One of our long-standing film partnerships in Canada is with Toronto's Planet in Focus Film Festival, with whom we share an interest in pressing environmental issues. Their new programmer Marc Glassman this year has chosen a German film, co-presented with the Goethe-Institut, that received rave reviews at the Berlin Film Festival. Here is Marc's personal take on Sebastian Mez's
Metamorphosen (
trailer) and why you should see it at Planet in Focus on
November 22.
"Sebastian Mez’s rigorous and gorgeously shot film
Metamorphosen premiered at this year’s Berlinale and will have its Toronto debut this month at the Planet in Focus Environmental film festival, which takes place from Nov. 21-24.
Mez’ film is a tragic, intensely evocative piece about contamination, environmental destruction and the appalling consequences of tyranny. Its title evokes the controversial composition by Richard Strauss, a memoriam to the devastation of Munich—including its Opera House—during the final stages of the Second World War. The film’s other cultural antecedent is Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which a simple man is transformed into a bug.
Metamorphosen is set in the southern Urals in Russia, a foreboding area of low rising mountains, turgid rivers and endless fields that extend to Kazakhstan. In the fall of 1957, a tank, which contained highly radioactive water, exploded at the region’s Mayak nuclear plant.
Experts on radioactive explosions rate the disaster in the top five of infamy, along with Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima and Chernobyl but few people know about it because the Soviet Union’s authorities were able to keep the story secret until Perestroika 30 years later.
Mez captures the simple human stories of Russian peasants and factory workers who miraculously survived the explosion, but
the film has a far wider agenda.
Using his photographic skills, Mez shoots Metamorphosen in black and white with an eye that captures individuals alienated from their environments, whether in kitsch interiors or in arid cityscapes that are gradually being abandoned
as the oldest generation of survivors of this nuclear holocaust dies out. His figures are as abandoned—and as stunningly gorgeous--as Richard Avedon’s stark cowboys in his series on the American West with the appalling addition that they’re condemned to death by radioactive poisoning.
Watching Metamorphosen isn’t a sad experience. Neither is listening to late Strauss or reading Kafka. The evocative images of Mez and the stories of his rural Russians, who have contrived to live for more than 50 years since the nuclear disaster attests to the human spirit and its capacity to survive and grow in even the most difficult of circumstances.
Metamorphosen is film worth seeing—and telling others to view, too."
Marc Glassman is a Toronto freelance writer and programmer, the editor of POV and Montage magazines, author of several books on Canadian film and a long-time partner and collaborator of the Goethe-Institut Toronto.
