Four documentaries at the 75th Berlinale

The documentaries spanning all sections of the Berlinale have always been interesting and wide ranging.  One gets a sense of how the “creative treatment of actuality”, in John Grierson’s always handy description, has fared from one year to another.  The flexibility of the genre is palpable in the four documentaries I saw these past days: The first-person historical compilation All I Had Was Nothingness; two observational documentaries about war-torn Ukraine, Timestampand Time to the Target; and an American essay film, Evidence.
 

In 1985 I had the opportunity to view the complete Shoah – the nine-and-a-half-hour oral history of the Holocaust made over 12 years by Claude Lanzmann. It was an experience I never forgot, not the least because the screening over several days took place in the very city where the logistics of the hecatomb were planned and implemented. Also striking was that Shoah did not show any historical footage, à la Night and Fog (1956); it only featured interviews with survivors and perpetrators, and B-roll, some of which was obtained with hidden cameras. Or, using deception, as Lanzmann wryly described in a Berlinale appearance in the 2010s, for the screening of The Last of the Unjust.

For Shoah’s 40the anniversary, the festival premiered in Berlinale Special Je n’avais que le néant: Shoah par Lanzmann / All I Had Was Nothingness. Guillaume Ribaud, a French photographer whose interest in history led to writing books on dark chapters of the 20^th century, was given access to Lanzmann’s archive by his widow Dominique, who is also one of the two producers. Ribot reviewed over 220 hours of outtakes and materials not used in Shoah and his last Holocaust project The Four Sisters (2018). The editing is organized around Lanzmann’s 2009 memoir Le lièvre de Patagonie (The Patagonian Hare, trans. 2012), which Ribot reads as a first-person voiceover.  The narration cleverly works at two levels: it is a referential text about the complicated research over a decade to find the interviewees; but it also comments about the challenges of a project whose point of departure was the “All I had was nothingness” of the title, coming straight from Lanzmann.  The interplay between the expository mode and the self-referential approach to its conditions of production and ethical dilemmas makes All I Had Was Nothingness a superb coda to Shoah.  The documentary also unfolds as road movie of sorts, since much of the material selected is of Lanzmann driving to interview his subjects, talking to the camera about the peculiar nature of this work, the presentation of “the horror, the horror”.   

Screened in the Forum Time to the Target and Timestamp, written and directed by Vitaly Mansky and Kateryna Gornostai are complementary takes on the impact of the 3-year war Ukraine is fighting against Russia. In both films the approach is cinéma verité, never easy to implement, requiring time, timing, patience and more than a modicum of luck. Mansky crafts a 3-hour love letter to Lviv, his hometown, relatively far from the battlefront. With a very small team and a camera both inquisitive and respectful, with an eye for details, 

Time to the Target is a mosaic of people, old and young, military and civilians, maimed soldiers and priests, in a wide range of situations captured over a year. Death, destructions and funerals are regularly brought from the background to provide narrative continuity and a visual and sound frame. Interviews are few and far between, well selected and edited to seize the fundamentals of a permanent state of war and its impact on ordinary people.  A profound sense of beauty - physical and spiritual - permeates the film, creating an immersive experience for the non-Ukrainian audience, that generates empathy.  In this sense, Time to the Target functions as a strategy of truth, showing the world the resilience and determination of a beleaguered city, a synecdoche for the whole country. 
 

Timestamp has a similar impetus, but its focus is one year in the life of several schools far and close to the battlefront. The vérité approach serves it well, and it shares with Time to the Target a similar sensibility to beauty in its physical and spiritual dimensions.  Here, the teachers as beacons of strength and normality ground the story, fulfilling a patriotic mission, the preservation of the nation’s history and culture. 
 
Viewing these two films, I was reminded of another Ukrainian documentary, the semi-experimental Rule of Two Walls(2024), directed by the Ukrainian-American David Gutnik. It captures the experience of war as lived and thought through by several artists precisely in Lviv and Kviv.  One recognizes, a patriotic sensibility looking to consolidate a national identity threatened by an imperial invader.
 

