Munich Film Festival II
Vita & Virginia: directed by Chanya Button, script by her and Eileen Atkins, on whose theatre play of the same name the movie is based, starring Gemma Aterton as Vita Sackville-West, Elizabeth Debicki as Virginia Woolf, Rupert Penry-Jones as Harold Nicolson (Vita's husband), Peter Ferdinando as Leonard Woolf, and Isabella Rossellini cameoing as Vita's thoroughly unplesant mother, Lady Sackville. I liked this film a lot, though not as much as I hoped I would, not least because it does betray its theatrical origin a bit too much as opposed to being thoroughly cinematic. By which I mean, for example: when Vita and Virginia are writing to each other, we see the heads of the actresses speaking the words in close up. This kind of thing works on stage, because, well, monologue, but not so much in the movie. (As a point of comparison, when Stephen Frears adapted Christopher Hampton's play Dangerous Liasons, which in turn was an adaption of a novel consisting entirely of letters, he kept letter writing scenes, but always used them to make additional characterisation points, for example Valmont writing on the back of his mistress du jour.) I also had suspend some disbelief in terms of physicality, which is the exact reverse to the originals - i.e. real Virginia was smaller than real Vita, who was tall, whereas Gemma Aterton is tiny and makes Elizabeth Debicki look really tall.
But these are minor points, in the end. As far as I can tell, Eileen Atkins' major additions to the rl material she was working with was to insert some drama and obstacles, i.e. instead of falling in love and later gradually transitioning back to friendship, we get Harold, Vita's husband, at first objecting more than he did in rl, and instead of some gradual passion fading, Virginia writing Orlando comes across in part as her exorcising her passion for Vita via recreating her as "a man who turns out to be a woman who in the end is a fiction". (Vita's son Nigel Nicolson called "Orlando" "the most charming love letter in literature", whereas in the play it's that but also a goodbye letter (to the love affair, not the friendship), and a succcessful power struggle where Virginia via her creative skill takes control of the relationship which previously has been Vita's. Who flirted with Virginia from the get go and did all the initializing and pushing of the relationship up to that point, but also is presented as a female Don Juan no more monogamous with Virginia than with anyone else.
Knowing a bit about the people involived going in, I knew this would be that rarity, a historically based same sex relationship depicted without a tragic ending for anyone (I correctly guessed the movie would not touch on Virginia Woolf's suicide which happened many years later). I was also curious abouut how much or little it would specifically deal with the leads being writers. Answer: a lot, though it varies how, not least because we start in Vita's pov and end in Virginia's, which means that one of Vita's initial reasons for approaching the Bloomsbury set in general and Virginia specifically, wanting to be taken serious as a writer instead of writing bestsellers but being dismissed as a dabbling aristocarat (which doesn't happen - Leonard Woolf agrees to publish a book of hers with the Hogarth Press, but basically just for the cash) never gets a real pay off, whereas Virginia's writing is a central subject throughout - the problem of both writing the moment and being in the moment (how?), and as I said, the regaining of emotional control via fictionalising what has taken it. We see Virginia writing, and struggling with it, while we see Vita fllirting, seducing and occasionally arguing with people, so in a way, the movie implicitly shares the opinion of the Bloomsbury's of Vita the aristocractic dabbler versus Virginia the true artist.
Having chided the direction for the occasional staginess, I must also applaud it for makng the most of Knole, Vita's beloved ancestral home (which she couldn't inherit, due to being a woman, and which Virginia gave to Orlando forever), which is short gorgeously, as is the surrounding landscape. And there's one scene where the Woolfs and the Sackville-Nicolsons all four watch an eclipse elsewhere which is breathtakingly beautiful. (BTW, the way back to London in the train also includes the only scene where Virginia and Harold talk (while Leonard and Vita have dozed off on their respective shoulders), and it's one of the most interesting scenes in the film, because they're discussing biography (she's reviewed one he's written) and at the same time Vita and what biography does to a person.
