There is a lot of good mood in this new film by Avi Mograbi – as there always is in films by this great Israeli filmmaker, who in his films for decades has raised a critical voice to the way politics and human rights are dealt with in his country. They have a good time being together, the asylum- seekers from Eritrea and Sudan, who with theatre director Chen Alon, cameraman Philippe Bellaiche and Mograbi himself – doing the sound, moving around with a boomstick – perform scenes from their own lives, from where they come from and from the absurd situation they are in now. Playing the scenes, thus staging their own lives, could make them politically active as well as have them express their own frustrations and traumas. That is the philosophy.

They are near Holot, a detention centre in Israel close to the Egyptian border, they can not be sent back to their home countries, where they would be persecuted – and they can not go to Tel Aviv because the Israelis don’t want them and consider them to be ”dangerous infiltrators”, as it is stated in the synopsis of the film.

The theatre scenes in good mood, but with no optimism, are in

general perfomed by a handful of detainees, in the time between the roll calls of Holot three times per day. Which makes them de facto, as they state it, live in a prison. If they are not there for the roll calls they might be transferred to Saharonim, a ”real” prison with no permission to leave.

The good mood of the theatre scenes stops with the individual talks, the monologues from some of the refugees, who tell stories of murder, torture, hunger… and about escaping into Israel from Egypt, being caught by Israeli soldiers, being sent back again, crossing the border several times. It’s crazy and humiliating and against any human right convention.

”We don’t want your country, because you don’t want us”, is one sentence. Another person talks about facing racism if you get into Tel Aviv as a black man – and when the Holot is announced to be closed, a couple of the refugees say that they will stay here anyway; there is no home to go back to, there is no future for them in Israel.

In the film Avi Mograbi is present at a strike in June 2014 by the refugees, who are confronted with Israeli military. You see him stand behind a fence having a conversation with a man inside Holot – are you fasting, he asks, are you being treated well etc. You sense the frustration by the director who, in one of the theatre scenes, regrets that he can not get into Holot to film and you have the feeling of hopelessness from not only those, who are stuck in this isolated location in the desert, but also from Mograbi himself, who with Chen Alon try to do something good but know that what they do – for very few – is a drop in an ocean of aggression and lack of humanity. As a response you can only say, like I do here, yes, but you do something, you point at an injustice, you raise your voices on behalf of people in need. And you do so through a cinematic combination of emotion and information. As a viewer you watch, listen and read the many texts on the screen, you shake your head…

France/Israel, 2016, 85 mins.

I know the French director Catherine Bernstein from the Paris-based European training programme Archidoc and from several of her awarded documentaries. She is a master in dealing with archive material, which is so brilliantly demonstrated in this film that will be broadcast in France (FR3) tomorrow monday February 29.

I received a vimeo link fra Catherine Bernstein, watched the film and wrote some notes to her: ”Dear Catherine. I saw the film. It is based on an impressive research, it tells a terrible story that I had never heard before, it raises the eternal question about “guilt” (“did you examine your conscious”, you ask the doctor), yes, you tell it addressing the scientist who “knew nothing”, I was “hooked” from the start – and it is a scoop to have childrenreading/translating the texts and figures. Bravo – and hope you get a good audience Monday!

I have copy-pasted the promotion texts of the film, an English and a French version – they are different:

Entre 1939 et 1945, le docteur Julius Hallervorden a contribué à l’assassinat des malades mentaux ordonné par Hitler. Le médecin a récupéré 690 cerveaux de victimes pour ses recherches sur les pathologies mentales. Malgré cela, Julius Hallervorden a poursuivi une brillante carrière après guerre, sans jamais être inquiété.

Le documentaire suit, pas à pas, la carrière de ce neurologue réputé qui, au nom de la science, participa à un meurtre de masse afin d’accélérer ses recherches médicales personnelles. Le parcours de ce médecin est intimement lié à celui de l’opération dite «T4», consistant à éliminer les handicapés physiques et mentaux et les personnes considérées comme inutiles et «asociales» par le régime nazi.

(The synopsis of FR3 that distributes monday February 29 at 22.25)

This documentary recounts his story and through the man’s story,that of the so-called “Action T4”, which consisted of eliminating physical and mental disabilities and those people considered by the Nazi regime to be useless or “asocial”. Doctor Julius Hallervorden, a major name in the science of brain pathology, first benefited from, then contributed to the systematic assassination ordered by Hitler of German mentally ill persons, by recovering the brains of 690 victims. He nevertheless pursued a brilliant post-war career, in all impunity, and died covered in honours. Between 1939 and 1945, at least 200,000 ill people were assassinated

(From the catalogue of the sales company, arte tv.)

