It is not only in Denmark but also in Slovakia that something is rotten… That is the impression you sit with having watched the new film by Robert Kirchhoff, an impressive work both in terms of the research the director has done during the 8 years, it has been under production but also because of its fresh and never dull storytelling. The film is full of anger but also of well placed sarchasm, as well as funny moments. It is called a documentary tragedy, and it is indeed when it comes to content, but there is no need for kleenex help during the watching, rather you mumble to yourself: Nooo, this can’t be right! Content below..

but first the title: Normalization (as I googled it) is ” In the history of Czechoslovakia… a name commonly given to the period 1969 to about 1987. It was characterized by the restoration of the conditions prevailing before the Prague Spring and the work to maintain the status quo.” Gustav Husak was the one in charge after the mentioned reform period led by Dubcek – a period that ended dramatically in 1968, when Soviet forces occupied the country.

The Cernanova Case refers to the tragic event in 1976, where Ludmila Cernanova, a 19 year old student died. Her body was found in a river and (quote from the site of the film) “although there were no traces of violence found on her body, yet the police claimed she had been raped… it was a case that was paraded in the communist mass-media at the end of which seven men (5 years later!) were found guilty… They are the same individuals who today proclaim their innocence and claim that they were caught up in the middle of a grand-scale political-judiciary conspiracy”.

… and were given long prison sentences.

Take a look at the still photo of two older coroners, who stand on each side of a professor of a younger age. The director has brought them together and

behind the camera you hear the director shout to the two, who were involved in the case: Was she raped or not? They do not want to talk about the case, and end up walking out of the room…

Yes, something was totally wrong with the way the 7 people was treated – and had most of their lives destroyed, if not all – and Kirchhoff acts in their defence by step by step (it took him 8 years to make the film) finding witnesses, who talk about how the police forced them to talk against the suspects. A script was already written by the system. A fabrication of stories had been made in other words.

Kirchhoff refrains cleverly from bringing in the family of the murdered woman to the film. It is not difficult to imagine how they feel the loss and to understand the traumatization due to the unsolved case 37 years after it happened. What he does, is, in the best investigative journalistic tradition, to confront people involved at that time and to uncover a story about a corrupt, communist legal system – and to bring us viewers to the fact that the case, that was raised again, in 2004 had a surprising and shameful continuation. The court repeated the first decision, with an extension of the conviction from 1982!

In an interview Robert Kirchhoff puts it like this: But in the end I found that the more recent ruling of the Supreme Court [2006] is more monstrous by far. I understand that in the 1980s it was probably about some order from above, the people were servile to their superiors, they feared not only for their jobs but also for their children, their families. They were hostages of the regime. But what happened in 2004 and in 2006 was that the Supreme Court judges were aware of the newly-discovered evidence, and they refused to hear witnesses and learn about the new circumstances in the case.

Kirchhoff insinuates an Arab link and performs a hilarious interview with a secret agent, Ali, who says nothing about the case but comes up with the following sentence: He who tells the truth will never be happy… nobody likes the truth”! The director, in picture, is speechless and can only nod with a confused open mouth face.

The most watched documentary in cinemas in Slovakia so far, FilmNewEurope writes – after a month 5400 admissions, 20.000€ in box office.

A not normal figure for a film about a Normalization that apparently is still going on in the EU country Slovakia. It is in the media but noone wants to talk about it, the president says no, the top people from the legal system says no… Shocking and scandalous, one thinks after the film.

PS. The 7 have taken the case to the European Court for Human Rights. Still waiting for an answer.

