"The West remains lonely"

At the International Documentary and Animation Film Festival in Leipzig, the best films told about family ties

Relatives as authors of non-fiction films and their characters - the reality of one of the largest European documentary (plus animation section) film festivals - in Leipzig. As part of the Leipzig documentary programs, there were films that daughters made about mothers and fathers, granddaughters about grandmothers, grandchildren about an entire army of relatives. Several self-portraits, and non-professional ones: directors give a camera to their heroes, and they shoot video diaries. Several films about family dramas, the genre of which can be defined as “analytical reporting”: heroes experiencing difficult, sometimes unbearable life vicissitudes, allow the film’s authors to get incredibly close to them. The sphere of private, family relationships has already become perhaps the most important subject for modern documentary films.

Russian cinema is traditionally widely represented in Leipzig. The consequences of the change in fate of the countries participating in the Warsaw Pact are understood here as common to the former “Eastern” and former “Western” worlds. The festival, which was previously located in the GDR zone, with amazing tact, responsibility and, dare I say it, cordiality, introduces into its programs films that analyze human behavior in the space of civil vacuum (or, conversely, activity), and state pressure. What are the limits of independence in confrontation - or unity? - with a reality structured not by the individual’s own efforts, but by some external forces? And are there such limits? These themes are clearly heard in many films of the festival programs, including Russian ones - such as “Civil State” by Alina Rudnitskaya, “Upside Down, or Phantoms in a County Town” by Veniamin Tronin, “Vacation” by Marina Razbezhkina, “Yaptik-Khase” » Edgar Bartenev.

“Yaptik-Khase” received the main prize of the festival in the short documentary section. This is not the first time that a film festival cannot resist the simple story of a Nenets family setting off on a traditional seasonal journey from the “lower” world to the “upper” one. And the reason for this, I believe, is the sincere envy of the people of Western civilization, tortured by the external structure of the world. Envy of a “more simply” structured reality, the inhabitants of which seem to be satisfied with their level of comfort and are in complete emotional balance. The geography of their world is a continuation of their daily routine, a child's toy is a fragment of the tundra, and a means of transportation is born and dies along with family members. The charm of the film, perhaps, is that the public perceives its characters as aliens. As “others” who, due to the logic of the Universe unknown to us, find themselves on the same planet with the New York subway, a European confectionery, a non-national corrupt military group... And these “others” do not feel any curiosity about us - having a complete picture of the world and being inside the “landscape”, they do not strive for expansion, or generally for moving “outside”. It is curious that the story about an unearthly civilization on Earth is thought out and structured in the format of the current ethnographic genre, which in itself, after the fact, introduces a share of irony into the viewer’s impression. The festival also noted the refined cinematography of Alexander Filippov.

In the feature competition, the festival's main award was shared between two worthy contenders: the Israeli "Cemetery Club" (director Tali Shemekh) and the Austrian "Exile: Scenes from Home Filming" (Arash T. Riani).

"The Cemetery Club" is a canvas of Shakespearean proportions. A tragic conflict between the dependence of family members on each other and the ontological (existential) freedom and loneliness of everyone in this world. Director Tali Shemekh filmed the company of her grandmother Mini and Lena, the sister of Mini’s husband, for five years. Mini and Lena's middle-aged friends gather once a week on Saturdays in a shady part of the park adjacent to the Mount Herzl National Cemetery. They bring food in plastic containers, discuss the community charter - not without a scandal, arranging a series of theoretical discussions about modern politics, history, and current artistic impressions. The director also meets with his grandmothers outside of these gatherings, learning about their interpretations of human responsibility, memory, comfort, hunger, past, future, love (“...I don’t know what love is, and I didn’t need to know it; his family who became my husband, saved me in the Warsaw ghetto - that’s what I know... But Lena, my husband’s sister, had unrequited love, she knows what it is..."). Minya and Lena still speak Polish among themselves, just as they did during their childhood in Warsaw. Filming goes on year after year, and during this time those who recently walked busily along the path between the graves to the lawn - to the next picnic conference - pass away. (Minya to her granddaughter-director: “...You have no right to call the film “Cemetery Club”; we are not going to the cemetery, but away from it, in the park... Other children have decent professions, but you. ..”) At some point, behind the scenes, the man who once united Minya and Lena also passed away. At the end of the film, when the screen darkens and the credits fade, the girlfriends will continue to leisurely bicker about the nuances of perceiving the world. And one of their friends will read in Yiddish in memory of his friend: “...I loved you without words, without hoping for anything, timid, jealousy tormented me...” - and further in the text; I note that the lines were translated with brave literalism, which made the Russian-speaking part of the hall burst into tears. In general, Tali Shemekh managed to show a group of people from the Holocaust generation as they see each other themselves. There, in the silence of a picnic and among hellish memories.

The second part of the main prize was also awarded to a fundamentally family story. The documentary novel Exile: Scenes from Home Filming by Arash T. Riani is indeed a composite of home videos shot over two decades. More than twenty years ago, a large Iranian family (one of many) found itself scattered around the world. Arash T. Riani, the director of the film, came to Austria at the age of ten with his parents, who were expelled from the country. Part of the family ended up in the USA, part remained in Iran. For twenty years, relatives only exchanged video messages. But then the family members decide to meet - lost among the countless pilgrims in Mecca. In a hotel room. Secretly. Shot with a hand-held camera, without any visual flourishes, the scenes of a long-awaited family reunion reveal not only emotional turmoil, but also a complex civilizational shift. Some of the family grew up in the West and were inevitably changed from relatives who remained in the Islamic world. Penetrating into a small hotel room, we see a meeting of two civilizations, which at every second, however, find the opportunity to trust each other, to find explanations for conventions and quirks. The related confusion consumes everything.

Europeans, who are celebrating this film not at the first festival, are again jealous that someone’s family protoplasm functions so positively. They, the Europeans, as they themselves admit, have lost this secret. “The West remains lonely” was the end of the commentary on the film in the festival catalogue. And the festival’s motto is aimed at testing (or correcting?) our civic and aesthetic sense and sounds like this: “Can we trust what we are shown?”

Marina DROZDOVA, Leipzig - Moscow