France, 2014, 53 mins.

You have to catch the attention of the audience right from the beginning. The opening of a film is so important. Here you have to  make an invitation to the viewer, give some basic information that indicates, what he/she can expect but first of all demonstrate that you are a filmmaker, who can create an atmosphere, a tone that makes you curious, that surprises you, that gives you something special, that in this case convinces you that this is personal and not private.

Swedish Sara Broos does so with the first four minutes of her ”Reflections” (”Speglingar” in Swedish). You get a close-up of a young beautiful face in profile and thereafter of an older beautiful face in profile. A fine voice (how attractive the Swedish language is spoken like this) tells us what this is about – mother and daughter together, filmed in Latvia in a house and on a beach. The daughter, Sara, the filmmaker, invited mother Karin, painter, on a trip as a present when she became 60. Sara wanted to ask questions – a classic: I want to know more about you, mother, there is so much I don’t know.

The combination of the text of Sara, the super-stylized arranged images that makes me think of surrealist art, the music, makes you totally drawn into the story. You even get an explanation to the aesthetic chosen; Karin takes photos of Sara and her two sisters as sketches for her paintings.

4 minutes, then on the screen ”Reflections – a film by Sara Broos” and then quite a cut to mother Karin and father Marc in their cosy

living room reading the morning’s newspapers and discussing, who is to descale the coffee machine and who is to feed the birds in the garden… It feels like Sara Broos wants to bring the film down to earth: hey we are humans like you are, a surprising and funny scene.

And then Sara and we get to know the mother’s story from when she grew up in the 70’es, tried alcohol and drugs and men, travelled… and had for years a severe crisis of bulimia. As had Sara who always wanted to be like her mother. There is a shift from mother’s to daughter’s story, there is pain but also joyful conversations between the two of them. And there is a terrible memory about a stillbirth, where Sara who waited excitingly to become a big sister never got to see the dead child. Why not, she asks.

The title’s double meaning comes out not only explicitly in the visual side of the film but also in the voice-off text of Sara, who thinks back on a chaotic childhood in an artist family, ”but there was always order in my room”. Slowly in the process of conveying her mother’s story reveal her own growing-up with crisis and getting finally to accept her own body.

It is told through use of archive photos and home video/film footage, sometimes the images are double-exposed and in a tone that changes with a change of the character of music, a couple of times with almost abstract-image sequences of experimental character. And then back to the stylized, to mother and her paintings and her face in front of the mirror putting on make-up, once accompanied by a wonderful anecdote about a woman they met in Jurmala who wanted to sell wrinkle cream. Yes, there is also a lot for us 60+, about aging.

Any objections? Well, more in the direction of taste. I have always thought that Swedish masters like Bergman and Stefan Jarl (in his nature films) sometimes became too solemn and used too many obvious symbols – Swedish Sara Broos does the same a couple of times. A matter of taste, the cinematic talent is indispensable.

http://www.broosfilm.com/#!speglingar/nludd

Sweden, 2016, 76 mins.

It’s a very fine film, I placed it on the 2015 Talent List and am pleased to see that the Copenhagen audience will get the chance to enjoy it. Cinemateket has chosen Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora´s ”Thy Father’s Chair” as the Documentary of the Month = five screenings starting from 25th of February.

Here is a precise synopsis in English, I will write the review in Danish: Abraham and Shraga are two Orthodox aging twins, who live a secluded existence in their inherited Brooklyn home. Since the death of their parents, they have stopped throwing away anything, hosting stray cats and accumulating all sorts of stuff. Now, their upstairs tenant threatens to stop paying them rent unless they proceed to a radical cleaning. Abraham and Shraga have no choice but to open their doors to a professional company. A traumatic invasion of privacy ensues, forcing them to confront their memories in order to try to find a new beginning…

Og ind i en smal gyde kører en bil med logoet HCH (Home Clean Home) på siden. Ud træder rengøringskorpset, som skal rydde op i det ustyrlige svineri, gøre rent og få gjort has på væggelus, kakerlakker og andre smådyr, som har hygget sig blandt madrester, i madrasser, i gulvtæpperne. Overalt. Fy for pokker!

Filmholdet er med og bliver til slut, hvor bilen kører væk efter endt oprydningsaktion… og filmen er slut, efterfulgt af en smuk epilog, der refererer til titlens stol, som Abraham sætter sig i henne i hjørnet med lys fra vinduerne. Med en kat indenfor rækkevidde og bogen i hånden.

