The Romanians won again

Results of the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival

The 50th anniversary International Documentary Film and Animation Festival has ended in Leipzig. Judging by its age and location, it is easy to understand that it was founded on the territory of the GDR, but over the past almost two decades it has turned into the largest European forum for documentary films.

This year the festival presented impressive main and national competitions, numerous special programs and retrospectives. Russian documentary films were represented in the jury, perhaps even more decisively than in the programs. Viktor Kosakovsky, a St. Petersburg resident and a very significant figure in modern European documentary cinema, worked on the main jury. Russia was represented on the jury of the “New Generation of Documentary” competition in the person of Boris Karadzhev, a famous analyst, director and professor at VGIK.

The main competition featured “Mother” by Pavel Kostomarov and Antoine Cattin. Kostomarov and Kattin are already a brand, a brand of open documentary drama, filmed super-emotionally, very close to the heroes. St. Petersburg resident Kostomarov and Swiss Kattin, who lives in St. Petersburg, create a kind of documentary novels, the action of which is embedded in the bone-crushing thicket of life.

The heroine of the film is the mother of nine children. They live somewhere in the rural expanses of Russia, where they fled from their evil Central Asian husband, she works as a milkmaid. There was such a children's game “Freeze!”: when this call from the driver is heard, the rest of the participants must freeze in the positions in which the call caught them. So in the film “Mother” it’s the other way around - where the heroine appears, it’s as if the cry “Otomite!” is heard. - everything and everyone comes to life, life begins to burst into full swing, hell turns... I don’t know whether what’s happening should be called heaven, but existing sins are forgiven by themselves. The brand of Kostomarov and Kattin’s films is also in the fact that all the characters constantly swear, that is, their native language sounds powerfully and uninhibitedly, the language of their loud life, devoid of both the snobbery of civilization and, indeed, many of its norms. To be honest, it seemed that “Mother” would receive one of the main awards at the festival, it had so much full-blooded power. But only a prize was given, which was formulated as follows: “For an exceptional Eastern European film.”

I wanted to understand why a truly excellent film did not become the main prize - it is precisely this kind of decision that opens the concept of the festival. Reflections and a careful examination of the competition program led to the conclusion that here in Leipzig, the analytical approach of the authors to what is happening on the screen comes to the fore. The content of films is the existence of social existence. And the word “existence” here, contrary to the doctrine of unknowability, implies a hidden or explicit analytical position, a vector of understanding, the presence of a conclusion. And this Cartesian approach prevails over, say, private or political histories, or historical studies. Why not? Each major festival truly articulates its position through the entire design of its own programs. And it was not for nothing that the opening of the festival was partly reminiscent of a forum of philosophers: the speeches were not short and aimed at finding the logic of the incomprehensible being.

Indicative in this sense was the special program of the festival under the intriguing title “Lost Paradise Found.” The entrances and exits to nirvana, no matter how anyone thinks about them, this is the approximate meaning of the program, which included three-hour and two-minute films. One way or another, comprehending our attempts to cognize the bliss of reality, which does not put pressure on us, but, on the contrary, gives in and submits. A very subtle text became the introduction to the program: “Today the concept of Heaven is interpreted as prosperity or abundance, accessible for money, or as the relative confidence in a pleasant everyday life without burdensome thoughts about the future. And this is a sign of our imperfection - it’s a shame that we began to admit it so easily. However, the Longing for Perfection does not leave humanity - and we will try to trace the different trajectories of its achievement." A wonderful program about various experiments with psychotropic drugs: from LSD and alcohol to religious hopes. The most powerful film, the three-hour saga “Gaming, Gods and LSD” by Peter Mettler (Canada-Switzerland), told about the daily life of a drug addict with many years of experience using LSD and his mother, a Holocaust victim who survived a concentration camp. The film took nine years to film.

And the winner of the festival and the winner of the Golden Dove was the Romanian film “Understand Me Correct” by debutante Adina Pentilla. The film takes place in a psychiatric clinic. One of the characters explores the theory of radioactive processes that will stop the rain. With a high degree of probability, he believes that he will receive a Nobel Prize for this. But his friend - also a patient of the clinic - doubts the correctness of the developments; he himself conducts discussions with the Creator. Their third friend carries stones; and so on for forty years. All three are endowed with an unfailing sense of self-esteem. The film, on the one hand, is made with classical care. But its fundamental difference from paintings of “similar issues” is that it does not have the traditional approach in such cases - looking at someone else’s life from the position of an imperialist who cannot hide his arrogance towards colonial culture. Like “what are those weird blue beads those people wearing in banana peels are making.” So, there is no such thing. The author's position reveals an absolute sense of anthropological equality in the director. Therefore, the film was perceived as a tale of an alternative reality, and its director was called “able to conjure and summon spirits.”

The second most important award was given to the German film “Children. How time flies..." by Thomas Hayes. Probably, it is even the first for the festival concept, since it very harshly and using the example of a family that was filmed over ten years, analyzes the way of thinking of a person of “Ossi” culture, a person who grew up in the socialist camp. The mother of two sons was filmed eight years ago, when her sons were just children (and she became a mother early, when she herself was not yet twenty). Looking at photographs of the kids, she then quite accurately predicted their future - one would always run into problems, the other would avoid them. That's pretty much what happened, at least for now. The Category of Time unfolds before our eyes and demonstrates the error of an entire social system and, even more tragically, the confusion in the minds of people who grew up and lived within this very system. Confusion that was difficult for them to avoid. As a result, they do not know what real responsibility for their lives is, not to mention responsibility for the lives of their own children. The main character - mother - works as a trolleybus driver all her life; Such an education was offered to her when she did not know where to go. The film, frankly speaking, is depressing in many ways. And with such expressive city landscapes filmed today and eight years ago on the former eastern territory - note that the filming of the past surprisingly accurately reproduces the mood of our streets in the year, let's say, 1978.

The anniversary festival has decisively expanded its scope towards a forum on co-production. These are a kind of “readings” during which the fate of documentary production is decided - authors and producers meet with potential customers and “money givers”. Unfortunately, Eastern Europe is ending for such forums in Romania and Ukraine, so we can only be observers and envious people, since we do not yet have such open forms of searching for (and finding) funding for documentary projects. And how nice it is to be in the midst of such activity: people freely and freely delegate to society, represented by television channels and interested producers, their rights to express concern in the form of documentary films. Projects most often concern the fight against hidden and explicit prohibitions that are imposed on people in a variety of ways at different times in different cultures. Perhaps the most radical of the submissions is the film “My Friend,” which “will be a study in the form of very personal essays on the history of world masturbation as one of the most severe taboos of European civilization...”

Marina DROZDOVA, Leipzig - Moscow