Finally, my two cents about Evidence, a well-crafted example of the essay film, written and directed by Lee Anne Schmitt, a filmmaker based in Altadena, and probably affected by the devastating Easton fire of a month ago.    
 
The essay film has gained wide recognition as a specific, if eminently plastic, mode of film practice. It is a hybrid that is neither “purely fiction, nor documentary, nor art film, but incorporates aspects of all these modes”, as noted by Nora Alter in The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (2018, p.4). From a purely film history angle, Evidence is designed as a piece of agit-prop, in the mold of the Soviet Russian filmmakers of the 1920s.
 

Schmitt’s subject is the role played by the John M. Olin Foundation, set up by the chemical company Olin Corporation, in the financing of conservative institutions and programs in the U.S.  The director builds the air-tight narrative characteristic of the agit-prop, by laying a first-person narrator over images purposefully unrelated to the topic. This editing strategy is visually arresting, in the style of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, but the downside is that it preaches to the choir.  If the counterpoint to Evidence had been a documentary about the Ford or the Soros foundations, leaders in funding progressive causes, the effect would have been the same: another choir, similar impact. Lee Anne Schmitt’s documentary is exhibit one that ideologically-driven projects – whatever its politics – face limitations.
 

The 75th Berlinale - February 13 - 23, 2025

Thanks to an invitation from filmmaker Manuel Antín, then the director of the Argentine Film Institute, who had appointed me to the federal film rating commission, I attended the Berlinale for the first time in February 1985. Berlin was still divided, and the festival was an instrument of West Germany’s soft power in a Cold War that had no end in sight: the Berlin Wall was a stark, brutal reality. I saw it for the first time from a platform in West Berlin.  It was the site, though not the filming location, where Wim Wender would set Der Himmel über Berlin / Wings of Desire (1987) two years later, in present day Potsdamer Platz, then a mined no-man’s land separating the outer and inner walls of the Mauer.

Long introduction to note that I have been coming to the festival as accredited press since its 35^th edition until today, the 75^th.   I missed a handful of times. If it were not for the hundreds of films from all over the world seen over more than three decades, my teaching would have been provincial.

Every year it is the same viewing routine: each day, three films in the Competition, and one or two in the other sections, plus press conferences with filmmakers in attendance. Film heaven.

The lights go off in the theater, the screening begins, and I am a tabula rasa ready to be won over by the magic of the movies. It is the best crash course in film esthetics that I can recommend, to actually see how film techniques work and how the dialogue with life unfolds in the dark (paraphrasing Scorsese’s 2013 essay “Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema”, a staple in all my classes).
 

It never fails that very soon the films begin a conversation with one another, or engage genres, auteurs, national cinemas, and the best case of all, with film history. 
 
One thread in half the 19 titles in the Competition is a focus on the nature and function of womanhood, as it relates to the protagonists themselves, their duties and desires, but also to their role as wives and mothers.  
 

In some cases, it is literally a case of paging Dr. Freud. Based on a novel, the British Hot Milk, about a domineering mother, afflicted by a mysterious illness(Fiona Shaw), and her caregiver daughter (Emma Mackey), written and directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, traces the self-awareness process of the latter, through a trip from Ireland to Spain. The changes are triggered by a lesbian attraction to a bisexual beauty (Vicky Krieps). The climax is a showdown between mother and daughter that leaves the audience in the dark (literally a black screen is the final image) about the success or failure of their separation. 
 

In the Swiss - German Mother’s Baby, Johanna Moder explores the increasing hysteria of Julia (Marie Leuenberger), a young orchestra conductor who conceives a child via IVF and is unable to take care of the baby (she forgets to feed him, drops him to the floor), to the alarm of her loving husband (Hans Löw).  Mother’s Baby systematically manipulates the relatable fears of any new mother into a horror story from the perspective of a protagonist becoming increasingly paranoid. The turning point in this descent to madness is Julia’s belief that the baby has been switched at birth; and the climax, the fantasy that it died at birth, is stored in a refrigerator and needs rescue. The last image is the ultimate nightmare: Julia carries the dead baby in her arms. That she is an unreliable narrator does not soften the emotional impact of this unflinching description of post-partum depression carried to its extreme.
 

