Jasper Sharp : The Day Will Come

Currently browsing The Day Will Come:

26
Nov

Thessaloniki Flashback part 3: The Day Will Come

Iris Berben and Katharina Schüttler in Susanne Schneider’s The Day Will Come (Es kommt der Tag)

Five days back in the bitter chill of London and Greece is already beginning to seem like a distant memory. Nevertheless, I still have a couple more films I want to revisit from Thessaloniki before moving onto other things. One of the things about festivals is that, after a number of days of rapacious film-viewing, you begin to notice certain themes or trends emerging in your habits. By the end of the first weekend, I’d realised that over half the films I’d watched were from German directors, mainly due to the choice of Fatih Akin’s multi-cultural comedy Soup Kitchen as the opening night screening and the exhaustive Werner Herzog retrospective. The first Herzog film I caught which I hadn’t seen before, the hypnotic 1989 TV documentary Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun also highlighted another trend at the festival, which was the number of films either set or made in Africa. The Egyptian film Heliopolis I looked at in some length in my last posting, but there was also Sherry Horman’s Desert Flower, based on the best-selling memoirs of Somali supermodel Waris Dirie, the Belgian/French co-production of The Day God Walked Away (Le jour où Dieu est parti en voyage) directed by Philippe Van Leeuw, whose portrait of a young woman caught in the midst of the 1994 Rwandan genocide earned Ruth Nirere the best actress trophy, and Chasing Moses, a well-meaning but otherwise truly execrable offering set in Nairobi from local boy Alexandros Konstantaras – I don’t want to be too cruel as I understand the director’s motives for this amateurish camcorder atrocity was to give Kenyans a chance to star and participate in the making of a feature, but really, this was not film festival material, and to be honest, there are filmmakers in Kenya already making far superior works to this (for example, Michael Wanguhu’s excellent documentary on the new Kenyan hip-hop scene, Hip Hop Colony from 2006).

Anyway, back to Germany, a country that seems to be coming out with a lot of really interesting stuff at the moment. Susanne Schneider’s The Day Will Come (Es kommt der Tag), actually a co-production with France, also highlighted another trend in the festival, films about terrorists, also the subject of Koji Wakamatsu’s docudrama United Red Army and Filipino director John Torres’ experimental (and somewhat self-indulgent) montage of observational footage shot in Manila and Berlin, Todo Todo Teros (2006), screened as part of the Philippines Rising section. Schneider’s film bears little relation to either of these aforementioned titles, neither concerned with reconstructing the facts of true-life events like Wakamatsu’s recent masterpiece or fellow-German Uli Edel’s slickly superficial and quite unsatisfying The Baader Meinhof Complex from last year, nor a more conceptual examination of what is meant by the word ‘terrorism’ as Torres’ film. Instead it’s a character study, centred around a proud middle-aged woman, Judith, whose radical activities in the 1970s forced her to disappear off to France where she has now forged a new life living on a family-owned vineyard in the Alsace region with a French husband and son and daughter. When her daughter, Alice, abandoned as a child when Judith went underground to avoid police capture, turns up on their doorstep incognito, she is forced to confront her past.

An awkward family gathering in The Day Will Come.

I have to admit, I didn’t go into The Day Will Come with the highest of expectations, probably in part due to the rather unmemorable title, which had me referring to it as “that German film” whenever it came up in conversation during the rest of the week. The film isn’t interested in detailing the true-life activities of the German red movement of the 1970s, and starts off slowly. Just as it picks up and we’re geared into expecting a very European style of psychological suspense thriller in the vein of, say, Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, the film suddenly moves into more interesting territory as it lays open its themes of guilt, self-justification and inter-generational conflict, with a standout scene where Judith’s aged bon-vivant in-laws turn up unexpectedly for a family lunch in which Alice threatens to expose her estranged mother’s skeletons in the closet constantly threatening to career off into Mike Leigh levels of catastrophic awkwardness.

Iris Berben confronts the past in The Day Will Come

One of the most interesting things is the Alsace setting, a formerly German-speaking area of France. Even though the film doesn’t really emphasize the political motivations of Judith’s peers, she does state that theirs was a rebellion against the wartime complicity of her parent’s generation, “everything we despised incarnate”, before railing against the self-absorbed complacency of her iPod generation children who’ve never had to fight for anything and addressing the wartime resistance activities of their French grandfather as a case where underground activity is perfectly justifiable. This is something that so many seem to people forget when they violently denounce street demonstrations and political activism – back in the Edwardian period there was little support for the suffragettes, and nearer in time in the 1980s, police regularly clashed with Anti-Apartheid demonstrators, yet who today would deny women the vote or suggest that black South Africans should be treated as second-class citizens in their own country? There is a fine line between when youthful idealism tips into violent or criminal activity. Mercifully, The Day Will Come doesn’t invite us to make easy judgements on its characters, opening up arguments about the validity of the more extreme actions of the the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s at a time when so many of us are content to sit shrugging our shoulders impotently in the face of world events.

