Walter Salles, whose international
recognition began in Berlin in 1998, with the Golden Bear to Central Station, met Jia Zhang-Ke
precisely at this Berlinale, when the Chinese filmmaker, a graduate from the
Beijing Film Academy, showed his first feature film Pick Pocket (1997). Their
friendship and love of cinema has crystallized in this remarkable
collaboration, whose seeds originated at the Mostra de Sao Paulo in 2007, with
a Jia Zhang-Ke retrospective.
Explaining that Jia Zhang-Ke was shooting his next project, Salles
introduced the documentary and had a warm Q&A with the audience in the
packed Cinestar 7, in the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz. And for the next 105
minutes, the public was treated to a very traditional documentary format –
expository, no stylistic flourishes or voiceover narrator – made extraordinary
by the quiet, unprepossessing personality of the Chinese director and film
clips from a remarkable body of work – Platform
(200), Still Life (2006) and A Touch of Sin (2013) – portraits about the
‘non-holders of power in a time of confused values and national malaise’, as
Jia Zhang-Ke notes. 
The idea behind the film is to see
how the director’s memories and experiences of growing up in Fenyang, a town in
Shanxi province, northern China, shaped his films. Salles follows the filmmaker through
courtyard apartments and busy streets in this shabby town, talking to family
and friends, and superimposes scenes of the films shot on those locations. By remembering the minutia of life in remote
from the centers of power on the coast, Jia paints the turmoil of China’s last
forty years – from the Cultural Revolution and its horrific toll, to party
capitalism, globalization and their cost – from the perspective of ordinary
folks. The voice of the director talking
to the camera and over his films not only document China’s crisis of culture
and clash of values – like his cinema - but is also a celebration of his, and
Salles, passion for cinema. The gift of
this documentary is to make us travelers to China and come closer to understand
how in the hands of gifted filmmakers the local can reveal the universal.
A family’s trove of home movies
will remain just that – records of people’s special moments in their lives –
unless they can transcend its ‘home-movieness’ thanks to the artistic touch of
the director. Which is what happens in
the supremely entertaining three-hour long Iraqi
Odyssey. An example of the first
person documentary – à la Michael Moore, Ross McElwee and Alan Berliner, to
cite US directors – Iraqi Odyssey combines
a wealth of home movies, photos, interviews with family members scattered all
over the world, animated maps and archival footage, under the first person
account provided humorously by Samir, its Iraq-born Swiss director. This subjective approach gives a great flavor
to the film because it is grounded in a specific perspective, that of the upper
class professional bourgeoisie in Iraq, a narrative not commonly heard in the
media. The story of this multi
generation family spans from the Ottoman Empire, the partition of the Middle
East after WWI, the impact of WWII, the takeover by the Baath Party in the
1950s, the Sadam Hussein dictatorship and the US intervention in Iraq. No stones are left unturned in this chronicle
of a highly articulate family in the diaspora who enjoy a rendez-vous in
Switzerland in the climax of the film.
And as one of the patriarchs says at the end, Samir’s family is, on a
small scale, an example of how multiple cultures, religions and languages can
coexist. 
I wish the emerging filmmakers
in my documentary class could see Iraqi
Odyssey: it would help them see that by putting together their family
history they can capture the larger threads of history. The director and many in his family made the
trip to Berlin to talk about their adventuresome lives in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt,
Libya, the Arab Emirates, Switzerland and the US, while the Iraqi and Swiss
ambassadors to Germany were called to the stage before the packed screening as
a gesture of good will.
With great interest I also saw the latest films of Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, titans of the New German Cinema of the late 60s/early 70s, still active filmmakers, but maybe with their best work behind: the small scale drama Everything Will Be Fine and the period biopic Queen of the Desert. James Franco is the protagonist of the first one and has a supporting role in the other. The press has skewered them. You have to be tough in this business of filmmaking.
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