Berlinale Film Festival 2021, Industry Event, Day 5

With Daniel Brühl’s NEXT DOOR and Dominik Graf’s FABIAN being geoblocked away from German laptops, that left only two Competition tiles to be screened on the final day of the Industry Event. The first was Alonso Ruizpalacios’s A COP MOVIE.

UNA PELICULA DE POLICIAS (A COP MOVIE), dir Alonso Ruizpalacios, photo © No Ficción

I haven’t seen Ruizpalacios’s previous features MUSEO and GÜEROS, so I had little expectation going into this one. About the only thing I knew was that A COP MOVIE had already been sold to Netflix — and, given the description in the press materials, that it was, in one form or another, a documentary film.

These two details make perfect sense together. Since Netflix first gained popularity around two decades ago, the documentary film has undergone a renaissance. Films that were once (maybe) seen at select arthouse cinemas in a few cities, but more likely on public television, were now available on demand. The phrase, “Did you see that documentary on…” is now a cliché. Documentaries are so popular nowadays that Netflix announced that every controversial murder since the dawn of the twentieth century is going to get its own five-part series. So yeah, it makes perfect sense that a documentary about police in Mexico City would find a welcome home at the streaming giant.

But as you already may have heard, A COP MOVIE isn’t your standard doc (some mid-point movie spoilers follow). The film starts out as the kind of reenactment-heavy crime film that has been used to effective ends since before Errol Morris’s A THIN BLUE LINE turned it into an investigative tool. At first we’re introduced to a Mexico City cop by the name of Teresa as she’s forced to deliver a baby because all of the city’s ambulances are busy elsewhere. Then we meet her parter in both work and life, Montoya, who’s struggling to keep it together amidst widespread corruption and not drown himself with alcohol. We think these cops are playing themselves in the reenactments (though there are a few clues that this may not be the case). Then a funny thing happens. The lights in the living room go out. The fourth wall collapses. The film crew enters. We’re then introduced to the actors who played the real cops in the reenactments — Mónica Del Carmen as Theresa and Raúl Briones as Montoya — as well as the real Theresa and Montoya. The movie then steps back to learn about the process the actors went through to prepare for their roles and understand their characters. This includes attending classes at the police academy, going on ride-alongs and filming video diaries during the whole experience.

It’s a pretty neat trick. By turning the mirror on itself, the filmmakers reveal the ideas behind the movie: the public perception of Mexico City police, how police offers are represented on film, and the fuzzy nature of reality. One of the points here is nuance, which is something that people today can’t get enough of. Which is to say, they don’t get enough of. The idea that there are both good cops and bad cops, isn’t exactly mind-blowing, but it’s worth making in the context of this film. Theresa and Montoya are good cops, and because of that fact, their story doesn’t end well. There’s a glimmer of hope that good people are still showing up at the academy, as well as a sense of just how much work needs to be done before these people can make a difference. Most of all, it’s a story being told in a way we haven’t really seen before.

DEINE STRASSE (YOUR STREET), dir. Güzin Kar, photo © Güzin Kar

Over the past few years, there’s been a small increase in the market for short films on the ever-growing number of streaming platforms. Mubi makes a point of highlighting them on the reg, Netflix is hosting more of them, and the reliable short film depots of Vimeo and YouTube are now easier to stream to your television. But seeing one on the big screen is still something that happens rarely outside of a film festival, which is a shame.

Still, catching the short films at a festival like Berlinale isn’t exactly a first choice for your average audience member, or your lowly press pass holder. Given the five-day arrangement of the Industry Event screenings, I didn’t get to many short films. But I did enjoy a couple. The first of which is DEINE STRASSE (YOUR STREET), by the Turkish-Swiss writer and director Güzin Kar. At under ten minutes, it’s a briefly heartbreaking story, narrated by the German playwright Sibylle Berg. Berg describes the street to some unnamed person. It’s a street on the outskirts of the German city, Bonn. There are businesses and houses. A roundabout. We start to understand that the street is named after the person Berg is addressing. Who is it? An immigrant child who fell victim to a neo-Nazi attack in the 1990s. It’s a quietly powerful piece of work.

HERR BACHMANN UND SEINE CLASSE (MR BACHMANN AND HIS CLASS) dir. Maria Speth, photo © Madonnen Film

The last Competition screening was Maria Speth’s long-awaited return to cinema, HERR BACHMANN UND SEINE CLASSE (MR. BACHMANN AND HIS CLASS). The three-and-a-half hour film is a deep dive into a fascinating subject: a sixth-grade Wilkommen class in a small industrial town in southern Germany. A Wilkommen class is where immigrant children will go, so that they can get the attention they need to learn the language and get what they need to enter the mainstream classes with native German students. To help them achieve this, they have the remarkable teacher Herr Bachmann.

We should all be so lucky as to have a teacher who doesn’t talk down to his students, who encourages openness, honesty, intelligence, individuality, staying true to your dreams, and the power of learning an instrument and playing music in a band. This film has been gaining comparisons, at least among American critics, to the work of veteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman, but this extends to more than just the length and quality of the film. Like Wiseman did in movies like HOSPITAL, WELFARE, CITY HALL and EX LIBRIS, Speth gets herself imbedded in a system to show the difficult work being done, the frustrating limitations the workers have to contend with, and the saintly individuals who try their best to persevere. The portrait of Herr Bachmann and his class is one that says, it is possible to take a difficult situation and do exactly the right thing — this is what it looks like. And given the time the film spends with the students, you also get invested in their improvement and whether or not they’ll get the stamp of approval to move on to the next level.

Herr Bachmann is invested in his students as well. Any teacher will tell you that dealing with kids, especially sixth graders, can be exhausting. And throughout the film, Herr Bachmann doesn’t shy away from learning the details about each kid’s family, or stepping in to help steer them toward a better future. He’s not one of these teachers who doesn’t get emotionally involved because he knows he only has a limited time to spend with these students. He’s going to try to do the best, and the most, that he can do to make them see their potential, open their minds, and instill tolerance and goodwill toward others. It’s more than a moving and inspiring portrait of a guy who’s really good at his job, it also shows just how good our education systems can be if we focus on helping kids become good human beings rather than just pushing them through some standardized machinery.

We’ll wrap things up with the next installment. After Day Five, the winners of the Competition and Encounters programs were made available over the weekend. So I was able to catch up with a couple Encounter pictures and one award-winning short. I’ll also try to provide some thoughts on what I think made this edition of the Berlinale stand-out from past years.