Katharina Schuttler as the abandoned daughter Alice

I’m not sure whether The Day Will Come has much in the way of distribution as yet. Like several of the titles at Thessaloniki this year, it played at Toronto International Film Festival in September: you can read a little more about it here. It’s a deceptively-simple slow-burner of a movie, but incredibly compelling and thoughtfully constructed with some great performances, especially Katharina Schuttler as Alice, which earned her a special mention from the jury. One of the bests of the fest for me. I hope it gets the opportunity to screen more widely.

Posted at 18:49 on 26 November 2009

Filed under news.

Comments Off

18
Nov

Greece is the word: Mid-fest thoughts on Thessaloniki

It’s been quite some days since I touched down in Thessaloniki, and as is the usual case when you arrive at a new festival in a strange city, it has taken me a few days to find my feet and put some of my thoughts up. Well, this was always going to be something of a busman’s holiday so constant updates were never really on the cards, but I had intended to write perhaps a few posts at least.

I’m here for the full 10-day stretch, and aside from a few introductions, don’t have many duties, so it’s a great excuse to watch films that I usually wouldn’t get a chance to experience and to enjoy a new city. I’m feeling a bit discombobulated at the moment, as most of the filmmaking guests are only staying a few days, so for example Koji Wakamatsu has already gone after appearing over the weekend to promote United Red Army here, and several of the lively group of Philipino directors, including the charismatic Khavn de la Cruz, also departed in the small hours of the morning. I guess a fresh load of new faces will be arriving over the coming days.

I think the relatively relaxed atmosphere of the city has encouraged a certain lethargy in me after such a hectic couple of months, and while I’m catching a lot of films, I’m also catching up on a fair amount of sleep too, despite the fact that the screenings for the Beyond Pink sidebar I helped with all begin after midnight – things keep going pretty late here, and though its a bit of a pain having to stay up so late while remaining relatively clear-headed, its no real hardship and I’m really impressed with the level of interest these films are getting. For example, last night saw Wakamatsu’s Secret Acts Behind Walls playing alongside Noboru Tanaka’s Watcher in the Attic on two of the five screens used by the festival, and both were more or less full, making this the most successful by far of all the pink retrospectives I’ve worked on across the world since the book came out.

Thessaloniki International Film Festival is the first time I’ve ever been to Greece, something that’s always been of a mystery to me as having grown up reading the books of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, and John Fowles’ The Magus, the country has always seems cosily familiar without my ever having visited. Somehow I always knew I’d love it, the food, the relaxed pace of life (the Rough Guide to Greece describes it as ‘sybaritic’), the sense of such a deep-rooted underlying history and culture. The city feels at once familiarly European, but somehow slightly more exotic than other Mediterranean countries I’ve visited like France, Italy Spain, for example. I guess Thessaloniki’s geographic situation, right in the northeast of Greece in the region of Macedonia accounts for its rather special atmosphere, reflected in its strong programming of Balkan cinema. Its the country’s second largest city and a major port, yet not too touristy. The people are very friendly, with some of the most striking-looking women in the world, and the prices are cheap. Festival or no festival, I know I’ll be back to this part of world pretty soon.

Time prevents me writing too much about the actual films at the moment, and I’d also wanted to post some of my photos, but annoyingly forgot to bring my connection lead to download them to my computer, so this will have to wait till I get back to London next week. One thing that did dawn on me though was that in the first few days, most of the films I’d seen were from Germany. There’s a complete Werner Herzog retrospective, with Herzog arriving in town for the next weekend, allowing me to catch up on some of his lesser-known documentaries that I’d probably not get a chance to see elsewhere. Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen was quite an inspired choice for the opening screening. True, it’s comedy was fairly laboured at times, but its easy going charm and story of a Greek immigrant in Germany’s attempts to keep his restaurant going against all odds went down well with local audiences here while presenting a positively multi-cultural image of Europe that would have had Robert Kilroy-Silk weeping. Another very powerful German film was The Day Will Come, a story about a former 1970s activist who disappears underground after abandoning her daughter, and finds her past catching up with her and her new family who run a vineyard in Alsace, by the German border. This film received its premiere hear in Thessaloniki, and was a really pleasant surprise.

Lots more other strong works too: I’ll write later about Samson and Delilah, this year’s Australian contender for the Best Foreign Language Oscar (although its Aboriginal characters actually barely speak at all), the polished Egyptian indie Heliopolis, and Dennis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique, a Montreal-based equivalent to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. Right now I’ve got to dash and watch a film….

Posted at 17:51 on 18 November 2009

Filed under news.

Comments Off