Kurds. Armenians. The Holocaust. Death row inmates. Human rights abuses loom large in this year's German films and co-productions at TIFF. This thread emerged last year with The Whistleblower (at TIFF 2010, in theatres now), Storm (which we showed at the European Union Film Festival Toronto 2010) and the Guantanamo Trap (at Hot Docs earlier this year) among others.
I started my festival schedule yesterday with the Özcan Alper’s feature film Future Lasts Forever (with several loving references to Wenders' Lisbon Story and Wings of Desire). It opens with a stunning scene of a majestic horse running wild in a rugged mountain landscape, only to be shot dead in flight -- an image that returns at the end of the film as a metaphor for the plight of Kurds and Armenians (and other persecuted and displaced people). The film documents atrocities against the living and the dead. So in a way does Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss, a documentary that shows the simple futility of the death penalty. The German master auteur gets close to dead men walking (and their victims' families), murderers as they await their deaths in US prisons. Herzog announced that he will continue working on the subject.
Agnieszka Holland's ghetto and Holocaust drama In Darkness, a German co-production with a few of Germany's best-known film actors, will represent Poland in next year's Foreign Language Oscar race. In a way even Wenders' PINA (also an Oscar contender) echoes this recurring theme of violence and victimization, with the inclusion of Pina Bausch's haunting interpretation of Le Sacre du Printemps, with its ritualistic sacrificial climax.
"We cannot get rid of this pain inside," a Kurdish woman laments the killing of her husband in the documentary elegies woven into Future Lasts Forever, as protagonist Ahmed ponders Orhan Pamuk's question who the damned of the world really are.
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
