Greenwald and Poitras to conversation, Snowden repeatedly said that he wants the story not to be about himself but about the intelligence services’ work. In the end, it turned out to be the other way around, but in the case of Citizenfour it is probably for the better.
Finally, the most intimate and touching work of the program, the Israeli film Do You Believe in Love? by Dani Vasserman, touches upon a whole bunch of human rights issues. Here you have the stories of the disabled, the polemics around euthanasia, and an investigation of the question of what love is after all. And love is the most commonplace topic in cinema. That is why all the most interesting recent films about love, including Do You Believe in Love?, speak about extreme cases of love on the edge of death. Tova, the film’s heroine, works in matchmaking. For this purpose, she keeps a huge journal with information on seekers of love, and matches couples using the power of her intuition. What adds spice to the situation is that Tova’s body is completely paralyzed, and her clients are often also people with disabilities. The film is made emotionally intense by Tova’s strong life-asserting charisma and the dramatic story of her acquired disability.
Like any discussion about the disabled, Do You Believe in Love? is both an uncomfortable and an inspiring experience. It is certainly the most melodramatic movie in the program, which can easily both provoke a perplexed tear and throw the spectator into life’s warm embrace. But do not expect the film to work miracles –this is the only way they will have a chance to happen.
Oleksandr Teliuk, film critic