Filmens opbygning er således enkel mth. start og slut, med den fremadskridende arbejdsindsats og brødrenes reaktioner brudt op i tætte afsnit, I, II, III osv., der markerer at noget tid er gået. Det er alt sammen nænsomt fortalt akkurat som oprydderne, med masker og beskyttelsesdragter, er søde og nænsomme i deres måde at henvende sig til Abraham på. For det er ham, der hele tiden er i centrum, broren Shraga kommer og går og den tredje bror Nehemiah dukker aldrig op, ej heller da der skal sorteres ud i hans ejendele. Abraham er klar over at aktionen er nødvendig, men det gør ondt på ham at måtte se mange ting blive smidt ud og han bliver endnu mere nervøs, når han ikke kan få fat i sine brødre. Han tumler rundt og skal svare på om dette skal smides ud eller ej.

Langsomt og fint får vi tilskuere tilført oplysninger om forældrene og kan danne os et billede af, hvordan livet blev levet da de var i live – ifølge jødiske ritualer og tænkemåder.

”I feel so sad when I see you sad”, siger den (jødiske leder) af oprydningsholdet. Og det er netop den følelse filmen giver videre, når man ser de hjælpeløse brødre ryste på hænderne (I’m addicted to alcohol, siger Shraga) og Abraham som vist har samme problem, gemmer flasker væk.

Langsomt bliver der ryddet op og gjort rent, og naturligvis ikke uden problemer. Abraham synes han taber kontrollen med sit hjem og føler sig ind imellem ydmyget af situationen med alle disse mennesker omkring sig. Hvordan pokker har han også kunnet holde ud at have et par filmfolk rendende rundt?

Alligevel, og det er filmens fortjeneste, forlader vi Abraham fyldt med respekt for et klogt, empatisk menneske. Som ikke kunne overskue sit voksende hjem. Og ikke nænnede at smide ud. En sjældent velfortalt, helstøbt film.

Italien, USA, 2015, 74 mins.

www.cinemateket.dk

Thank you for letting me be in the company of Aisha for 70 minutes. You invited me to get to learn a young girl and woman full of Life living in a country I know very little about, Jordan. And yet, could it not have been everywhere that an abandoned child, who has spent 18 years of her young life in orphanages and foster homes, have to fight to find herself, love and a place to be in society?

It starts with a conversation between Aisha and Asma, the one behind the camera, the director. In a desert, at a place where there is nothing to disturb, where Aisha has the time to reflect on her life and on how she changes personality according to situations and people, she meets. And where she out of own experience claims that few people are able to ”think outside the box”. That is what she says and says in English language. This location for intimate conversation comes back later in the film and closes an amazing and fascinating story about Aisha, filmed over many years. (The still photo is taken there). It is very impressive how the film goes to the level where the social problems – harsh – stay in the background to let the personal stand out and become universal.

It is sometimes a bit confusing that Asma Bseiso cuts from one year to the next and back again, but getting used to this ”rule of the

game”, you simply enjoy to watch the changing hairstyle of the star of the film! Yes, Aisha is a film star, the camera loves her face and her smiles, and the older she gets, the more she knows how to act in front of the camera. Like when she is suggesting Asma behind the camera to get her notebook, after having shown pictures of herself, in which she writes ”you have to watch out for yourself and dream about your future”. And – as said on another occasion – turn the negative into something positive.

In 1997 King Hussein and the Queen visited an orphanage that was far beyond any decency. The King decided to move the kids to a wing of his Palace, where Aisha had a good life until she was taken to an orphanage in horrible condition – Asma Bseiso filmed there without permission. When she was 17 she got married, but that did not last long as the (English)man was already married! At a certain point Aisha is asked how many places she has been living. 12 she says, without counting the places where ”I was for some days”. The camera visits her when she lives with Noura and another girl, whose face is blurred, and in another appartment where her birthday is celebrated. There are several uplifting girlish scenes, as there are scenes where she can not hold back the tears, a girl who knows her parents, who are well of but abandoned her.

Aisha goes to university, studies psychology, gets a job at Save the Children Jordan, changes her looks into having tattoos and being pierced, constantly searching for ”who am I”, ”rebel for freedom” is the text of one of the tattoos and indeed she could be a role model for young Arab women with a tough background.

I asked Asma Beseiso about the title, the name – she answered that ”Aisha means “alive”, the title in Arabic “lissa aisha” means literally Still Alive..” As is the film “very much alive”, quite an achievement from the side of the director, who I met on Corfu in 2011 in one of the Storydoc workshops. The film will have its premiere in March in Jordan and from there go to festivals.