Another neat thing is that the various sexualities on display aren't given any "As you know, Bob" justifrication/explanation scenes but simply presented, including for the supporting characters like Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell and her relationship with the otherwise mainly gay Duncan Grant. Leonard Woolf is the only one depicted devoted to only one person (incidentally, this take on Leonard is like all other's I've seen or read a very sympathetic one - he has to be that rarity, the spouse of a feminist icon not seen as confining or damaging but supporting her throughout), but he doesn't judge anyone else. And lastly: everyone looks great in their 1920s costumes. In conclusion: enjoyable, but not a must in a "omg you HAVE to see this movie" way.
Rih Rabani/Divine Wind: an Algerian movie with French, Libanese and Quatar co-producing, directed by Merzak Allouache who also wrote the script. Essentially a two person movie in black and white which heightens the Archaic atmosphere. The two people in question are terrorists, one (male) newly recruited, Amine, and one (female) a hardcore veteran, Nour, who arrives somewhat later in the film, Nour. The actress who plays Nour, Sarah Layssac, was present for a Q & A afterwards, and her performance was incredible, conveying the hardcore fanaticism by body language and expression even before Nour opens her mouth for the first time - Nour is frightening throughout - yet also never making her less than human and giving her moments of vulnerability as well. (Usually when no one else but the audience is present to observe them. It's characteristic that when Nour in an internet café gets her orders for a suiicide mission, she is visibly shaken, but later when conveying those orders to Amine - whom we see cry at the very start of the movie already, and who gets to be the openly emotioal one in this film throughout - , she's ruthlessly driven again, not allowing herself to show the tiniest bit of doubt.) The film keeps its politics simple - the group Nour and Amine are with is never named (could be IS, could be another fundamentalist Islamist group), it's not even said the country they're in is Algeria though the mix of languages (Arab and French) suggests that), and there isn't a Westerner in sight. (The forces after the terrorists are local - and for that matter, Muslim - as well, which fits given that most of Islamic terrorism actually kills other Muslims.) It's no big spoiler to say this one doesn't have a happy ending, but it's a fitting one.
Notes from the Q & A: Sarah Layssac did watch some videos of female terrorists early on but then abandoned that since she didn't want to do impersonation, deciding to get into Nour's psyche by using just the clues the script provides and accessing her own darker emotions. Developing a body language for Nour first helped. What she really needed a coach for were the Qu'ran recitations in classic Arabic since she speaks modern Algerian Arabic, which sounds differently.
XY Chelsea, directed by Tim Travers Hawkins (who was present for a Q and A afterwards), documentary about Chelsea Mannig, the Private and IS specialist who leaked US Army documents to Wikileaks in 2010, got sentenced to 35 years in prison, got her sentence commuted by Obama in his last week in office, and at the end of April this year got imprisoned again for contempt of jury. (Since she refuses to testify in the impending Assange procedure.) The portrait is unabashedly pro Chelsea; Tim Travers Hawkins started originally a different type of movie while she was still in prison, which was supposed to deal with the challenge of documenting people who are inaccessible for the camera, with her as one of the cases, then when her sentence was commuted (and he lucked out since he was filming her lawyer when the phone call came!) decided to do a full feature of her. It starts with the commuting of her sentence and was supposed to end with her decision to withdraw from public life post brief and bungled Senate run but due to events overtaking life now ends with her being in prison again, with her lawyer pointing out that the US can use this "contempt of jury" ploy endlessly (Chelsea Manning got released for six days in between, then rearrested) to in effect imprison her without a sentence forever. There is a certain flashback structure - her deployment to Iraq and decision to leak documents is told in retrospect a third into the film, and details about her seven years in prison are spread throughout the movie as flashbacks while the readucting post release makes up the main, present day story. And it's a very personal take making no bones about where the documentary's sympathies lie - i.e. we hear from Chelsea Manning herself and her support structure - lawyers, friends -; there aren't interviews with the people condemning her actions, who are presented via tweets scrolling out on screen instead.
