Chopped storytelling: a recap of Signals section Changing Channels

A still from Pablo Larraín’s Profugos. International Film Festival of Rotterdam

HBO standars have brought TV series into a Golden Era. Since the nineties, when shows like The Sopranos or The Wire shocked the audience with complex and layered plots and deep characters, more and more directors have stepped back from the big screen into television to find a more comfortable place to develop their stories.

David Lynch had his share with Twin Peaks, Gus Van Sant as well, and Martin Scorsese did the same three years ago when he led the production of Boardwalk Empire. Some directors, though, have become icons thanks to television, that is the case of Joss Whedon (Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Firefly) or J.J.Abrams (Lost).

The expansion of HBO
So it isn’t strange that the film industry had to change its direction and focus on the small screen. Nowadays, HBO is exporting his successful model into other countries. Such as Chile, where acclaimed director Pablo Larraín (whose film No is nominated for the Oscars) has been backed by the big company to create Prófugos, a story of corruption and Mafia but also a vision of the past and present of Chile through the eyes of marginal characters.

In Poland, HBO helped director Agnieszka Holland to develop Burning Bush, a historical series about the political situation of Czech Republic in the late 1960s, after the tragic suicide of Prague student Jan Palach, who set fire to himself as a protest against Soviet occupation. 

A scene from Burning Bush. International Film Festival of Rotterdam

Also Chilean director Sebastián Silva developed, in the USA, his story The Boring Life of Jacqueline, about an unemployed actress in New York. This project in particular shows the blurred frontier between TV and the Internet, since it is an exclusive production for HBO Digitals.

However, the rising force of this “chopped storytelling” makes possible for script writers and directors to build a project without such a big financing support. In Brazil, Felipe Bragança is working in a transmedia production about the counter-culture tradition of the clauns or clóvis, that will consist in a three episode TV series, a graphic novels and a bunch of webisodes.

Internet-based small productions
The digital revolution, though, has widened the window to almost anybody who has an idea and a video camera. ‘Webisode’ is no longer a neologism as YouTube has become a huge platform with an enormous potential audience. 

And success is possible. The Misadventures of a Black Awkward Girl has been bought by ABC network after two seasons shown entirely on Youtube. Also The Trivial Pursuits of Arthur Blank has been produced directly to the web, but with finantial support by AMC.

But still many series creator have to rely on the “point-and-click” audience and manage to get a recurrent audience, such as Muscle Top, I Hate Being Single or The Eric Andre Show.

Promotional image from Muscle Top. International Film Festival of Rotterdam

The times, though, they are a-changing and with the numerous digital devices that we have nowadays the attention is shifting slowly toward the smaller screens and the Internet, so it is pretty sure to say that there’s nothing but future in this projects.

Also, the VoD and streaming platforms are going to attract more filmmakers to the web and the quality of the new products surely will be better each year. We only have to wait and enjoy.

Be sure to check the Signals: Changing Channels programme, a selection conducted by Inge de Leeuw.

Film Review: The Fifth Gospel of Kaspar Hauser, by Alberto Gracia (2013)

Image: International Film Festival Rotterdam

Kaspar Hauser was one of those so-called feral children that was a puzzling topic for Western philosophers. He appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, barely wrote “Kaspar Hauser” when questioned by the police, which was considered his name, and after the investigation it was suggested that this 16-year-old kid had grown up locked away from the enlightened German society.

A living proof of a frontier, out of the language and what is considered “culture”, Kaspar Hauser has been the subject of numerous interpretations, myths and films as well, such as the Werner Herzog’s widely known  Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (Every Man for Himself and God Against All).

However, Gallician artist Alberto Gracia tackles his fifth gospel, his apocryphal gospel, with a different point of view. A plastic arts student, Gracia’s film is a brave attempt to conceptually but also technically express a radical skepticism, an inevitable corollary of the Kaspar Hauser persona.

Subject of many pedagogical theories, scientific studies and philosophical discussions, Kaspar Hauser has always been the canvas where the different “experts” have projected their own concepts into, in order to solve a jigsaw that otherwise could blow up their closed and neatly finished system.

But, actually, the only conclusion that can be achieved after analyzing Hauser’s case is that the explanation always fails to contain reality. The name doesn’t encompass the object. The language is essentially irreverent when trying to describe an experience with a symbolic system that isn’t even made with the same material.

