EXBERLINER Issue 168, February 2018

WHAT’S ON — Film
Preview
Scary Mother Searching for Oscar The Rub
Critical mass(es)
As if the Berlinale wasn’t enough
to quell filmgoers’ appetites, Berlin
Critics’ Week returns with an uncompromising
programme for serious
cinephiles. By David Mouriquand
Critics’ Week is an independent venture
that offers a more streamlined
selection of films than the Berlinale’s
sprawling and often dizzying programme.
It’s proven to be much more than a mere
sidebar to the festival and has successfully
followed in the footsteps of Locarno
and Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique. The
overarching theme of this fourth edition is
the focus on Publikum: how films reach and
engage with an audience; by what standards
they are produced; how we watch and
perceive the medium. Fittingly, the German
Critics’ Association has put together an
eclectic, globe-hopping selection that should
bring critics and cinephiles together for
some particularly lively debates.
The programme kicks off with Ana Urushadze’s
Scary Mother, the winner of Locarno’s
Golden Leopard award for Best First Feature.
The Georgian-Estonian co-production
sees a middle-aged housewife who sacrifices
her mental and physical health, and then her
family, as her previously repressed love of
writing evolves into a borderline-horrifying
obsession. As a brazenly unique, female-directed
film with strong allegorical tones, it’s
joined by Mihaela Popescu’s darkly surrealist
drama Yet To Rule. Executed with brio,
featuring languorous pans and ambitious
extended takes, the Romanian director’s
purposely confounding narrative involves
the physical manifestations and interactions
of the Freudian id, ego and superego and is
sure to prove divisive.
Two other standouts are the very different
observational documentaries The Big House
and Searching for Oscar. In the former, directors
Kazuhiro Soda, Terri Sarris and Markus
Nornes take a page from Frederic Wiseman’s
playbook and explore the front- and backstage
of Michigan Stadium, the largest football
arena in the US. The focus is directed
less at the on-pitch action or the players, and
more on the place as a living organism; on its
rites, rituals and traditions. It’s a fascinating
snapshot of a community institution. Meanwhile,
Octavio Guerra’s endearing portrait
of Oscar Peyrou is practically tailored for
Critics’ Week: its subject, the president of the
FIPRESCI prize, is a film critic who seemingly
doesn’t watch films. Instead, his (provocative)
opinions – which may be concealing a
secret – are based solely upon film posters
and the “energy” given out by titles and actors’
names. By turns touching and funny, the
film toys with the audience, who may question
how much of the action is staged. It also
gives plenty of food for thought regarding
criticism, the embedded truths at the core of
the critical community, and what is meant by
the subjective/objective viewer; which is to
say, it’s not to be missed.
Lastly, one experimental piece by Péter
Lichter and Bori Máté is worth singling out:
The Rub is a destabilising and at times intoxicating
mood piece that features decayed
and hand-painted 35mm and 16mm celluloid
strips of mainstream films, spliced together
over an hour. Eerie and oneiric, this artistic
endeavour works in sensory movements,
with colour schemes and sonic palettes
evolving, all to recordings of extracts from
Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Whether it leaves you
baffled, enlightened, or scrambling for some
eyedrops, it certainly won’t leave you indifferent.
Let the debates begin…
Berlin Critics’ Week Feb 14-22 Kino
Hackesche Höfe and various venues, full
programme at wochederkritik.de
FOLK
SUMMER
by Maxim Gorky
With his tableau of scenes and
network of relationships penned
in 1904, Gorky wanted to present
"the modern bourgeois-materialist
intelligentsia“. He shows a comfortable
society, which is no longer
sure of itself and which rumbles
with restlessness. A cataclysmic
turning point casts a shadow on
these summer folk and their restless
souls.
Director: Daniela Löffner
Premiere: February 23, 2018
upcoming dates with
English surtitles: March 01, 19
and 21, 2018
For tickets and more information
visit www.deutschestheater.de/en