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, a U.S. drama written and directed by Mary Bronstein, effectively mixes the conventions of horror with melodrama. It is a psychological thrill ride about a therapist (Rose Byrne) whose husband is away on a business. She is taking care of their young daughter (heard but not shown on camera) whose mysterious illness may kill her. A dizzying crescendo of complications, including the testy confrontations with a fellow therapist, played with relish by Conan O’Brien, lead to another hard-hitting climax, but a split-second intervention of providence makes the case for motherhood as a redemptive force. 

 

Interestingly, two small scale family dramas – the German Was Marielle weiss/ What Marielle Knows, written and directed by Frédéric Hambalek, and the Argentine El mensaje / The Message, co-written and directed by Iván Fund, are stories about young girls whose mysterious spiritual powers impact their families in unforeseen ways.  

What Marielle Knows is based on the conceit that as a result of a punch, the daughter (newcomer Laeni Geiseler) of sophisticated bourgeois parents can “see” and “hear” what they are doing at all times (excellent the renowned Julia Jentsch and Felix Kramer). Briskly plotted and edited, the film asks the question: is transparency in a marriage 100% desirable, or should there be a space for the “noble lie”?  The film works partially as a morality tale with an edifying ending, and also as the portrait of a couple functioning in a sterile environment, nicely conveyed by sets and locations.  

 

In the Argentine El mensaje, directed by Iván Fund, the conceit is that 12-year-old Anika (Anika Bootz, also a newcomer) can speak to animals and her two guardians (veteran actors Mara Bestelli and Marcelo Subiotto), travelling in a modest motor home through provincial towns, set up a business delivering messages to owners about their dead or missing pets. Shot in exquisite black and white, with a lovely jazz score, the film provides no context, avoids social commentary and eschews an ethnographic approach. It slowly reveals who these people are, keeping the question, "Are they con artists?", unsolved until the revealing last line.  This road movie is in conversation with Fellini’s La Strada (1954), not only in the trope of the journey – geographical and symbolic – but also for the role played by love and grace in the road of life.
 

The Brazilian entry O último azul / The Blue Trail, co-written and directed by Gabriel Mascaro, is also a road movie, and, remarkably, one that sidesteps the legacy of Cinema Novo.  Unlike Walter Salles’ Central Station (1998), rooted in an understanding of Brazil shaped by that legacy, O último azul’s point of departure is a science fiction premise:  the government (slight jabs at the Bolsonaro administration of a few years ago) confines the elderly in a housing colony to save economic resources. In her late seventies, Tereza (Denise Weinberg), a resilient factory worker in the Amazonia, is forced to retire and ordered to check into the facility, far from family and friends. Her final wish is to fly in an airplane, so she defies the government edict and flees.

What follows are picaresque self-contained episodes, unfolding along the Amazon and its tributaries, providing a mosaic of the Brazilian society. At the end, Tereza meets a free-spirited preacher her age (Cuban actress Miriam Socarrás), the owner of a boat, who knows how to beat the system, and invites her to share the adventure. It’s a fairy-tale happy ending, a utopian solution for two feisty old women who have lost none of the zest for living. In old age ... carpe diem.

 

In a flight of historical imagination, I can picture Sigmund Freud at the Berlinale Palast this festival, scratching his forehead, still wondering: "Was will das Weib?"

Palmas (2024): a documentary short about Los Angeles

The rewards of toiling in the teaching trenches for many years sometimes appear in unexpected ways. Such was the email from Aric Lopez, a CSUN student who took two of my classes during the fateful pandemic season. I wrote a letter of recommendation for USC in Fall 2021, but lost track of his endeavors.   