For that exact reason O quinto evanxeo de Gaspar Hauser abhors the word and exiles it, leaving us before a purely visual material which we inevitably try to find a meaning for, the meaning. 

Thus, the radical skepticism is combined with the inexorable and romantic attempt to achieve full comprehension, as Gracia sharply described in the World Premiere of the film.

But the Gallician resisted to that Romanticism and tried since the very first shoot to emulate the void that we experience after realizing that language is inefficient and actually a disguised lie. By using a Super 16 camera, the filming process was indeed an act of faith, as our belief in the truth of the language is. Quite different from the control we have in a digital recording, when we can monitorize and revise constantly.

This apocryphal gospel, proof of the faith that underlies our use of language, also includes the absurd, materialized in a smoking Batman, a sadomasochistic dwarf and a sailor as Hauser’s jailmates and travel partners.

Thus, the film depicts an unsuccessful attempt to leave the platonic cave, from the cell to the blinding sun that should show us the real meaning but that actually never does, because there isn’t any meaning. And, as a consequence, every attempt to explain anything will always be unsuccesful, including this film review.

O quinto evanxeo de Gaspar Hauser (The fifht gospel of Kaspar Hauser)
Directed by: Alberto Gracia
61′, Galicia, 2013

Interview with Dominik Graf: “I know that I’m not welcome in Germany”

Dominik Graf

Dominik Graf’s retrospective has been one of the major points of the 42^nd edition of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Almost each of the selected 15 films, as chosen by film critics and experts in Graf’s oeuvre Christoph Huber and Olaf Möller out of more than 60 titles in his prolific production, have literally traveled out of Germany for the first time.
Graf talks about the obstacles he has found while trying to overcome the pressure of the orthodoxy of German film industry and how he developed a craftsmanship to keep making films for more than 35 years.

After so much time working exclusively in Germany and not getting your films shown out of your country, how does it feel to be the subject of a retrospective?
It feels very good, of course. I was never keen of getting known outside of Germany. I’m making my films there, in Dusseldorf and Berlin, and those are the places where I want to see my works shown. But it’s always a pleasure to see people, specially young people, watching my films since some of them are from many years ago.

One of your earlier works, Die Katze (1987) had quite a commercial success and it was indeed exported to other European countries. Why didn’t that lead to a major career in cinema?
When it comes to films like Die Katze, even if they are a success, nobody wants to repeat that because of building an action film in Germany is such a lot of work. It’s not just the money you put in it, it’s such an enormous amount of effort.
The explosion in the middle of the film, for example, don’t you think you can do that in Germany again. I mean, it was so dangerous that one of the five cameras went off. And the black cloud went right into the Japanese part of the city and it was swallowed by the air condition into the offices of all these Japanese people. After a couple of minutes you could see forty or fifty Japanese running and coughing away from the building.
Nowadays you can’t use it anymore because it’s illegal. So it’s getting more and more difficult to make that kind of film. Die Sieger (1994) was my last effort and it was actually a half-effort, half-made and half-scripted. Nobody was keen of having another film like Die Katze.

Die Katze (1987). International Film Festival of Rotterdam

Despite the production, logistic and legal difficulties, did you have problems with the financing?

Always, actually. Even nowadays. We have an enormous film industry in Germany, with a lot of money, but the money has been spent -since I’m in this industry- always in the wrong things, in my opinion. There’s always one path that everybody runs through, one way, one subject. One success leads to other thirty films that are clearly just trying to get the same revenue. Comedies are made all from the same pattern, which is okay, but that doesn’t leave room for anything else.

Your main genre is police films, have you had any problems when trying to escape from that German orthodoxy?
Yes, but again I think that’s a result of the existing system in Germany. There are walls when you work and I’ve experience them several times. For example with the Der Fahnder episodes (1985-1993).  When you start making films, you have a dream of how German films could be. There was something missing at the time I started, I thought they could be less obscure and also tougher, harder and quicker. And I got to make many of films that way.
However, when you try to push that in a higher level, as I tried in Die Sieger, when you really want to show that you can do that in the big screen, then you find out that somehow the system says -in subtitles, nobody says that to you- “no, you keep in your corner, you make it over there, don’t bother us here, it’s for other people”.

Did you think about leaving Germany and work elsewhere?
No. I discovered recently that, as Christoph Huber and Olaf Moller say, Germany is my main subject. I can’t transplant that into any other place. Also, I’m not really interested. I have to tell my stories there. I think that every story that I chose to tell is so connected to the places that you can’t put them or build them somewhere else. And I would lose interest, too. The result, though, is I have to cope with the system, find my way to continue working.

