”There is so much to say about this first feature documentary by young Brazilian director Petra Costa. So much positive because of its visual brilliance and so much because of the way it treats its painful theme…”.

This was written almost 7 years ago after I had seen ”Elena”, a film that toured the festival circuit and created expectations for Costa’s next film. Which was excellent as well. ”Olmo and the Seagull” came out in 2014, a film she wrote and directed together with Danish Lea Glob – a work that Allan Berg praised on this site in his analysis, link below, for its portrait of a creative process, with references to theatre, to Chekhov, and to Virginia Wolf. Berg expressed his content that here was a Film and that he did not have to write about documentary or fiction. Words to that effect.

If you substitute ”first” with third in the quote above, Petra Costa’s third film

”The Edge of Democracy » is indeed dealing with a painful theme. It is a film that is based on documentary material but in many ways constructed as a drama: The recent development of Brazilian politics told from the director’s personal point of view, the loss of the dream of democracy –with a tone that you could call sad, a melancholy that associates to Chekhov. There is no Brazilian clichés, no bossa nova (before the end credits), no Copacabana, no Gilberto Gil. At the same time as the drama between the political protagonists is – to say the least – Shakespearean:

Look at the photo – you see the popular, charismatic, the man from the working class, Lula pass on the presidency to Dilma Rousseff, who is from the same party as him, the Worker’s Party, PT, but note the man to the left, Michel Temer, the vice-president from the PMDB party, who – as Costa says in her personal voice-off – was waiting to take over, contributing to the impeachment of Dilma… Temer was President for a couple of years until he, as many others, was arrested for involvement in financial operations to be cathegorized as corruption. He was followed by another criminal, Bolsonaro, whose references go back to the military dictatorship that ended in 1984, the year Costa was born.

The film is full of details about the financial scandals, about how power corrupts; for someone whose knowledge of Brazilian politics is little, it is complicated to follow, but you get it all due to Costa’s commentary and due to her open position and cinematic skills:

Her parents were in opposition to the military dictators. As Dilma Rousseff her mother was imprisoned and tortured, but her family was also part of the elite and often during the film, like when Bolsonaro was elected president, she says “many in my family voted for him”. Costa’s sympathy lies with Lula and Dilma, she has access to them and there are fantastic scenes with the two, mostly shot in cars, where you get close to them. Dilma during the impeachment process: “I am K, a Kafka’sque character, but a K with a lawyer…”, she says ironically, and with Lula it is amazing to follow him, when he is sentenced to prison and the crowd shouts at him “don’t turn yourself in”. Which he did. 12 years.

Petra Costa takes me as the schocked viewer, who lives far away from the big wonderful country – as in her first film – but here using archive material to guide me through one corruption after the other, sometimes you feel that you are watching a thriller (¡) – with visual brilliance to the presidential palaces, to the utopian capital Brasilia that separates the elite from the people, to family archive, to close-ups of Dilma and Lula, to a scene where a cleaning lady in the President’s Palace says that “there is no democracy in this country”, to her own statement that the divided country is run by some few families… To Dilma, in a conversation with Costa’s mother, saying that being a President you have lost your freedom.

Quite brave by a young director to combine complicated reportage material with a personal angle and narration. A film full of painAn inspiration it must be for other documentarians!

Brazil, 2019, 1 hour 53 mins.

Available on Netflix.

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3279/

http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/2239/

Looking down from the sky. Moving over an area with houses accompanied by the director’s voice telling the viewer that this is my place, a kind of brief prologue in a melancholic maybe nostalgic tone. Existential questions raised. And then down to earth, to a smiling happy boy on bike, driving around a town with glimpses of happy gatherings, old women dancing, and driven by lovely energetic music by Evgenyi Kadimsky. It’s a dynamic optimistic start.

The title: ”The simple present tense is when you use a verb (here a film, ed.) to tell about things that happen continually in the present, like every day, every week, or every month. We use the simple present tense for anything that happens often or is factual.”

… explanation for a complicated English title chosen by Russian director Dmitry Kabakov. I met him in Riga a month ago and he sent me a link to this new film by him. Thank you for that, I enjoyed it. Because of the director’s good documentary eye for situations and details in everyday life in his Zvavoronki, where he has lived since he was three years old. Because he takes his time, let scenes stand long and because he has a position:

Fences are built in his town. Around houses, at the railway, at the roads. Borders that separate. Trains that pass by, only some stop. Political refugees from Tajikistan, they don’t speak Russian, meeting slogans on the walls like ”Russia for Russians”. The director takes a lot of time to give a historical background of Tajikistan. Not necessary, what is interesting is the fate of the characters of today.  

It’s a big family that is in focus with the boy on the bike, Mukhammad, as the one to be followed from, when he goes with his father “to pick up” a new baby, sibling number 7 and his mother at the hospital till you see him as a fence builder after his Tadjik family has been forced to move away from the house that they had been allowed to stay in by the church in the town.

Between the boy on the bike and the same older boy doing fences you find the film. Next door to the house of the Tadjik family is the green house, where an old couple live. The woman is a teacher and invites in Mukhammad and his sister to be taught languages and mathematics. She is lovely. A strong woman. Her talks with her mostly silent husband are most often about the living conditions of the refugees, she has a true humanistic approach to life and people. The camera catches, no I would say caresses the couple, when they are inside and when they sit on a bench in the garden.