Now, if you show such a documentary at a German Film Festival, where the question "should US war crimes be made public?" is guaranteed to be answered with a thundering "hell YES!", this is no problem. (Full disclosure: this is my reaction as well. For "American", you can also substitute any given nationality, of course, the answer doesn't change.) But in the Q & A, the director mentioned being slightly disappointed that the reaction to his movie was entirely predictable (i.e. the Guardian loved it, the right wing press hated it), and when he said this, I thought: well, then maybe you should have dealt with the accusations against Chelsea more in depth than very briefly mention the "were names of Aghan informants also released and thus endangered?" question. Then again, trying for balance did not get anyone anywhere with the right wing in the recent decade or two or three, and I found it impossible not to admire the courage and endurance it must have taken Ms Manning to a) leak the war crimes info, and b) cope with the aftermath - the deprivation of sleep (23 of 24 hours) immediately after, the repeated solitary confinement, being trans in an all male prison. Personally, I'd have gone insane.If I had the courage to act in the first place.
What struck me upon viewing the movie at once was how very very young she came across in the footage from right after her release. (I also thought about the depressing fact that whistleblowers are treated horribly in general - we had one German soldier last year who went public about right wing extremists in the army and he was almost dismissed dishonorably before people intervened.) And how John Bolton, one of several main contributors to the Iraq War, is in power again, while Ms Manning is back in prison for having principles. (In the Q & A, someone brought up Assange and Hawkins said it's no accident that Assange is in the documentary only via two newsclips very very briefly. Firstly, Assange's story has been told and he tends to make everthing about himself if you give him the slightest chance by interviewing him anyway. Secondly, Chelsea Manning never met him, is not a little appalled of how Wikileaks developed since 2010 (when it was one of the organisations knowing something about cryptography and able to post the material without leading people back to the source, which was why she chose it for the upload), and doesn't refuse to testify out of any sympathy for Assange as a person but because "she thinks the entire trial, prosecuting someone for publishing information like that, is bullshit which has to be objected too and stopped". (BTW, this is also the attitude of our media over here - Assange obnoxious, US lawsuit unfair and big step against democracy and free press.)
Chelsea Manning being trans is an element of the documentary but not what it's all about. Everyone except for her mother in the one scene she's in refers to her with the correct pronouns and her chosen name, and the mother saying "Bradley" and "he" is immediately followed by her correcting herself and saying "I'm learning, it's difficult". (The woman had a stroke, and it really doesn't come across as spite a la Nomi's mother in Sense 8.)
In conclusion: sympathetic, in all senses of the word, and very watchable. Sadly will not reach people who don't already consider Chelsea Mannig one of the good ones, I'm afraid.
The day I lost my shadow, directed by Soudade Kaadan, a Syrian-Libanese (with additional French and Quatar money) movie. Soudade Kaadan, who was present, was until now exclusively a director of documentaries; this was her first feature film. Naturally, one of the questions asked was why the switch. She said that she couldn't experience the war in Syria and keep filming - "I can't film people dying or bodies torn apart, I put my camera away when that happens to be with the people. I had to go to fiction to deal with the war."
Although her movie still doesn't contain torn apart bodies. The horror of war - and of living in a dictatorship - in this story, which is set in 2012 when the war in Syria was just warming up, is conveyed by other means. Sana, our heroine, starts the film racing with her small son Khalil to her flat because there will be a short precious time with both running water and electricity, and they need to wash their clothing. En route upstairs, their IDs are controlled, you only see the gun and the lower body of the soldier doing the controlling, and there is constant background noise - bombs falling from the air. (Evidently the people of Damascus already are past going to air shelters.) That's just the opening sequence. Sana is a pharmacist, and her place of work is devastated the next morning, not because of the bombing but because soldiers did a raid. (Her boss has mysteriously disappeared.) The gas in her oven is the next thing to go and so she joins a friend and her brother on a trip outside of Damascus to get some gas. They split the money for the Taxi (since petrol is rare, a lot of money is needed), but the Taxi has problems at the first check point they run into because Jalal (the brother) is a bit sarcastic and then the Taxi driver (who as it turns out has a camera in the taxi he shouldn't have) panics. Events spiral from there. Jana, the fiery Reem (who has already lost one brother who didn't come back from prison and is afraid to lose Jalal, with whom she argues all the time but whom she clearly loves deeply) and Jalal all come across vividly.