Die Sieger (1994). International Film Festival of Rotterdam

Was going back to television your response to those obstacles?
Television has always been the place to run for cover. Not only when I lost my battles in cinema I went back to the small screen, as it is a place to recover, but also of course just to exercise more and getting my craftsmanship even better, because the things I did in television were smaller, with less money, and you have to put more effort to make the most out of it. That was really my ambition.
And actually I never really wanted to go the big screen with every project I made. It’s too exhausting for me. TV is much easier to finance something. In cinema, already in the 80s, there’s a process of months and months of rewriting, and I find that boring.

As a result, did you find more freedom in television?
Yes, but of course I know what I can do and what I cannot do in TV, specially in the prime time fringe. Of course there are restrictions, and I have them already in my head, but you always can jump over that limits, you can smuggle things through or you can undermine them. And that’s more fun.

Is that your definition of craftsmanship?
It is, but it always comes down to making the most out of nearly nothing. In a way, I had to learn so much because nobody could teach me anything. We had to learn for ourselves, an autodidactic process. Of course when you have such a lot of money as we had on Die Katze you try to show something and get something built. But in smaller productions, you mainly have to be quick, and that’s something we had to learn by doing.

Since you work mostly on television, do you try to be more accessible for the public or is it something that is related with your idea of craftsmanship?
I can’t deny that I would love people to understand what I’m doing, but it’s obvious that sometimes that doesn’t work, even if I try. In primetime I made films such as Die Freunde der Freunde (2002) or Das Gelübde (2007) that were denied from the first moment. So either I didn’t make myself understandable or I had a subject that was not easy from the first moment.
Either way I am using the mainstream for doing something that they haven’t seen so far and mostly I’m using the opportunity to work at that time and trying to fit an unusual subject.

Das Gelübde (2007). International Film Festival of Rotterdam

Does that make you a genre renovator?
I don’t think so. I totally agree with Joss Whedon in that stance. He said that everything is already in the genre. There are no limits. When someone says that you have expanded the genre, the fact is that whatever you came up with was already in it. You didn’t have to stretch it at all. Right since the moment you are thinking or fantasizing the story you find that it completely fits in the genre in every way, even when the subject is very unusual. My main genre is police and there are thousands and thousands of possibilities, you just have to find them.

Humor is also an important aspect of your film writing. Even in your deepest and thoughtful films you always find a moment to fit in a joke. Is that something that comes up during the screen writing or is it a habit of yours?
That is sort of a rule that I learnt from American people, the film can be as serious as possible but there’s always has to be time for a good joke, if you find a good one, of course. For example, the ironic ending of Die Katze. The producer wanted me to finish the film with the death of the main character, but I thought that was boring and forced. I think that the ending that Christoph Fromm and I found was so much better and that would make the public leave the cinema with mixed feelings, tough but happy.

Now that we are in a golden era of TV series, at least in the USA, do you expect to have more possibilities in German television?
There are people from the TV market saying that everywhere in the world they make series trying to imitate the HBO standards, except from Germany. My country has become in this case some kind of a ghetto and I think the responsibility lies on the TV networks, not on the producers but on the upper floors, because they are so afraid of a commercial failure that they don’t dare to do anything different.
There has to be a change desperately, public networks have to change their attitudes. They act as great companies but actually they are paid by us. They just can’t behave like the CIA, but that’s what they do. The way they act and speak in public is more close to politics, that old “say by saying nothing” strategy. I don’t think they get away with it in the following years. And I hope that allows me to have an opening.

Germany, though, is a big exporter of TV films to other European countries, at least in Spain. However, I haven’t seen any of your films in Spanish television. Is that related to that “CIA attitude”?
Every TV sellers and buyers don’t want to buy my films because they think it’s too risky. They’re more close to small cinema movies than TV’s, because the later ones are usually patterned and written so that they never surprise you.
In that way, I can always feel grateful that I can still make films. Nicholas Roew said in an interview: “I still wonder why they let me do it”. And that applies perfectly to my career. I know that I’m not welcome.

