Berlinale 2014 REVIEW: Inbetween Worlds

At an Afghani outpost, German soldier Jesper comes into conflict with his conscience; should he help his interpreter Tarik save himself and his family or should he follow orders? The wordless opening scene zooming in on Jesper being deployed (again) to Afghanistan is a memorable piece of cinema. It has a semi-documentary feel to it and prepares us for the taciturn military context we will find ourselves in. The threat level is extreme from the beginning, even though not much actually happens for quite a while. Director Aladag names authenticity as her guiding light. "I didn’t want a German Turk speaking a fantasy dialect in Morocco,” she sums up her decision to shoot on location. She wanted to find out how the system works (and successfully withstood attempts at control and supervision in the process).

The team of mainly women Aladag works with directs a cast of 99% men. The surprisingly self-financed writer-director-producer is aided by Ronald Zehrfeld (best known for his role in “Barbara”), who is enough of a cautious, exploratory and non-narcissistic actor that he invests a potentially testosterone-charged soldier role with depth and sensitivity. Young Afghani lay actor Mohammed Mohsen is an admirable counterpart to the seasoned German character actor in what is essentially a two-hander, a close-up of their tentative brother-brother (for Jesper) or father-son (for Tarik) relationship.

Aladag manages to viscerally portray the culture clash German soldiers and Afghan fighters and staffers struggle to negotiate daily, between learned and felt allegiances and traditions and new friendships in a mutually alien situation determined by constant ad hoc life-and-death decisions based on not much more than instinct and hope for the best. Without (hardly ever) slipping into Hollywood war kitsch or pushing us over the bloody edge, she dares to tell a story that leaves a lot of questions unanswered because they are unanswerable. One Berlinale programmer commented to me that the film is “more about being German than about war.” I would say it is more revealing in its investigation of Germany's actions in the world today (since we all already knew that war is stupid). As a matter of fact, I cannot name another major German film on the subject of Germany’s new military global engagement, despite Germany's involvement in Afghanistan still being a point of contention (and there is some booing after the screening, just like there was an outcry of opposition just now when the new German defense minister said she wanted to expand Germany's mission to Africa). A recent German TV documentary tackled Germany’s so-called Kunduz Affair that cost many Afghani civilians their lives. The docu-drama also relied on the tension between following orders vs. individual assessment and decision-making in highly complex situations. What I didn’t know before is that German soldiers do swear to follow orders -- but also their own moral compass, something owing to our 20th century history of course, but nevertheless unique. Jesper finds himself in exactly the same conundrum more than once and manoeuvres as best he knows how.

“Zwischen Welten” –the perfect title as never the two worlds shall come together-- is an important film. Could it have been an even better film? Yes. The script could have been a bit less functional and didactic to distract us less from the plot and characters (here comes the scene where we get introduced to the Afghan-Western “what are foreign troops doing here” discourse). The soldiers might be a bit too touchy-feely in their relations with the (ex-Taliban, now allied) local fighters. The support cast could have been a bit more rounded. But that might have also made it too Hollywood.

After the screening I happened to strike up a conversation with a German TV journalist who told me he not only reported from the ISAF camps in Afghanistan but also has family connections to the region and speaks Pashtun and Dari (the languages spoken in the film). “This is exactly what it’s like in Afghanistan right now,” he categorically told me. Aladag seems to have accomplished her high goal of authenticity. Don’t expect the intensity and clear indictment of "12 Years a Slave". Instead I am left with a feeling of diffuse uncertainty on all sides -and most uncomfortably the question: What would I do?-- and many shades of grey in a lose-lose situation. "You have the watch, we have the time," the Afghani militia commander tells Jesper in a negotiation. The international operation is called Enduring Freedom. Let's hope that at some point in the not too distant future it will be more than US war poetry.

by Jutta Brendemuehl, Toronto

image: "Zwischen Welten" by Bjoern Kommerell, Independent Artists Filmproduktion