The film by Jude Ratnam had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. I had seen it but promised not to write a review before the festival. I have now returned to the film, which made and makes a strong impression on me. Why? This is what I will try to find out with the following text.

It is always difficult to find your own tone in a documentary. To create an atmosphere, a space for the viewer where he/she can be and stay, caught by the strength of a story. Ratnam succeeds – because he uses the cinematic language in a brilliant way. There is a rythm, fine cinematography and a commentary, where Ratnam in first person expresses his feelings bringing back the horrible memories he and his family have ”etched deeply in my (their, ed.) mind”. He says so when he recalls how and when he and his parents were fleeing the capital in Sri Lanka, Colombo – he being 5 years old – in July 1983, when the war started, that suppressed the tamil population, that fled to the North; a war that took the country into terrible violence until peace was made in 2009.

It is his story, with the train going North as the metaphor, the timeline that comes back again and again. The scoop for the film is that Ratnam gets his Uncle back from Canada and into the film. He was one of the freedom fighters, who was not with the Tamil Tigers but with TELO, one of 16 militant groups against the Sinhalese. With him the film goes back in time. He goes to the village where he lived, is being recognised by Sinhalese citizens, who were hiding tamils. He goes to his friend Andrew, who says that they were fighting for a socialist revolution – contrary to what the Tigers were standing for. There are many touching moments with Manoranjan, the Uncle, who is the character through whom terrible internal fights between the groups are revealed, including a massacre on members of TELO (Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization) by the Tigers.

How did our hopes for an independent state, The Tamil Eelam, turn into such cruelty? I actually at the end wanted the Tamils to lose the war against the Sinhalese government, says Ratnam at one point with reference to these internal Tamil fights, which are talked about  by not only him and the Uncle but also other Tamil fighters, who walk roads where kid were burnt alive with tyres around their bodies.

At one point you see the Uncle cutting rails into pieces as it has been done to remove the memory of horror – ”the rails that saved my life”, as Ratnam puts it. ”Be quiet, speak not in tamil language”, Ratnam’s mother told him. Today Ratnam’s son has been given a Tamil name, Nethran. Is it over? Is there a reconciliation process? Could that be the next film by Ratnam? Will he stay with themes from his country like his mentor Cambodian Rithy Panh has done?

Below you will find a Youtube link to a half hour interview with Ratnam from the Doc Day in Cannes this year.

http://www.upsidedistribution.com/flyer/upside1466_DiP_flyer.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3u5wzYsAlk

One more Odessa-story of quite a different flavour. Vassilis Economou has for Cineuropa interviewed Sergei Loznitsa, whose fiction film, ”A Gentle Creature”, was shown at the festival. As always it is interesting to listen to the director, whose documentary ”Austerlitz” has travelled the world. Read the whole interview, link below, here is a clip:

Cineuropa: A Gentle Creature is loosely based on the short story of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Do you think that he still remains an inspiration for current events?


Sergei Loznitsa: I believe that nothing much has actually changed in Russia since Dostoyevsky wrote his story. Dostoyevsky was a prophetic author. He predicted the horror that arrived in Russia soon after. In The Demons, one of his most prophetic novels, he describes a very particular type of human being – immoral, very devious and dishonest. They appeared in

Russia at the turn of the century; they multiplied massively and at a certain point took over the country. Dostoyevsky depicted this atmosphere that generates the “demons” and encourages this type of devious behaviour. I was inspired by this concept introduced by Dostoyevsky, and I used it as a starting point for my film.

Are we still facing the same demons? 
If we compare the Dostoyevskian era to our contemporary situation, I feel that we are in a worse position now. In a way, this is quite logical if we consider the millions of people who have perished in this country over the past 100 years. Those who were sacrificed certainly represented a different spectrum of the human character, totally opposite to the one of the demons. The negative selection in the population led to devastating results…

Looking forward to seeing the film and to the upcoming documentaries by the super-productive director: I’m working on two documentaries. The first, entitled Victory Day, was shot in Treptower Park in Berlin on 8 and 9 May; it’s a place that ex-Soviet citizens, now German residents, visit to commemorate the victory in WWII. The second is a montage of archive footage of the show trials that were held in Moscow during the Stalinist period. The film will be called The Trial. I’m also preparing a new feature film, and I just came from a location-scouting trip in Central Ukraine.

http://cineuropa.org/it.aspx?t=interview&l=en&did=332151

Found this on FB the other day, posted by Palestinian multi-artist Khaled Jarrar: Happy to announce that the film that I’m working on since two years ‘Displaced in Heaven’ is nominated to The Film Prize of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.