Under the Milky Way and IFFR collaboration boosts online distribution

Up to thirty titles that can be seen these days in the Bright Future and Spectrum sections of the festival will be uploaded to iTunes and available to watch in the Benelux area. Thanks to the agreement between IFFR and the digital distribution company Under the Milky Way, filmmakers will have the opportunity to get their works shown on Video on Demand (VoD) or Electronic Sell-Through (EST) formats in the Apple digital market.

“We think iTunes is going to be the biggest platforms in the future”, said Julienne Jansen, head of distribution for the festival , during the “IFFR in the cloud” expert panel conducted yesterday at the Industry Room. Jansen also added that the festival will serve as a brand because “that can make the difference with so many films online” nowadays.

Pierre-Alexander Labelle, CEO of Under the Milky Way, explained to an audience filled with filmmakers and producers the procedures and the conditions of this program, as well as the financial details.

The company and the IFFR Distribution area will both act as an interface between the right holders (filmmakers and producers) and iTunes in every technical, contractual and legal aspect. Furthermore, they will also be responsible for the selection of the thirty films.

The project expects the selected films to be available on iTunes in three months, as the procedures require several Quality Checks by the technical departments of iTunes and the Apple approved encoding stations, as well as the non-exclusive contract negotiations.

Finantially-wise, the IFFR and Under the Milky Way will provide the necessary funding, around 875 euros -dictated by the Apple encoding costs-, in a 30-70% ratio. Labelle’s company expects to recoup the investment with the first 325 sales of the film.

Thus, the right holder will start to earn royalties after that point, specifically the 53% of the total VoD revenue and the 48% for the EST sales. The earnings will be paid on a quarterly basis, along with an extensive report provided by Under the Milky Way.

When asked if the project will be presented to other festivals, Labelle answered that “there’s no other festivals that can meet our criteria of attracting high quality films with distribution difficulties”.

The collaborators, though, hope to be able to expand the project to other territories and iTunes country stores in the second edition, as this first year is a ground-breaking experience that needs to be supported by the public.  Under the Milky Way, in its four-year experience as a company, has set offices in different countries, specially Europe, so the infrastructure for a future expansion is already built.

However, the major concern of the audience was if there was in fact a market in VoD platforms for independent films, to which Labelle responded that “the main goal for this first edition is recoup the investment and give some money to the right holders through sales”.

Julianne Jansen noted that before the meeting only six directors or producers had approached IFFR Distribution or Under the Milky Way with interest, so there’s still room for new applicants.

Film Review: Northwest, by Michael Noer (2013)

Image: International Film Festival of Rotterdam

I had already seen this film before entering the theater. And you too, probably. The story of a young guy, Caspar, who grows up in the suburbs and his family situation narrows his professional career so he has to get into burglaring to get money for the house is not really original.

You can already tell the follow-up. Small crime organizations attract big ones into a fight for the territory and the “right” to sell, buy, steal or whatever. And the young guy finds himself in a position he doesn’t control anymore, realizing at the same time he has drawn his younger brother into that spiral.

Northwest, however, really succeeds re-telling this same-old-story by keeping the focus on Caspar and his inner struggles coping with new challenges. Because breaking through an unknown’s house isn’t the same that shooting someone to death and that results in an intense and fast-pace coming-of-age tale that grips you from the start.

And the reason of it may be the film’s choice to leave the Denmark’s social background aside, thus not judging the situation explicitly but just putting the things in place so that we can do it ourselves.

The fast-money fast-life situation makes the film go hectic for a while but the simple plot never gets too far away from the young guy’s escalating career and the family care scenes.

Perhaps it’s that purity of the story what makes Northwest an enjoyable and entertaining film. In the end, though, we cannot really get rid of the feeling that the same-old-story prejudice overcomes every Michael Noer’s try to make a difference.

And that is a big downside for a film that needs to surprise the FIPRESCI Jury in Rotterdam to stand out and beat the other 18 World Premieres in the Bright Future section.

Northwest (Nordvest)
Directed by: Michael Noer
Written by: Michael Noer and Rasmus Heisterberg
Cast: Gustav Dyekjær Giese, Oscar Dyekjær Giese, Lene Maria Christensen, Nicholas Westwood Kidd, Roland Møller, Dulfi Al-Jaburi.
96′, Denmark, 2013

Film Review: Towheads, by Shannon Plumb (2013)

Images: International Film Festival of Rotterdam

Cooker, caretaker, cleaner, teacher, nurse, counselor, lover, friend, critic, assistant, and a huge etcetera. Those kinds of jobs or roles normally get their own retribution, either based on a salary or by respect. But when they’re filed down the “mother” or “wife” categories, they all seem to vanish.