Fast forward to this email from December 13, 2024: "I feel that this film might resonate with you, as I took inspiration from some of the filmmakers you focused on in class such as Agnès Varda and Patricia Cardoso. I'm very proud of it, and I think the influence of attending a school like CSUN helped shape this documentary and its particular lens on Los Angeles. Lastly, you wrote my letter of recommendation to USC, so I hope this film is evidence that I have fulfilled the promise of your recommendation".

I wrote a review of his beautiful short Palmas, as if I had pre-screened it for a festival. Here it is, hoping that this work of love finds an audience.

"USC graduate film student Aric Lopez has made a very polished autobiographical essay using palm trees, non-native plants in Southern California, to interrogate his own life and roots in Los Angeles. 

 
It is an impressive film in its technical aspects, notably camera work, sound design and music, showcasing extensive research in local archives.  It is divided in three blocks by simple, elegant and expressive black and white drawings: “The Transplant Tree”, “The Three Communities” and “Native Angelenos”.
 
Interestingly, Palmas struggles to overcome a storytelling dilemma, the result, I think, of a strong drive to make a longer film, wishing to encompass other subjects to bring a larger picture of life in Los Angeles.  The palm tree is a metaphor for the director’s self in the first seven minutes, with footage of various species intercut with interviews about the history and meaning of the botanically named "arecaceae",  integral to the familiar and mythical landscape of the city. A story of invasion, if I may.

The short then takes takes a surprising turn into chapters of LA history – the building of Dodger Stadium and the Spanish missions  – to connect this foreign species with the natives and Hispanics, seen as firmly implanted in its geography. These communities are the natives displaced by waves of English speakers. 

Thus, the native/non-native equation described in the first block is upended in the second and third, where the resilience of Indians and Spanish-speakers is as tenacious as the acclimated and tough palm trees. The displacement of the Mexican Americans of Chavez Ravine and Gabrieleño-Tongva Indian tribe in the San Gabriel Mission, as told to the camera by their modern-day descendants and archival materials, is the subject of the longer documentary pushing to be born from Aric Lopez' creative vision.
 

The writer/director’s rootedness in Los Angeles, described as the interplay between the outside and the inside, with the palm tree as a metaphor for both, is reaffirmed at the end of the film. Closing with a lovely shot of three tall palm trees blowing against a blue sky, the writer/director softly concludes that he now understands his rootedness in the hidden history of displaced Angelenos. The paradox of Los Angeles has been captured in a poetic manner".
 
 

Documentary gems: The 2024 World Poll of "Senses of Cinema"

I have been reviewing documentary submissions for the Social Impact Media Awards for a few years. It is an annual competition run by the non-profit organization SIMA Studios that also curates documentaries and media projects through its online platform.

Here are five documentaries, richly deserving promotion and a worldwide audience. The January 2025 issue of  "Senses of Cinema", number 112, published my selection.

                       Black Snow 

                    Dir. Alina Simone, U.S., 2024

A profile of the Russian eco-activist Natalia Zubkova, begun in 2019. Black Snow more than meets the challenges of the observational mode about finding story form: it is constructed with bits and parts, including home movies, Zubkova’s own journalistic footage, archival materials and elegant animation. The two narrative blocks are skillfully integrated: first comes the work of a citizen journalist, recording the damage of the open-pit coal mines in her Siberian hometown in a successful blog. Then, the viral impact of her denunciations that leads to her exile in Georgia.

Black Snow is staged for the camera – Flaherty style – to make the key intellectual and dramatic points effectively, like its opening scene with Zubkova recording what she thinks may be her last blog, a chronicle of a death announced. It has many similarities with the remarkable Navalny (Daniel Roher, 2022), another political film aiming at the larger picture of Putin’s Russia from the testimony of one courageous individual.  

 

                    Emergent City 

                    Dir. Kelly Anderson, Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, U.S., 2024

Made over a decade by veteran filmmakers Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, Emergent City is a triumph of observational documentary. It captures the conflict in the Sunset Park riverfront of Brooklyn between its traditional working-class community and the developers of the Industry City complex of decayed industrial buildings.