For a movie that deals with war and dictatorship keeping a country in a state of constant terror, the film is amazingly kind about human nature. Some of the soldiers our heroines encounter en route are quickly offended, but they're clearly terrified themselves (doesn't make them less dangerous), and late in the movie, there is a terrific scene between Sana and a soldier who starts out threatening to shoot her and ends up joining her longing for snow since snow stops the war everywhere (impossible to see anything). Also, all the civilians Sana encouters are helpful to her and her friends, full of hospitality despite having little themselves .(In a Hollywood movie, I guess either Sana or Reem would have been threatened with rape at least once.) One of the most devastating sequences starts out in such kindness: the family where Sana found shelter for the night splits up, the older women going outside to perform a mysterious task, and the little girl who remained with Sana offers to show her; turns out the women are digging graves, because everyone knows before the day is over, there will be more dead. They just don't know who will die this time.
The director, who is Syrian herself and now lives in Libanon, said that while the three adult leads are professional actors, practically everyone else are amateurs from the refugee camps, including the boy who plays Sana's son Khalil. "He has these beautiful big yes. But when I met him, he had the skin of a ninety-years-old man, at six years, because his camp only had salt water to use. I thought: If my movie does nothing else, it will help this kid get ouf of there! And so I cast him, and it did. He's now a recognized refugee and safe, along with his family."
The title refers to the one "magical" element of the movie - Jalas is missing his shadow at the start, and the longer the movie takes, the more characters lose their shadows as well. To me, it felt like they were losing their shadows once they were at an emotional point where being afraid all the time had peaked and gone and now they were past fear, but Soudade Kaadan said she left the interpretion of the shadow losses to the viewer. She did find it interesting that in countries which had a recent war, like Croatia, people never asked what it meant, only in countries without a recent war, like Germany. She got the idea from being haunted by the photographs of Hiroshima post bombing, with only shadows left of the people. In her movie, the reverse happens.
It's an intense and compelling film, and so far, I'd say, the best of those I've watched at this year's festival. I hope it will be released in a lot of countries.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1346147.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
But these are minor points, in the end. As far as I can tell, Eileen Atkins' major additions to the rl material she was working with was to insert some drama and obstacles, i.e. instead of falling in love and later gradually transitioning back to friendship, we get Harold, Vita's husband, at first objecting more than he did in rl, and instead of some gradual passion fading, Virginia writing Orlando comes across in part as her exorcising her passion for Vita via recreating her as "a man who turns out to be a woman who in the end is a fiction". (Vita's son Nigel Nicolson called "Orlando" "the most charming love letter in literature", whereas in the play it's that but also a goodbye letter (to the love affair, not the friendship), and a succcessful power struggle where Virginia via her creative skill takes control of the relationship which previously has been Vita's. Who flirted with Virginia from the get go and did all the initializing and pushing of the relationship up to that point, but also is presented as a female Don Juan no more monogamous with Virginia than with anyone else.