The non-existing concern about this modern slavery or vassalage has been buried in the common sense area despite its social and politic consequences. Lately, though, the issue has become widely known, as everyone tries to get rid of sexism or at least they pretend to, but the main solutions have been only fake getaways in order to freeze the protest.

Penelope is a convict in her own house. Devoted to raise and take care of her two towheads, her sons Walker and Cody, her daily life is a continuum of tasks that while are not specifically assigned to her, she cannot avoid doing them, as no one else would care to take relief.

Her faceless husband, an important stage director, spends most of his day out of the house and not until does Penelope start acting “out of her role” he pays any attention. The problem, though, in the husband’s eyes, can only be boredom, tiredness, or madness.

Video artist Shannon Plumb writes directs and plays a consumed woman that needs to find a change in her life, first trying those theorical solutions that the capitalist world has designed to stop the women’s unrest: beauty, fame and sexyness.

In a Buster Keaton or Charles Chaplin way, Penelope stomps into failure,  mostly causing hilarious situations, when every object or person turns against her, but at the same time shows the inherent rubbish and nonsense that is behind that fake empowerment.

The silence of that bodily humor, reinforced by a Plumb’s genius lack of expression acting, and the comic effect are only the shell of the movie. In a not-so-deep second layer there’s the feminist claim that actually just states an obvious truth that sometimes is forgotten: women are not just mothers or wifes, and specially not servants.

However, not until has she stopped acting “like a mother” or “like a wife” his family realizes something wrong. But again, the husband can only think about boredom and hides behind his so-called real world responsibilities.

Driven with a light-mood, a really adecuate music and a good plot rhythm, Towheads manages to expose his ulterior motives without giving them away  but forcing the audience to think and relate the different tries of Penelope with that modern ways of male domination.

Although some would argue that the film is in fact too straightaway and that the Chaplin impersonation may be too obvious, I cannot betray myself and deny that the movie made me be happy and thoughtful for a while. And that’s something you don’t usually get.

Towheads
Written and directed by: Shannon Plumb
Cast: Shannon Plumb, Derek Cianfrance, Cody Cianfrance, Walker Cianfrance
86′, USA, 2013

The TV-series “Claun” brings mithology into brazilian carnival counter-culture

Images: International Film Festival of Rotterdam

Deep in the Signals Changing Channels programme there’s the first episode a supernatural story by Brazilian filmmaker Felipe Bragança, a common festival guest that presented in 2010 his two co-directed films A Alegria and Desassossego.

His last project is a transmedia mythologization of the Rio de Janeiro’s counter-cultural tradition of the claun, also known as clóvis or bate-bolas, that will include a graphic novel, some webisodes and the three-episode TV show, whose pilot (Part 1: Ayana’s Week of Adventures) can be seen during the festival.

During the city’s famous carnival celebration, right from the suburbs emerge different clans or gangs fully dressed in colourful costumes that run into the organized acts to sing and dance.

Because of the organization’s reservations against these performances and the actual plans to kick them out of the city’s carnival, the clauns have gathered a status of subversive and counter-cultural, claiming that gentrification is destroying the real values of Rio’s carnival.

Bragança goes deep into this tradition to turn it into a magical and mystic adventure where Ayana, a 13-year-old girl, tries to understand his family claun’s roots after the death of his father.

The girl has to beat his fears when meeting the three big gangs of clauns (the illusionists, the bate-bolas and the clowns) and “resurrecting” his long lost brother from the stomach of an ox, the same animal that left her one-eyed when she was only a child.  The goal: to recover the carnival from the “bad” hands of the businessmen, who also have their share of mystical powers.

Right since the beginning the fantastic nature of this tale is really shocking, but manages to get an opportunity from the viewer until the different gangs of clauns come into the stage. That’s when the low budget really affects the evolution of the story, since the rudimentary visuals hinder the full immersion in the universe (as well as some lousy acting).

Although with the proper funding the show could overcome the visual effects issue and become an impressing tale, that is if the audience can also be open-minded about the claun’s costumes, the rather simple storyline is actually the main deficiency.

The coming-of-age tale of Ayana to become the claun’s queen and thus be able to defeat the bad guys really doesn’t leave much left to the imagination and only the exotic and mystical aspects of the story can be gripping.