Slovakia, 2013, 100 mins.

http://www.kauzacervanova.com./film_en.php

http://spectator.sme.sk/articles/view/50320/2/cervanova_case_film_judiciary_in_a_new_light.html

www.filmneweurope.com

http://www.filmsk.sk/pdf/filmsk-en-2013.pdf

Here, the first right is the right to roam. Nicolas Philibert, the acclaimed French documentary filmmaker, largely known for capturing the trivia of the closed worlds (i.e. In the Land of the Deaf, Animals – see MoMA series on his films: “Nicolas Philibert: The Extraordinary Ordinary”), this time pushed the gate of the progressive psychiatric clinic La Borde. Nestled in the vicinity of the sunlit Loire Valley, the film, succintly dubbed as Every Little Thing, portrays the every day life at La Borde, its trivial goings-on, loneliness and feebleness. Yet, there is room for moments of joy and laughter. Set over the summer of 1995, Every Little Thing follows the residents and staff of the La Borde psychiatric clinic as they set out to stage, what has now become a tradition, a fête production of a theatrical play. This year, they mount Witold Gombrowicz’s absurdist classic ‘Operette’.

The film opens with the scene of a woman, alone in a wide shot, singing a piece from the opera ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, “Mortal silence. Vain hope. What a torment. […] I succumb to my suffering,” she sings apropos as if Christoph Gluck himself had composed it for her. This immediate, somewhat disorienting immersion into the world of La Borde, takes place without an introduction or a context. The slow pacing seems especially fitting for this milieu. Its natural-lit outdoor cinematography appears idyllic and even a tad utopian.

In the following scene, we see a series of alienated body plans wandering in the green space. As we watch them roam, we are suspended in a state of unease and discomfort. Captives of their own bodies, their movements are rowdy and uncoordinated – they are unbridled misfits, displaced, repressed of drive, and rendered to vacillating and haphazard convulsions. Master at finding the right balance between sound and silence in all of his films, in Every Little Thing Philibert too deftly employs silence to signal the storytelling tone. Given the environment, the long silent takes now seem to be rather disturbing than peaceful. Agitated by the wind and trees, the life of its own nature seems to have found a

relief to the agony of the troubled souls. Yet, they do not stagnate, they grow freely, at their own pace and in all directions.

“[…] Scattered, lost. […] But who can tell? Who can tell what? […] Bizarre forms, demented shapes. I don’t know, I don’t understand, I don’t comprehend. Motionless, dazed, confused. […]” As the patients recite the lines from the ‘Operette’ with vigor and anxiety, this Polish absurdist comedy from the mid-60s and its distortive dreamwork seem ideal for La Borde. Caught in the nervous tics and disrupted diction, Michel, one of the long-term patients who regularly stays at the clinic since 1969, alike his fellows, chooses the temporary safety of the art world. He feels protected by the narrow confines of the fictional world of the ‘Operette’, where “the totally illogical lines comfort him.” Embraced by the tranquil woods of the Loire Valley, the La Borde asylum alleges art as a sanctuary and repose, serving both as an act of catharsis and that of defiance.

Above and beyond the theater, Philibert pursues no spectacular shots bestowing the folklore of madness. Neither does he try to encrust the film with new twists and turns. In fact, the film is constructed within a rather basic narrative pattern that eschews an adherence to any complexity of a latent plot or drama. Nevertheless, the timeline tracing the preparation for the play, the final performance, and the aftermath lends itself a narrative cohesion. Obstinately true to his style, the legato unhurried pace gives time to be attentive to the protagonists and their everyday doings. Once we embrace the slow rhythm and gradually get comfortable with it, we find ourselves immersed in these micro-moments that otherwise would have gotten lost in the momentum of the every day life. As the simple atcs unfold in a non-narrated manner, we see people reveal themselves in unpredictable ways. The scattered mosaic of moments is poetically undercut in a complexity of patches – all rendered with a lucent beauty. Yet, when that beauty slips in, it is almost always broken.