Knowing a bit about the people involived going in, I knew this would be that rarity, a historically based same sex relationship depicted without a tragic ending for anyone (I correctly guessed the movie would not touch on Virginia Woolf's suicide which happened many years later). I was also curious abouut how much or little it would specifically deal with the leads being writers. Answer: a lot, though it varies how, not least because we start in Vita's pov and end in Virginia's, which means that one of Vita's initial reasons for approaching the Bloomsbury set in general and Virginia specifically, wanting to be taken serious as a writer instead of writing bestsellers but being dismissed as a dabbling aristocarat (which doesn't happen - Leonard Woolf agrees to publish a book of hers with the Hogarth Press, but basically just for the cash) never gets a real pay off, whereas Virginia's writing is a central subject throughout - the problem of both writing the moment and being in the moment (how?), and as I said, the regaining of emotional control via fictionalising what has taken it. We see Virginia writing, and struggling with it, while we see Vita fllirting, seducing and occasionally arguing with people, so in a way, the movie implicitly shares the opinion of the Bloomsbury's of Vita the aristocractic dabbler versus Virginia the true artist.
Having chided the direction for the occasional staginess, I must also applaud it for makng the most of Knole, Vita's beloved ancestral home (which she couldn't inherit, due to being a woman, and which Virginia gave to Orlando forever), which is short gorgeously, as is the surrounding landscape. And there's one scene where the Woolfs and the Sackville-Nicolsons all four watch an eclipse elsewhere which is breathtakingly beautiful. (BTW, the way back to London in the train also includes the only scene where Virginia and Harold talk (while Leonard and Vita have dozed off on their respective shoulders), and it's one of the most interesting scenes in the film, because they're discussing biography (she's reviewed one he's written) and at the same time Vita and what biography does to a person.
Another neat thing is that the various sexualities on display aren't given any "As you know, Bob" justifrication/explanation scenes but simply presented, including for the supporting characters like Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell and her relationship with the otherwise mainly gay Duncan Grant. Leonard Woolf is the only one depicted devoted to only one person (incidentally, this take on Leonard is like all other's I've seen or read a very sympathetic one - he has to be that rarity, the spouse of a feminist icon not seen as confining or damaging but supporting her throughout), but he doesn't judge anyone else. And lastly: everyone looks great in their 1920s costumes. In conclusion: enjoyable, but not a must in a "omg you HAVE to see this movie" way.
Rih Rabani/Divine Wind: an Algerian movie with French, Libanese and Quatar co-producing, directed by Merzak Allouache who also wrote the script. Essentially a two person movie in black and white which heightens the Archaic atmosphere. The two people in question are terrorists, one (male) newly recruited, Amine, and one (female) a hardcore veteran, Nour, who arrives somewhat later in the film, Nour. The actress who plays Nour, Sarah Layssac, was present for a Q & A afterwards, and her performance was incredible, conveying the hardcore fanaticism by body language and expression even before Nour opens her mouth for the first time - Nour is frightening throughout - yet also never making her less than human and giving her moments of vulnerability as well. (Usually when no one else but the audience is present to observe them. It's characteristic that when Nour in an internet café gets her orders for a suiicide mission, she is visibly shaken, but later when conveying those orders to Amine - whom we see cry at the very start of the movie already, and who gets to be the openly emotioal one in this film throughout - , she's ruthlessly driven again, not allowing herself to show the tiniest bit of doubt.) The film keeps its politics simple - the group Nour and Amine are with is never named (could be IS, could be another fundamentalist Islamist group), it's not even said the country they're in is Algeria though the mix of languages (Arab and French) suggests that), and there isn't a Westerner in sight. (The forces after the terrorists are local - and for that matter, Muslim - as well, which fits given that most of Islamic terrorism actually kills other Muslims.) It's no big spoiler to say this one doesn't have a happy ending, but it's a fitting one.
Notes from the Q & A: Sarah Layssac did watch some videos of female terrorists early on but then abandoned that since she didn't want to do impersonation, deciding to get into Nour's psyche by using just the clues the script provides and accessing her own darker emotions. Developing a body language for Nour first helped. What she really needed a coach for were the Qu'ran recitations in classic Arabic since she speaks modern Algerian Arabic, which sounds differently.
