#Berlinale

A spectre is haunting us …
PREFACE
A spectre is haunting us – and not just in Europe.
We have confusion following the collapse of the
great utopian dreams and disenchantment with
globalisation. Neither capitalism nor communism have
fulfilled their pledge to make the world a fairer place for
us all. Rarely has a Berlinale programme more forcefully
captured the current political situation in images. Many
film artists are seeking answers in the past, trying to
understand the present against the backdrop of history.
When the British ‘granted independence’ to India
70 years ago, they left behind an exploited, socially
damaged country which they divided into India and
Pakistan. Almost 20 million people were resettled,
deported or displaced during partition, and hundreds
of thousands were killed. Arbitrarily drawn borders
reserved the western part of India for the exploitation
of oil reserves by the former British colonial masters.
Director Gurinder Chadha, who has Indian heritage,
depicts this drama in her film VICEROY’S HOUSE.
And in FÉLICITÉ, director Alain Gomis depicts a
despoiled Africa with unsparing realism, made only
just bearable by the film’s exceptional poetry.
The German poet Friedrich Hölderlin wrote: “But
where danger is, the remedy also grows”. The
filmmakers also trace this hope and they discover
that, in spite of everything, there can be a lot of fun in
the world. The world is really a peculiar place that can
amaze us and also make us laugh. Sally Potter does
exactly this with her fast-paced romantic comedy
THE PARTY; likewise the Austrian Josef Hader with his
tragicomedy WILDE MAUS.
Perhaps stories of strong individuals and ideas from
exceptional artists have supplanted the grand utopian
berlinale talents
hau hebbel am ufer
11–16 feb 2017
Why
don’t you
get a
real job?
courage against all odds
dreams. We repeatedly encounter such people in this
year’s Berlinale programme: there is Joseph Beuys,
portrayed by Andres Veiel as ‘the Man of Sorrows of
the arts’. See also the great Geoffrey Rush playing
Giacometti in Paris in FINAL PORTRAIT or Sally
Hawkins as the naïve painter MAUDIE in Nova Scotia.
The 67th Berlinale literally gets off to a swing, even in
these highly turbulent times. French director Étienne
Comar dedicates a cinematic portrait to the musical
genius Django Reinhardt. Reinhardt’s gypsy jazz
combined 1930s swing music with the ‘Gypsy’ music
influenced by Arab, Turkish and Indian folk music.
His improvisations and compositions influenced
many musicians and directors, from Carlos Santana
and Jerry Garcia to Woody Allen. In DJANGO we see
Django Reinhardt achieving international fame in
German-occupied Paris while defying Nazi henchmen.
Yet another exceptional artist must be mentioned here:
he who never really left us, the truly immortal Rainer
Werner Fassbinder proves with his five-part series ACHT
STUNDEN SIND KEIN TAG – which we’re screening in the
digitally restored version for the first time – that serial
story-telling is not an invention of today.
With LE JEUNE KARL MARX Raoul Peck brings a young
Marx back into the world he was urgently warning us
against. The time feels right for a different kind of
spectre to haunt the world again. Spectres which aim
to help humankind. Spectres which, like many films
in this year’s Berlinale, show us not the grand utopian
dreams but the little ones which bring us closer to
moments that point to a way forward.
The story of a Syrian refugee in Aki Kaurismäki’s THE
OTHER SIDE OF HOPE might represent a world of
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