Be it, in the garden of La Borde, where a haggard patient strives to walk up to a shrub, rubbing his forehead as if to mollify the unbearable thought that hit his head; or at the art club, where a patient tries to draw the face of another patient, pauses in a moment of panic with words, “I am afraid to miss…” but finally cedes into a grin, overwhelming her suffering – behind these small moments, there is a lot at stake. It is riveting how little can say a lot about people: a stare, a gesture, a sigh, even a smile. Such moments of intimacy resonates with the viewer eminently. It uncovers something essential and profound about the human existence. Yet, what exactly it uncovers is up to the viewer. The film does not contain much commentary, laying itself wide open to the reading. Philibert’s ambition of being “a bit of an anti-Michael Moore” shows its vestiges here as he avoids to give any answers or to “think for the viewer”. Instead, he gives the viewer something to think about.

True to his style, Philibert is not voyeuristic in approaching his subjects. He says, “this film is not about people, but with and because of them.” Throughout the film, it becomes evident that the protagonists are well aware of being filmed. It can be seen through their verbal interventions or gazes directed to the camera. But these scenes don’t end up on the floor of the cutting room. Philibert says, “It doesn’t bother me that they look directly toward the camera. I don’t try to make them forget my presence. It is a matter of making myself accepted, not forgotten.”

As Philibert makes himself accepted in the La Bodre asylum, so do we. Indeed, as we voluntarily immerse ourselves in their world, we become almost as them – mad, too. By gradually taking us into the impenetrable madness, this cinematic vigil makes us re-work our view on madness and extend the degree of ambivalence toward the notion of normality. The film is very shrewd in bringing to focus the fluidity and dynamics of the borderline between madness and sanity. In Every Little Thing, anxiety and fragility are never far behind the laughter, spontaneity, and liveliness. “You are laughing at the rubbish I say. Aren’t you? You are totally crazy,” one of the patients utters. Different expressions race back and forth over his face. His smiles come in succession like waves breaking on the surface of a little lake. “You are nuts, you are completely nuts! […] That poor nurse is crazy. The staff need care. That could happen, you know. […] True, if we get care, no one will look after you.”

Indeed, as all visible differences between the patients and the care-givers are removed and patients are liberated to actively participate in running the facility, it seems hard to distinguish between those who need care. The care-givers do not wear white coats and doors have handles on both sides. Who manages the switchboard, who answers the phone calls, who prepares the meals – each one, notwithstanding their mental status, is a member of the La Borde little community, a microcosm of the society riven by differences and tension. All are in the same boat. Within this closed community, Philibert manages to create intense feelings of both community energy and extreme solitude. He observes the patients both when they are collaborating and when they are alone, estranged and off in their own universe.

As we hear tragic arias, soul-baring confessions, and moving recollections, the film without a condescending pity or soaring valorization, brings an illuminating account of a world that is outside of most of our daily experiences. Philibert approaches his subjects with a deep but unforced empathy that does not exoticize or disown them. In this radical otherness, we see our pallid reflection, we find part of ourselves. The film does not offer an antiodite for our fear of otherness, the otherness would still keep leaking into our psyche. Profoundly disturbing and intensely personal, the last sentence of the long-term patient Michel both moves and terrifies us, “We are here among ourselves. And you are among us, too, now.”

France, 1997, 105 mins.

It is a bit difficult for me to verbalise precisely, what this film is about. It goes in many directions and I have to confess that I sometimes lackd a focus while watching. However, the reason you stay with the film is the tone and the footage available for the male director, family archive footage shot by his father over a period of almost 20 years. I write male as the director is the only male in the family with mother, grandmother and 5 sisters! The Man with the Moving Camera he calls his father in the beginning of the film, or the father calls himself so, ending up giving himself the same characteristic as the one, who is never really involved, always on a distance, always observing. We dont get to know a lot about the son, the one making the film – and we don’t get to know much about the father, who left the family to marry another woman. Why? He does not talk about it.

On the contrary when it comes to the females in the film, they are open-minded, when they talk. The mother, a famous actress, the grandmother with her photos, talking about her good looking husband, who had many affairs, and the daughters, who grow up looking for their own way of life.

