Rowan Sullivan, Author at FilmRoot

176

Beatriz’s War – Melodrama Following the Indonesian Occupation

Beatriz’s War Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

Why Watch Beatriz’s War?

For a brief history lesson on East Timor and one of the lesser known genocides of the 20th Century.
To follow a strong unmovable woman that sticks by the old ways.
For an East Timorese adaptation of the story of Martin Guerre.

From: East Timor, Asia
Watch: Trailer, Website, IMDb
Next: First They Killed My Father, The Look of Silence, The Rocket

A Brief History Lesson on East Timor

As mentioned in the opening scenes of Beatriz’s War, East Timor was a Portuguese colony until 1975 when the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) declared independence. However, their independence was short lived, as Indonesian forces invaded 9 days later to take control of the entire island. Indonesia then occupied East Timor for 24 years until East Timor finally regained its independence in 1999.

Beatriz’s War takes place over the 24 years of the Indonesian occupation. It depicts the violence of the Indonesian occupation as well as the fragmented East Timorese resistance happening around Beatriz.

Strong (or Stubborn) Independent Women

Beatriz is both strong and independent. She’s married off in the opening scenes as a young girl but due to the gentle nature of her young husband, she’s always in control. Like her father, the leader of the community, we’re always led to believe that she’s more likely to take a stand and join the fight against the Indonesians than her husband.

However, her strength seems to turn to stubbornness in the second half of the film when her gentle husband disappears in a massacre. Her community mourns the losses of the men and children killed by Indonesian forces, but she stubbornly refuses to believe that her husband is truly dead. She also never accepts her new reality, trying to maintain her old way of life by abiding by traditions. Her stubborn denial is a sign of the trauma caused by the violent occupation.

Fitting a French Legal Case into The History of East Timor

Martin Guerre was a French peasant from the 16th century who was at the center of a famous case of imposture. Several years after he left his wife and child, a man claiming to be him appeared and tricked his wife and son for three years before he was eventually found out. His story has been dramatized many times for film and TV over the years and is also inserted into the second half of Beatriz’s War after the departure of the Indonesian occupiers to emphasize the length of the occupation.

Primarily, the adaptation gives Beatriz’s War a lot of melodrama. It sets of a battle of emotions between Beatriz and her community as to the origin of a man who arrives in their community 20 years later claiming to be Beatriz’s husband. If you can get past the melodrama, the inclusion of the Martin Guerre story also highlights the impact of the long Indonesian occupation. Whilst the occupation physically destroyed a generation, the length of the occupation also helped to mentally blur a generation. With no photos, Beatriz’s image of her husband has faded over 20 years to a point where she can no longer recognize him. The long, traumatic occupation enabled the Martin Guerre story to happen.

What to Watch Next

First They Killed My Father feels like the closest film to Beatriz’s War. Both films follow a girl who sees their country occupied by an opposing force. Both films show the occupation and the genocides that go with it. However, whilst First they Killed My Father focuses on a girl’s perspective, Beatriz’s War takes place over 25 years.

For more films about the atrocities committed by Indonesians, check out Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries: The Look of Silence and The Act of Killing. Both documentaries look at the free-living leaders of Indonesian death squad that were responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Indonesians. The Look of Silence even gets the perpetrators to act out how they did it, with the killers slowly coming to realize the grotesque crimes they’ve committed.

Or if you’re looking for more stories from South East Asia featuring kids in coming-of-age stories, check out The Rocket from Laos and Golden Kingdom from Myanmar.

177

Man With A Movie Camera – Cinematic Innovation from Soviet Russia

Man With A Movie Camera Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Man With A Movie Camera is one of the most influential films from the silent era. Made in 1929 by Dziga Vertov, it uses a range of effects that have been copied throughout the existence of cinema. It was one of the first to employ rapid cutting, split screens, slow motion, and dissolves. It also threw in a load of magic through messing with perspective, using stop motion, and literally having magicians on screen. All the effects come together to create a work imbued with excitement for the potential of modernity to change Russia and the world. This film feels like a celebration of life bottled up in a time capsule from 1920’s urban Russia.