And I am happy to say that I have read the script of Palestinian Jarrar, whose work as an artist and filmmaker I have been trying to follow since I met him in 2011 at the Storydoc workshop in Greece. Trying to… not easy, since his activist work has brought him to galleries and exhibitions and streets in for example Paris. His film “Infiltrators” has gone all over the world. I wrote these words about it on this site: …a film that with its non-aggressive approach gives the viewer a unique account of the climbers, big and small, old and young, who go to Jerusalem illegally. To work first of all. It uses a non-linear structure, it has many angles and stylistical elements that wonderfully surprise you as a viewer, who is used to strong films in all genres, aggressive against the Israeli occupation. You have sometimes a clear laugh when you see the different ways of climbing, sometimes you laugh because of the absurdity, and sometimes you are moved and feel angry: this can not be true, this is not civilisation 2012! But it is.”

Under the title “A Dinner that Never Came” Khaled Jarrar has written a kind of background treatment for the film “Displaced in Heaven”. It is long time ago a story has moved me so much. Here is a long quote and a link to where you can be acquainted with it:

I wrote most of this story from a refugee shelter in Wessel, Dortmund, in mid-September 2015. The story is largely put together from notes and images gathered along the course of a journey I undertook, using false papers, from Mytilene, Lesbos, through to Athens, and then across Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, and Southern Europe. I travelled with Nadira and her family, all of whom carry Syrian-issued documents for Palestinian refugees, who were fleeing civil war in Syria. I came to know the family well from the time I met them in Mytilene, on September 7, 2015, but their journey as refugees had started when they escaped from the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus and made their way to Istanbul in 2014. For that journey they carried Ahamed Abu Zamel who later died in Istanbul, from an injury to his head. Upon reaching Istanbul, after an unsuccessful first attempt to cross the sea in the so-called “death boats” six weeks before, they succeeded in reaching Mytilene.

When I met them, the family consisted of Nadira, a seventy-five-year-old wheelchair-bound woman; her daughter Mona, a school teacher; Nadira’s son-in-law Yousif; and Nadira’s son Mohie, a university professor. Mohie had left his wife Reeman, his eighteen-month old son Kinan, and his new born baby Jasmin in Istanbul because he was afraid to risk their lives after the unsuccessful first attempt to cross the sea. With tears in his eyes, he left his family in the hope that he could bring them to Germany if he managed to make it.

In 1948, Nadira Hawwari, then nine years old, was forced like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave her hometown, Nazareth, in Galilee, and flee to Syria where she settled in the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Damascus. Nadira lived her life in this overcrowded place, started a family, worked, and somehow made a home in this permanent temporary state of being a Palestinian refugee. In 2014, like millions of people living in Syria, she was forced to leave home again as a result of the unremitting violence in Damascus. Fearing for your life wherever you go — Daesh, the Al-Nusra Front, Bashar Assad’s brutal forces, everyone hell-bent on making life unliveable — this was Nadira’s life before she left. So she was forced to leave again, to leave what had become home, again, and journey towards Istanbul….

Photo: Mona, Yousif, and Mohiee pushing his mother Nadira to cross the border to Serbia

http://www.theabsenceofpaths.com/commission/a-dinner-that-never-came-1 

It’s a very fine choice of style, Syrian Layla Abyad has made for her short film made in Switzerland. It works with the personal essay form, it gives an intense atmosphere, her English voice and the shift from English to Arabic is perfect, and the image never ”kills” the text, vive versa. It gives you a glimpse of what it means to be in exile in a Western European country communicating with someone dear to you back home – Sama is online from Damascus, the young woman who is talking and who you never see gives ”advice” on how to survive here in Switzerland, where a demonstration lasts one hour without any conflicts and where you can film it all, if you wish. On her way round in the country in the middle of Europe she attends a meeting with Swiss citizens, who are afraid of muslims…

”Where do I start to explain to this nice, polite old man that I have statistically more odds and reasons to fear his vote’s support for the arms industry than he has to fear the underground fanatics already killing way more Syrians than Swiss”, a quote from the very well composed commentary in a film, that ends up with words to Sama in Damascus on what to do when ”they” interrogate her and if torture is to be used…

On the production background: …5 well-known filmmakers from Syria, Palestine, Israel, Ukraine and Russia were invited to Winterthur for 5 weeks. Together with Swiss film students, they realised a short documentary about the theme „Exile“. The result is a documentary with 5 episodes and 5 personal, touching, yet provocative views of Switzerland.

Switzerland, Syria, 11 mins., 2015

http://langfilm.ch/en/catalogue