The 49th San Sebastian International Film Festival continues. Contrary to expectations

The 49th San Sebastian International Film Festival continues. Contrary to expectations, its competition program, although uneven, was not so badly affected by festival competition and the global crisis. From San Sebastian - ANDREY Ъ-PLAKHOV.
The most critical arrows went to “The Gray Zone” - built on facts and diaries of the history of the 12th Sonderkommando. This was the name of one of the Auschwitz units, formed from Jews: they were recruited to help in the extermination of their fellow tribesmen for small benefits. Director Tim Blake Nelson assembled a group of top-notch Hollywood actors led by Harvey Keitel and played out a heartbreaking drama where there is not a moment of brightness. Perhaps this drama would have been shocking if the director had not piled up massacres and mountains of mutilated corpses with such persistence and turned into stupid statistics (which is what the idea of concentration camps was based on). The film, conceived as a hard-won author's statement and a polemical gesture in relation to opportunistic fairy tales like "Schindler's List" and "Life is Beautiful", caused a heart-rending whistle in the audience. No one, however, dared to leave the screening early, and this is precisely why they were annoyed - the professionals wandered out of the cinema pale and extremely angry.
But the most warmly received was the new product of Danish Dogma - the film “Truly Human” directed by Ake Sandgren. A lonely girl abandoned by her parents invents a friend-interlocutor, and he materializes in the form of a strange creature emerging, like a golem, from the rubble of a destroyed house. The creature does not speak any language and only imitates natural human reactions. Golem wants to be a real person at all costs, but the majority around him does not believe in the alien’s naivety and good intentions: he is mistaken either for a Balkan or Russian refugee, or for a vile pedophile. As a result, the overly gentle creature leaves this world, but manages to surprise and teach people something, and also allows the girl who invented it to survive.
This modern fairy tale was filmed in full accordance with the canons of Dogma. Lars von Trier invented Dogma in the same way that a girl invented a golem, just for fun and to give others the opportunity to destroy their brainchild with impunity. "Real Man" is the first film with the Dogma certificate, where realism is completely destroyed in favor of pure fantasy. Which, we note, only benefits the method.
Another picture, thoroughly permeated with fantasy, came from Holland: it is called “Magonia” - after the name of a mythical country like Atlantis. The action moves from an Arab town to the African desert, and from there to a Norman port village. Three short stories tell about the thirst for love and the flight of dreams. Critics have called this unexpected relapse into poetic cinema one of the biggest surprises of the year.
The surprise turned out to be even greater for those who knew the Georgian director Tato Kotetishvili, who died in exile. The film was shot partly in Georgia by his friend Ineke Smits and is dedicated to the memory of Tato. The greatest, although unplanned, resonance was caused by the first short story, where a young muezzin sends paper airplanes to his girlfriend from the roof of the mosque - a kind of Islamic message of love.
After the events in America, many cinematic images and events acquire new meanings. Thus, in San Sebastian, the International Federation of Critics (FIPRESCI) awarded Iranian director Jafar Panahi, whose “Circle” (Dayreh) was recognized as the best film of the year in world cinema. And just recently, in the spring, Panahi was arrested at the New York airport for allegedly violating the visa regime and deported from the country in handcuffs. Probably, if law enforcement services showed such ardent vigilance where necessary, planes would be hijacked exclusively in Hollywood movies.
By the way, Panahi was almost deprived of the honorary prize by Russian film critics - members of FIPRESCI. Almost all of them voted for "The Pianist" (La pianiste) by Michael Haneke as the leader of the year. This was enough for the Austrian film to take second place, but it still lost first place to the Iranian film with a minimal margin of votes.

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 177 dated September 28, 2001, p. 13

Authors:

Andrey Plakhov

Dogma was invented to destroy