The couple is the director’s parents, he reveals towards the end of the film, you sense that in the tone of the film and in sequences… the father – he does that often – sits in his own thoughts for some time, gets up to take something from the wife’s place in the garden and walks towards the door to the house. Slowly.

The title, “The simple present tense”, is used to tell about things that happen continually in the present, like every day, every week, or every month… that’s what the film does in a very fine way.

Russia/Latvia, 2019, 91 mins.

Colleague Allan Berg tells me that if he loves a book, when finished he often starts reading it again immediately. My mentor Niels Jensen (who died in 2010) said the same: I often, if I love a film, leaves the cinema and walks in again to have a ticket for the next screening. Jensen, who also left a screening if he found the film boring and/or without quality… Why stay till the end?

I would have loved  to watch Thomas Heise’s film essay again right away. But I will wait for the second screening to be on a big screen, in a cinema, if not before (DOK Leipzig?) then at IDFA in Amsterdam. I want the full cinema screen with its image and sound as it was thought from the director’s side.

There is so much I want to (re)discover, so many cinematic decisions that are far from main-stream documentary storytelling.

With the whole overall ambition, to take the viewer through the history of a family, through generations from the beginning of the 20th century till today. What an ambition and what an original and succesful result!

Like a written biography it is a film in 5 chapters, indeed a piece of literature

in itself as much as it is an aesthetically balanced visual interpretation with the voice of the director reading letters, diaries, presenting documents, and let me not forget the muted tone, never pushy, never overwhelming, but always there in the background together with the eloquent voiceover.

I want to point at some of the sequences in the 1st chapter of the film – the chapter lasts one hour. Masterly montaged sequences.

The first chapter that is world history (the first WW) seen by Wilhelm Heise, the grandfather of the director, who writes as a young man about War:    

„Hand in hand with the spiritual degeneration comes the decline in ethic and morals“ … slowly emerges a photo of three soldiers posing for the camera… “Man‘s bestial nature celebrates its highest triumphs…“

Read by Thomas Heise with his voice that captures your attention here and through the film because of its kind-of-neutral character, even when the most terrible events are coming up, it stays like this – the effect is emotional strong.

But this first chapter is also a love story… between Wilhelm Heise, who lives in Berlin and Edith Hirschorn, whose family lives in Vienna. The letters are beautiful, read by Heise, while you look through a rainy window of a tram of today’s Vienna, hearing in between the automatic voice of „next station“! And hear some passenger voices and the tram’s rail music…

Edith writes a recipe. „Give it to your mother”.

And while Edith is back in Vienna, Wilhelm writes: „Just come and things will be different… in recent days I’ve been imagining this: I am sitting on the balcony and reading. Sometimes I look up. You sit at the other end of the balcony. Sometimes you also look up. We look at each other and smile…”. Yes, that’s how love is. Also in my sitting room today.

B/W images of today accompanying: U-Bahn in Berlin, a young couple hugs each other – Heise reads a letter from Max and Anna Hirschorn in Vienna telling Dr. Wilhelm Heise that they would welcome him in Vienna to become their son-in-law, the wife of their daughter Edith. (The U-Bahn scene also a ”first love scene” as the director remembers it? The film has many layers).

The sound of trains, the image of flowers in the foreground and train passing in the background, family photos of the couple with two children, Hans and Wolf(gang).

Back to historical documents, names written, Jews on lists for deportation, Heise reads the correspondance between Vienna and Berlin. ”Vater und Opa” Max Hirschhorn writes, so does Edith’s sister Elsa, about daily things, hard days and about the transport to Poland that becomes more and more actual. ”Why do we have to live in these times”. Where the Jews are not allowed to ride buses, can not get good tobacco any longer (Max complains about this), where certain areas are not good to stay in.

Montaged with around 20 minutes visual documentation – nazi deportation lists with Heise reading the correspondance. You read all these Jewish last names, you have met them on other occasions, it becomes painful as you know the fate waiting for them.  

From an aunt: “July 23. Dear Edith. Thank you for everything. Best regards to you all. Farewell. I’m travelling today. Pepita» – and you read the name on the document underligned with red: Finkel Perl Josefine Sara, 2 Körnerg. 7/15, 13.10.76, the latter her date of birth.

«Travelling today» – as the other members of Edith’s family «to Poland».

Cut to (the lyrics of) a popular song, performed by Marika Rökk during Nazi time, «Don’t look here, don’t look there – Just look straight ahead – And whatever may come – Just never mind». Sarchasm, Irony from the side of the director?

Leaving the deportation lists… long black break before Heise comes back with the personal resumé of Wolfgang Heise, the son of Wilhelm and Edith, who is a Wehrmacht soldier, like his brother Hans, writing from a barrack during the last years of the war. Words to the parents in Berlin – hope all is well.

Montaged with images from today in Eastern Germany: empty houses, forgotten nature if that is the right wording, everything is left behind, left overs, sad images, no hope and windmills that continue to move slowly, the flow of history as Wolfgang Heise mentions, not to stop.

Some steps into the first chapter, I will do the same later with the fifth chapter of this magnificent documentary reflection of a space in time.