From: Russia, Europe
Watch: Kanopy, YouTube, JustWatch
Next: Battleship Potemkin, I Am Cuba, Metropolis

178

The Wolves (Los Lobos) – Berlinale 2020

The Wolves is a spiritual sister to Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. Instead of a boisterous white mum and daughter living in a motel by Disney World, The Wolves features a single mum with two young boys that have just crossed the border into the United States. The kids are happy to follow their mum and spend more and more days passing time in a shabby apartment on the understanding that they’re going to Disneyland.

The two boys are stuck at home everyday making their own entertainment whilst their mum works double shifts to try and create a better future. There’s no school for them to go to and they’re forbidden from leaving the apartment. Any chances of being caught and deported must be avoided.

Despite being stuck in the apartment all day, The Wolves is presented with a lot of warm nostalgia. There’s a slow and lazy guitar soundtrack that generates the same warm melancholic tones of films imbued in Americana like Mud, Bombay Beach, or even parts of Thelma and Louise. There’s also warmth in the games that the two boys play to keep themselves occupied and the drawings that come to life in their imagination. Even though the melancholic soundtrack and bleak surroundings hint that the American dream is out of reach, their playfulness shows it won’t stop them dreaming.

The Wolves is an ode to the faceless people of America. Not just the immigrants that cross the southern border seeking a better life, but the homeless, and anybody scraping together a life living below the poverty line. A few times in the film, Samuel Kishi Leopo (the director) inserts montages of portraits of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds living within the new family’s community. All the portraits feature people staring straight into the camera like you might see in a National Geographic magazine, showing them without anything to hide. It shows them purely, in front of their humble homes. What these people have in common is an absence of the white picket fenced house promised by the American dream. It’s a sign that being American, or simply being in America for those that migrate north, doesn’t automatically grant you a well spring to health and prosperity. The Wolves honestly highlights the people that the country has left behind.

For more films from the Berlin film festival, head to our Berlinale home page.

179

Ruinas Tu Reino – Deconstructing Latin American Cinema

Ruinas Tu Reino Film Difficulty Ranking: 5

We don’t believe in a cinema that yells “¡Viva la revolución!” but in one that instead formally critiques the structures that originally created the profound injustice that exists today.
Pedro Escoto, Director of Ruinas Tu Reino

If you’re not familiar with slow film or meditative cinema, the lack of story line and raw experimental shots of Ruinas Tu Reino might prove to be too much of a challenge. The long shots of the sea and fishermen sitting around makes the film feel more like a film exhibit you’d see in a modern art museum. However, if you have the patience to observe, you’ll find a film imbued with poetry; literally in words that appear on screen, and visually in the meditative shots of the fisherman’s existence. It’s a film that seeks to deconstruct Latin American cinema by transcending historical narratives, reverting to DIY production, and focusing on the power of very raw images.

To get more from this film, I strongly recommend reading Ela Bittencourt’s profile of Pablo Escoto for Lyssaria and also Pedro Escoto’s interview with Pedro Segura for Ojos Abiertos (in Spanish).

From: Mexico, North America
Watch: Trailer, Letterboxd, Vimeo (via Tweet from Director with Password)
Next: Mysterious Object at Noon, Too Early, Too Late, El Dorado XXI

180

Absent Present – One Man Disappears in a Documentary About Migration

Absent Present Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

Why Watch Absent Present?

If you’re a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History
To uncover the mystery behind a missing person, like Luis Ospina’s A Paper Tiger
To examine the legacy of colonization and slavery on African migration

From: Germany, Namibia, Europe, Africa
Watch: Trailer, IMDb
Next: A Paper Tiger, A Storm Was Coming, Little Dieter Needs to Fly

It’s All About How the Story is Told

Angelika Levi’s Absent Present is one well made documentary. If you’ve ever listened to an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s equally well constructed Revisionist History you’ll find similarities with Angelika Levi’s documentary method. Like Revisionist History, Levi starts with an event – in this case the disappearance of her friend Benji – and unravels the threads linked to it to uncover a whole chain of associations from colonialism to migration. Having explored more of the threads linked to Benji’s life, we see his disappearance in a new light.