XY Chelsea, directed by Tim Travers Hawkins (who was present for a Q and A afterwards), documentary about Chelsea Mannig, the Private and IS specialist who leaked US Army documents to Wikileaks in 2010, got sentenced to 35 years in prison, got her sentence commuted by Obama in his last week in office, and at the end of April this year got imprisoned again for contempt of jury. (Since she refuses to testify in the impending Assange procedure.) The portrait is unabashedly pro Chelsea; Tim Travers Hawkins started originally a different type of movie while she was still in prison, which was supposed to deal with the challenge of documenting people who are inaccessible for the camera, with her as one of the cases, then when her sentence was commuted (and he lucked out since he was filming her lawyer when the phone call came!) decided to do a full feature of her. It starts with the commuting of her sentence and was supposed to end with her decision to withdraw from public life post brief and bungled Senate run but due to events overtaking life now ends with her being in prison again, with her lawyer pointing out that the US can use this "contempt of jury" ploy endlessly (Chelsea Manning got released for six days in between, then rearrested) to in effect imprison her without a sentence forever. There is a certain flashback structure - her deployment to Iraq and decision to leak documents is told in retrospect a third into the film, and details about her seven years in prison are spread throughout the movie as flashbacks while the readucting post release makes up the main, present day story. And it's a very personal take making no bones about where the documentary's sympathies lie - i.e. we hear from Chelsea Manning herself and her support structure - lawyers, friends -; there aren't interviews with the people condemning her actions, who are presented via tweets scrolling out on screen instead.
Now, if you show such a documentary at a German Film Festival, where the question "should US war crimes be made public?" is guaranteed to be answered with a thundering "hell YES!", this is no problem. (Full disclosure: this is my reaction as well. For "American", you can also substitute any given nationality, of course, the answer doesn't change.) But in the Q & A, the director mentioned being slightly disappointed that the reaction to his movie was entirely predictable (i.e. the Guardian loved it, the right wing press hated it), and when he said this, I thought: well, then maybe you should have dealt with the accusations against Chelsea more in depth than very briefly mention the "were names of Aghan informants also released and thus endangered?" question. Then again, trying for balance did not get anyone anywhere with the right wing in the recent decade or two or three, and I found it impossible not to admire the courage and endurance it must have taken Ms Manning to a) leak the war crimes info, and b) cope with the aftermath - the deprivation of sleep (23 of 24 hours) immediately after, the repeated solitary confinement, being trans in an all male prison. Personally, I'd have gone insane.If I had the courage to act in the first place.
What struck me upon viewing the movie at once was how very very young she came across in the footage from right after her release. (I also thought about the depressing fact that whistleblowers are treated horribly in general - we had one German soldier last year who went public about right wing extremists in the army and he was almost dismissed dishonorably before people intervened.) And how John Bolton, one of several main contributors to the Iraq War, is in power again, while Ms Manning is back in prison for having principles. (In the Q & A, someone brought up Assange and Hawkins said it's no accident that Assange is in the documentary only via two newsclips very very briefly. Firstly, Assange's story has been told and he tends to make everthing about himself if you give him the slightest chance by interviewing him anyway. Secondly, Chelsea Manning never met him, is not a little appalled of how Wikileaks developed since 2010 (when it was one of the organisations knowing something about cryptography and able to post the material without leading people back to the source, which was why she chose it for the upload), and doesn't refuse to testify out of any sympathy for Assange as a person but because "she thinks the entire trial, prosecuting someone for publishing information like that, is bullshit which has to be objected too and stopped". (BTW, this is also the attitude of our media over here - Assange obnoxious, US lawsuit unfair and big step against democracy and free press.)
Chelsea Manning being trans is an element of the documentary but not what it's all about. Everyone except for her mother in the one scene she's in refers to her with the correct pronouns and her chosen name, and the mother saying "Bradley" and "he" is immediately followed by her correcting herself and saying "I'm learning, it's difficult". (The woman had a stroke, and it really doesn't come across as spite a la Nomi's mother in Sense 8.)
