Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Day 4

Only during a film festival would a three-movie-day be considered cooling it down. After over a dozen movies in three days, you need throttle down, take a deep breath, eat a decent meal, sleep in for at least one long morning. Yet, when your film festival is an online event, many of the symptoms of Festival Fatigue aren’t as readily apparent. There are no long waits in line, no running across town to catch the next screening, you don’t have to rely on junk food so much, the laptop/headphones set up isn’t such an assault on the senses. (And yes, I tried to stream the movies on my television, but the Berlinale media platform wouldn’t abide.) Nevertheless, cramming so many stories into your head in one day taxes the brain — there’s no way around it.

GUZEN TO SOZO (WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY), dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, photo © 2021 Neopa/Fictive

So Day Four was a three-movie-day, and it started with an excellent film in the Competition section: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY. This is another film that relies on the details and intricacies of conversations, that then build into life-changing moments for its characters. Here, Hamaguchi offers three separate short stories, each of which revolve around honesty, coming clean, and unburdening the soul. For better or worse, one or two characters in each chapter makes a life-changing choice to tell the truth, open themselves up, and become vulnerable. By the end, I had tears in my eyes.

Ironically, WHEEL OF FORTUNE AND FANTASY did what I wanted Day Three’s FOREST to do. It uses its short story structure to indulge in different tones, to move from heartbreak to humor, to take the viewer through a range of emotions. In the first story, a young woman finds out her friend is dating her former lover, so she decides to confront him and say all the things she’s been grappling with since the breakup. It’s a prickly, sometimes bitter confrontation that takes everyone through conflicting emotions and desires. The second chapter is centered around an attempted literary seduction of a college professor that stands as one of the funniest moments of the festival (so far). The final segment features a woman attending a high school reunion and trying to reconcile with her first true love. This closing chapter is a near perfect feat of storytelling, and gives such hope to the power of human connection, that it is truly uplifting without being manipulative or sentimental.

Instead of putting the strongest story first, the film builds upon itself, getting stronger as it goes along. It’s also subtle about its theme. In each story, when the character feels compelled to unburden themselves, it feels like a very genuine and honest moment. Whether the immediate positive or negative results of their confessions outweigh the long-term results is up for debate, but the larger point is clear: we’ll only move forward if we speak the truth.

GHASIDEYEH GAVE SEFID (BALLAD OF A WHITE COW), dir. Behtash Sanaeeha, Maryam Moghaddam, photo © Amin Jafari

A tragedy is a difficult genre to pull off. Sometimes, like in Shakespeare’s work, the word “tragedy” is right there in the title of the play. So you know it’s not going to end well. You know that someone, maybe everyone, is going to die at the end. The thrill of experiencing a staged tragedy isn’t in the delivery of an unexpected ending, it’s in feeling those dreaded pieces fall into place. Agonizing over the fateful moments when people make the wrong decision. Recognizing the all too human traits that make people act against their better judgement and precipitate their own demise. Oh, but for the grace of God…

The Competition feature BALLAD OF A WHITE COW, is one of those tragedies. Indeed, it starts with a tragic death that all but assures more suffering will follow. (That said, I won’t spoil the ending but I will get into some plot developments that could be considered spoilers, so consider yourself warned.) We meet Mina (played with incredible conviction by co-writer/director Maryam Moghaddam) as she says goodbye to her husband, right before he’s executed by the state. Not long afterward, Mina gets the horrendous news that new evidence came to light, and yes, her husband was wrongly executed. She’s told there will be money given to her because of this mistake, but what she keeps hearing is that her husband’s death, still, must have been God’s will. Cold comfort.

Then, a mysterious man named Reza (Alireza Sanifar) appears at her door to try and offer some more genuine help. He says he was an acquaintance of her husband’s but it’s soon revealed that he was one of the judges who issued the death sentence. Reza is completely hollowed-out by the role he played in an innocent man’s death. The reasoning of “God’s will” isn’t sitting well with him, either. Reza’s son is disgusted with him, too, and doesn’t understand why Iran insists on continuing to execute people. So, while Reza’s life is falling apart, he tries to redeem himself by putting Mina’s life back together. We all know, this is a doomed arrangement. He can’t hide his real identity from Mina for long, and the longer he tries, the more damaged he becomes.

When the conclusion arrives, it does feel inevitable, but it also comes across a little too neat for the messiness of the situation. The abruptness of what happens may have been intended to leave you feeling gobsmacked, which it does to a certain extent. But it also left me feeling like directors Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam may have tried to keep the audience from asking too many questions. Prior to these last few minutes, Sanaeeha and Moghaddam film it all with a cool eye and a steely reserve. The framing is practically a how-to course in visual storytelling. It makes a strong impact and a great case for repealing the death penalty in any country that still maintains the barbaric practice. Death only begets more death. Even Shakespeare knew that.

ROCK BOTTOM RISER, dir. Fern Silva, photo © Fern Silva

Day Four ended with my own little midnight movie screening of Fern Silva’s ROCK BOTTOM RISER, a film that won a Special Mention award in the Encounters section. Even though Silva has been working nearly fifteen years on a number of short films, this one is his debut feature and it does feel pretty special. It’s hard to classify, but it does fit into a certain category of experimental documentaries. It’s a collage of sound and footage, captured in, around, above and underneath the island state of Hawaii. It probes at its history, its status as a hub for astrology, and its unusual nature as an ever oozing and burbling mass of lava.

From the get go, ROCK BOTTOM RISER lets you know that this will be as much a psychedelic experience as a movie. Just before the titles boldly present themselves, we’re given the image of someone falling down, through the solid ground. That’s us. We’re going underwater, into space, into the volcanoes that are constantly charging the landscape in some bizarre ways. In two of the most memorable moments from the festival (so far), we visit a vape shop for an insane smoke and mirrors performance, and a poetry class that is teaching students about the Simon and Garfunkel song “I Am a Rock.” In terms of greatness, these moments can only be seen and heard to be fully understood.

At times, ROCK BOTTOM RISER reminded me of a more experimental Werner Herzog documentary. Fern Silva is after the kind of ecstatic truth that Herzog spoke about in his famous Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema. Specifically, declaration number five, which states: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” In ROCK BOTTOM RISER, Silva is, sometimes quite literally, trying to reveal the many strange strata of Hawaii. What’s remarkable is that while a lot of time is spent staring at magma, or at lasers shooting out from observatories, you come away feeling like you have a much deeper understanding of Hawaii than you ever had before. It’s an unimpeachable success.