Uncovering the Mystery by Looking at the Big Picture

Benji’s disappearance is a mystery that Levi tries to unravel by following his path. Born in Namibia, he was one of many young Namibian children that were brought to the GDR (German Democratic Republic otherwise known as East Germany) having survived the Cassinga Massacre (a South African bombing raid on Namibian independence fighters). He spent 11 years in East Germany from ages 3-14 at an orphanage and German school, and became a naturalized East German citizen. However, in 1989 the GDR collapsed, East and West Germany reunified, and Namibia gained its independence. As a result, Benji was sent back to Namibia despite having grown up in Germany. Back in his birth country, Benji was kidnapped by Angolan soldiers and forced to join their liberation struggle. He managed to escape and returned to Europe disguised as a tourist. He eventually made it back to Germany, but disappeared a few years later. Levi travels from Germany to Namibia and back to Germany in Benji’s footsteps to try and investigate his disappearance. But ultimately, as she retraces his steps she finds the foot prints of more African refugees in Senegal and Spain and starts to uncover the hypocrisy of anti-immigration policies. By following the footsteps of migrants like Benji, Levi gives us a look at the big picture, which gives us a context to help explain Benji’s disappearance.

The Hypocrisy of Anti-Immigration Policy

Levi starts her broader investigation with the Columbus monument in Barcelona, a grand 19th century column that celebrates the discovery of the New World. At the top, Columbus points towards his ‘discovery’, a world where Columbus received gifts of welcome and from which Spain gained incredible wealth and prosperity. The hypocrisy of the monument is that it celebrates a migrant that crossed oceans in search of wealth, whilst today the same country that benefited from the wealth of other continents turns away migrants with similar intentions.

Levi also highlights the underlying racism behind Spain’s treatment of African migrants in the Canary Islands, juxtaposing images of white tourists relaxing on beaches and running through woods with images of Africans detained in camps just meters from tourist hot spots. The fact that these camps, that almost specifically hold African migrants, are built on the foundations of former slave camps makes it all the worse. Seen in this context, it’s not surprising that Benji tries to return to Europe disguised as a tourist with bleached hair. For Benji, and the African migrants that are detained in Spain, Europe is the only option left in their attempt to survive. It’s “Barcelona or Barsaak” (the Wolof for land of the dead). Viewed in its historical context, the anti-immigration policies of Europe look like an evolution of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. The Africans were forcibly brought to Europe and the Americas as slaves, forcibly exploited in colonialism, and now they are forcibly shut out of the riches their work and land created, detained as migrants.

Whilst the big picture Levi uncovers in Absent Present doesn’t answer why Benji disappeared, it does connect Benji’s forcible removal from his home country, and forcible repatriation to a brutal history of exploitation. It uncovers a hypocritical and racist history that takes African bodies when they’re needed and discards them when they’re not. Seen in this context Benji’s disappearance is not a mystery, but a symptom of the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and illegal immigration.

What to Watch Next

If you’re looking for another documentary that attempts to find a missing person, check out Luis Ospina’s A Paper Tiger. It tries to track down a Colombian artist named Manrique Figueroa by interviewing all the friends he left behind.

Or if you’re looking for more films in which migration and colonialism are a major topic I’d recommend exploring the following:

Atlantics – a feature film from Senegal that conveys the impact of a lost generation venturing north on their friends and family back at home.
Tenere – a documentary that tracks migrants crossing the Sahara desert on the back of Mad Max style converted trucks in Niger in quests to reach Europe.
A Storm Was Coming – a documentary that artistically represents how the Spanish Empire erased the indigenous cultures of Equatorial Guinea.

Or if you’re just looking for more documentaries narrated in English by great German film makers, check out Werner Herzog. His film, Little Dieter Needs to Fly is a great place to start. It’s a film about the life of a German war survivor that becomes a prisoner of war in Vietnam.