An X-ray of the centrifugal forces at play triggered by gentrification, the film assembles an extraordinarily detailed world of characters and situations, carefully edited to build a powerful narrative that never loses sight of what makes a neighborhood alive.
 

                    I Hope This Helps! 

                    Dir. Daniel Freed, U.S., 2024

I Hope This Helps! is a 50-minute clever gimmick disguised as a documentary, à la Exit Through the Giftshop (Banksy, 2010). Entertaining and sleek, the film demurely asks if A.I. is good or bad for humans. It does so with a fun story about its writer/director Daniel Freed “building” a relationship with the A.I. program Bard to make this documentary. 

The comedy springs from the stilted answers the program provides, rendered as a fuzzy screen creature with a British-accented female voice. This one-joke film is predicated on – but coyly avoiding – the non-sentient nature of artificial intelligence.  It milks the gag cleverly, expanding on its absurd “reasoning” and structural incapacity to understand context and nuances.  

 

                    Rule of Two Walls 

                    Dir. David Gutnik, Ukraine, 2024

Combining a semi-experimental poetic format with interviews to show the devastation of war on the home front, like the German/Armenian Landschaft (Daniel Kötter, 2023), Rule of Two Walls is an intelligent documentary about the experience of war as lived and thought through by several artists in Kyiv and Lviv, shot between February and November of 2022, the first months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

It works remarkably well as a war record (images of corpses are particularly haunting, à la Night and Fog); a survey of ideas about national, cultural and religious identity, as culled from insights provided by the artists interviewed; a reflection on the art of documentary; and, ultimately, a celebration of the human spirit.

The self-reflexive aspect of Rule of Two Walls – the strategy to be used when being bombed – is particularly to guide a filmmaker in the craft of filming and editing situations of upheaval. It movingly records the grit and endurance of a proud people and their culture refusing to surrender to a neighbour’s imperial designs.
 

                    The Sixth 

                    Dir. Andrea Nix Fine, Sean Fine, U.S., 2024

The Sixth is a gripping record of January 6, 2021, the day a mob entered the Capitol building by violent means, disrupting the electoral certification process of president-elect Joe Biden. It weaves interviews with two policemen, their chief, a House representative, a photographer covering the scene, and an administrative employee. Eloquently and with emotional restraint, in polished interviews, these six witnesses meticulously recount the day in chronological order. 

The documentary deftly combines footage from bodycams, cell phones, security cameras and television news, strictly from the point of view of those defending the Capitol from the assault.

The Sixth is a chronicle, not an explanation, of the fateful January 6. It interestingly eschews a voiceover narrator, thus providing an unmediated immersive experience. A few reenactments make it flow organically. A recurring diagram of the Capitol and its environs shows with dots where the interviewees were during specific incidents, so that the viewers can see in real time what the assault on the Bastille must have looked like in 1789.  
 

                    We Will Dance Again 

                    Dir. Yariv Mozer, Israel, 2024

We Will Dance Again is the Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1956) of our times. It provides a brutal account of October 7, 2023, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Chronicling the Hamas terrorist attack on the Nova Music Festival, it combines harrowing cellphone footage from young Israelis attending the concert with the terrorists’ bodycams and security cameras.
 
This remarkable documentary captures in real time, from multiple witnesses, what it was to find oneself in a split second on a journey through hell. The audience is literally made to share first the incomprehension, then the incredulity and finally the terror of the slaughter. 
 
Those interviewed become fully-fleshed characters in the documentary – with a background story illustrated by comments and photos of a happier time. It is a counterpoint to that day’s videos, the most haunting perhaps is the now well-known of the young man who kept throwing back to Hamas the grenades lobbed at his group in a shelter. Like Homer in the Iliad, writer/director Yariv Mozer gives each one individuality and the full measure of a life.
 
 

Source: https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2025/world-poll/world-poll-2024-part-2/#19