The material is impressive. The father took pictures – he even made an exhibition about the Ol´ha family – and the mother acted. As she says, now with parts as either a mother or a prostitute. We see her in close-ups and we see a lot of photos and the super 8mm footage of a happy family. The sunflower sequence in the beginning of the film is gorgeous. The happy family that was apparently not so happy. Suddenly the father was not there any longer and the son felt he had to ”rewrite history”. The father who, when young in the photos, looked fresh and optimistic is now closed and reluctant to answer the questions from the son. Who never dares to ask the question – why did you leave us, your big family?

A few words about the tone of a film that has many loveable moments, difficult not to fall in love with the little girl – the youngest daughter – who in songs/rappings comment on the new interpretation of a family without a father. Maybe a bit confusing structure but seldom a dull moment.

Slovakia/Czech Republic, 2012, 80 mins.

First a small introduction to a film that I saw in Kiev during the DocuDays festival. It was made by Dmytro Tiazhlov, who asked me to wait with any text review of the film until correct English subtitles had been adjusted. He sent the film to me a couple of months ago and I saw it again with pleasure and duable subtitles. The film is part of an almanach that

… comprises five short stories: Mezhyguirya, Afghan War Veteran, School, House with Chimeras, Cornered. 
The enactment in May 2011 of the Law on Access to Public Information prompted five nationals (documentary protagonists) to put the new piece of legislation to good use in their fight for their own rights. Not knowing each other, residing in different localities and totally different in their values, convictions, educational background and social standing, they nevertheless do have a strong point to share — their proactive approach to life…

“Cornered” is a small human story about Zoya Ivanivna Shulha, who lives in Panasivka in Ukraine, a small village with about 50 inhabitants, most of them old – see photo – and “cornered” they are without a decent transport possibility, no bus has come to the village for years. But the strong Zoya Ivanivna wants to change this situation. She writes to the authorities to get an explanation, refers to a decree from the former president, who promised transport to the most isolated areas of the country, and goes around to get signatures from the villagers to accompany her request. The director, who is also the cinematographer (and who made “I am a Monument to Myself” 4 years ago), follows her in her fight and demonstrates talent for catching and conveying situations among the citizens. Totally in the spirit of John Grierson this is a focus on public service, made with a sense of humour that makes you want to know more about the people of Panasivka. Why not a continuation?

Ukraine, 2013, 25 mins.

Amazing initiative around the film by Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon, I am Breathing, a film that has been shown at festivals all over, has been praised for its cinematic quality (also here at filmkommentaren.dk where it was on the Top 10 list of documentaries from 2012):

Tomorrow, June 21st, the film is to be shown in 164 places. Read this fine text from the website:

This year, on 21 June, in a wee village in Scotland a small group will get together to watch a film about a man who dies from Motor Neurone Disease (MND), also known internationally as ALS, ELA, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. At the same time, in a cinema in Mexico City, people are arriving from all over to see the the film, I AM BREATHING. In Russia and Romania, in Kosovo and Kenya, in India and Ireland, in Bahrain and Belgium, in the US and the UK – across the world people have volunteered to show the film – in village halls, schools, churches, living rooms, pubs, and theatres.

They have been inspired by the story of Neil Platt, who died aged 34, 14 months after being diagnosed with MND/ALS. He was determined more people should know about the disease.

Within a year, he went from being a healthy young father to becoming completely immobile from the neck down. As his body got weaker, he used his remaining months to communicate about his illness. He collaborated with the filmmakers on I AM BREATHING and wrote a blog, determined to play a part in making MND/ALS history by sharing his story and building a community of people to join the fight…

IMPORTANT: Go to the website below and you will find where and at what time, the film will be shown in a venue near you. For the Danes in Copenhagen:

Friday, June 21, 2013 at 05:00 PM

The National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, Denmark

A screening made by DOXBIO in collaboration with MUSKELSVINDSFONDEN, THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DENMARK, DFI AND DANISH DOCUMENTARY PRODUCTION 

http://www.iambreathingfilm.com/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/2207/