In conclusion: sympathetic, in all senses of the word, and very watchable. Sadly will not reach people who don't already consider Chelsea Mannig one of the good ones, I'm afraid.
The day I lost my shadow, directed by Soudade Kaadan, a Syrian-Libanese (with additional French and Quatar money) movie. Soudade Kaadan, who was present, was until now exclusively a director of documentaries; this was her first feature film. Naturally, one of the questions asked was why the switch. She said that she couldn't experience the war in Syria and keep filming - "I can't film people dying or bodies torn apart, I put my camera away when that happens to be with the people. I had to go to fiction to deal with the war."
Although her movie still doesn't contain torn apart bodies. The horror of war - and of living in a dictatorship - in this story, which is set in 2012 when the war in Syria was just warming up, is conveyed by other means. Sana, our heroine, starts the film racing with her small son Khalil to her flat because there will be a short precious time with both running water and electricity, and they need to wash their clothing. En route upstairs, their IDs are controlled, you only see the gun and the lower body of the soldier doing the controlling, and there is constant background noise - bombs falling from the air. (Evidently the people of Damascus already are past going to air shelters.) That's just the opening sequence. Sana is a pharmacist, and her place of work is devastated the next morning, not because of the bombing but because soldiers did a raid. (Her boss has mysteriously disappeared.) The gas in her oven is the next thing to go and so she joins a friend and her brother on a trip outside of Damascus to get some gas. They split the money for the Taxi (since petrol is rare, a lot of money is needed), but the Taxi has problems at the first check point they run into because Jalal (the brother) is a bit sarcastic and then the Taxi driver (who as it turns out has a camera in the taxi he shouldn't have) panics. Events spiral from there. Jana, the fiery Reem (who has already lost one brother who didn't come back from prison and is afraid to lose Jalal, with whom she argues all the time but whom she clearly loves deeply) and Jalal all come across vividly.
For a movie that deals with war and dictatorship keeping a country in a state of constant terror, the film is amazingly kind about human nature. Some of the soldiers our heroines encounter en route are quickly offended, but they're clearly terrified themselves (doesn't make them less dangerous), and late in the movie, there is a terrific scene between Sana and a soldier who starts out threatening to shoot her and ends up joining her longing for snow since snow stops the war everywhere (impossible to see anything). Also, all the civilians Sana encouters are helpful to her and her friends, full of hospitality despite having little themselves .(In a Hollywood movie, I guess either Sana or Reem would have been threatened with rape at least once.) One of the most devastating sequences starts out in such kindness: the family where Sana found shelter for the night splits up, the older women going outside to perform a mysterious task, and the little girl who remained with Sana offers to show her; turns out the women are digging graves, because everyone knows before the day is over, there will be more dead. They just don't know who will die this time.
The director, who is Syrian herself and now lives in Libanon, said that while the three adult leads are professional actors, practically everyone else are amateurs from the refugee camps, including the boy who plays Sana's son Khalil. "He has these beautiful big yes. But when I met him, he had the skin of a ninety-years-old man, at six years, because his camp only had salt water to use. I thought: If my movie does nothing else, it will help this kid get ouf of there! And so I cast him, and it did. He's now a recognized refugee and safe, along with his family."
The title refers to the one "magical" element of the movie - Jalas is missing his shadow at the start, and the longer the movie takes, the more characters lose their shadows as well. To me, it felt like they were losing their shadows once they were at an emotional point where being afraid all the time had peaked and gone and now they were past fear, but Soudade Kaadan said she left the interpretion of the shadow losses to the viewer. She did find it interesting that in countries which had a recent war, like Croatia, people never asked what it meant, only in countries without a recent war, like Germany. She got the idea from being haunted by the photographs of Hiroshima post bombing, with only shadows left of the people. In her movie, the reverse happens.
It's an intense and compelling film, and so far, I'd say, the best of those I've watched at this year's festival. I hope it will be released in a lot of countries.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1346147.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.