Stage and Screen

Vogter (Competition / Denmark, Sweden / Director: Gustav Möller)

When a new prisoner arrives, amicable guard Eva (Sidse Babett Knudsen), changes. Her face hardens, her demeanor becomes distant and almost hostile. There is a secret, no doubt, and soon enough we learn of it. Vogter is an intimate drama set in the cold light and the bare corridors of prison that sets up its premise and remains there. Any character development or complexity are absent, acting, cinematography and direction are little more than one-tone. Topics such as guilt and redemption are hinted at, even spoken out but remain phrases. For a prison drama, the film is not really interested enough in the dynamics of this place, for a psychological drama, there ist too little psychology. The film sets up its conflict like an experiment and leaves it there. There is nothing beneath the surface, the stony or scared face of the guard, the aggression of the prisoner. When an event changes the power balance, Eva’s demeanor changes again. Completely, too easily. The hopeless claustrophobia of the long corridors soon becomes an empty image just as the tragic backstory is just a vehicle for an entirely predictable plot that asks no questions and leaves the audience unaffected.

Shambhala (Competition / Nepal, France, Norway, Hong Kong – China, Turkey, Taiwan, United States, Qatar / Director: Min Bahadur Bham)

In a remote Nepalese village, Pema marries three brothers, as is traditional. After the one she loves goes away on a long trade trip, rumours spread. When he does not return, the pregnant woman sets out a journey that becomes that of her life. Shambhala follows her at the speed of the world in which modern life is only hinted at in the watches the men wear and the teacher’s jacket. Religion, tradition and patriarchy unite in a web of expectations and assigned roles that are impossible to escape from. Stubbornly, dignified and seriously she follows her path wherever it might lead her, slowly taking control over her life, her family, her independence, while acknowledging the foundation tradition and culture has built. She accepts her life without giving it up. This quiet, magnificently photographed and exquisitely paced film, in which the natural and the mythical and mystical are only ever a short way apart, creates its own time and lives by its own speed brings alive a world entirely alien to most of its audience, its rules, its hardship – and celebrates the resilience and dignity of this, of all women. A late Competition highlight.

Mé el Aïn (Competition / Tunisia, France, Canada / Director: Meryam Joobeur)

The wound won’t heal. After two of her sons disappear to join ISIS, Aïcha cuts herself in the kitchen. The blood won’t stop – the film’s central image for the wounds left by violence. A piece of naturalistic surrealism ensues, a ghost tale in which everybody ends up haunted. Dark dirty flashback, a grayish ominous present, a kitschy summer hue – these are the three corners of the palette the film uses. Again and again, the objects and characters literally go out of focus, the camera lurks from behind or goes painfully close. There is no perspective to be found, stories emerge and and exposed as lies. The redness of blood waits everywhere, is even foreshadowed by the brothers‘ appearance. A film full of symbolism, a little heavy at times, a story not to explained in any way possible. There remain open ends, fractures in the narrative, open wounds. Another one of this Competition’s somewhat heavy-handed films but one that is compelling in its restless searching for a meaning in all this, this violence, all this death. A search, a sense of being lost the audience shares.