A definite judgement, though, is impossible since we haven’t seen yet neither the remaining two episodes nor the graphic novel and the webisodes.

Film Review: Devastated by Love, by Ari Deelder (2013)

Image: International Film Festival Rotterdam 2013

A new cool jazz tune introduces us to Arie in a surprising opening scene that forebodes the dreamy surrealistic nature of Devastated by Love (Toegetakeld door de liefde). And there couldn’t be a better start.

At first it feels as if it the audio and video didn’t match, when we see a dream about fame, where Arie, played wonderfully by Raymond Thiry,  lectures an invisible audience. But then, led by the suggestive tenor sax, who becomes a signature move during the film, we get immersed in his growing madness of love.

A writer whose lack of inspiration is turning his life black and white, Arie finds Sonja, the redhead streetcar driver, and engages a self-destructing process of silence and imagination that while he believes is getting closer to his beloved driver is actually making him become really obsessive.

Ari Deelder, in his first feature film, works his way into an already known topic focusing on the visuals and the music. The film is strongly based on the possibilities of the image, the color and the animation to achieve an intense but also comedic surrealism.

A beating heart here and an entire fighting sequence there, the animation quickly becomes the comic relief of a story that otherwise could be pretty depressing, since Arie ends up being nothing more than a stalker with a great dose of imagination.

But the actual narrator of Devastated by Love is the impressing cool jazz soundtrack, performed by the New Cool Collective. A fact, though, that turns to be double-edged by the end of the film, when we are already fed up with the character’s representative tune and the cooly and warm effects of the sax can’t cope with the fact that the story cannot go any further.

In a nutshell, a simple story that is capable to go into amusing reveries thanks to the use of the colour, the animation, the Gondryesque cardboard atrezzo details and the music, but that at the end becomes a little bit tedious as the surprise gets colder. And that may be one of the issues in the FIPRESCI Jury decision.

Devastated by Love (Toegetakeld door de liefde)
Directed by: Ari Deelder
Written by: Ari Deelder, based on a story by Aat Ceelen
Cast: Raymond Thiry, Anna Hermans, Stefan Degand, Leny Breederveld
90′, Netherlands, 2013

Introducing Dominik Graf

Often referred as Deutschland best-kept secret, Dominik Graf is one of the opportunities to discover a new kind of cinema in the International Film Festival of Rotterdam.

Graf’s vast filmography has been mostly devoted to television, a decision that has hindered a potential connection with a larger audience but that has allowed him to make very personal incursions in the genre cinema.

Over 35 titles and a career span that is finishing its fourth decade, Graf has forged a personal work ethic that fits more the ‘craftman’ description than the auteur, as described by Olaf Möller and Christoph Huber, curators of the retrospective held at the IFFR.

His dedication to genre cinema has developed a wide production that covers crime films, police films, thrillers, science fiction films and horror films in a way that makes it impossible to identify Graf to another current German director and that resonates with the Weimar Republic era directors’ attention to genre rules and storytelling, specially terror.

The lonely neighbour
Dr. Marco Abel relates in his article Yearning the genre: The Films of Dominik Graf  this separation with the German cinema scene and the invisibility of Graf’s production outside his country borders.

He states that the nonexistence of a genre neigbourhood, defined as “seriality, repetition, similarities and differences” that appeal to larger audiences to search for familiarity and surprise thus forming a “pre-existing and pre-constituted” public, has turned Graf’s labor a Sisyphean one, pushing the genre stone over the mountain over and over again completely by himself.

This isolation, though, has helped to create Graf’s uniqueness and has allowed him to get just a certain amount freedom. While he doesn’t need to worry about the industry standards, the nationally subsidized television has their one preferences and limitations.

Overcoming some of those obstacles, the big screen has never been a welcoming place for Graf except for his 1988 Die Katze, the German director has gathered the critic’s atention (mostly inside Deutschland) for his counter-fils, highly critical with the country’s statu quo, the political and the artistic one.

In a May 2012 article in PressEurop, Graf urged to finish with the “educated middle-class principles”, what he calls the “issue-vulturing” that is dominating most of the German filmography, that rule the industry subsidy system.

A polemic but unnoticed director, this blog will follow the restrospective that will be screening in the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, to reclaim his contributions to the cinema history.

Dominik Graf’s Filmography:

• 2012 Lawinen der Erinnerung (documentary) 
• 2011 Das unsichtbare Mädchen (TV movie)
• 2005-2011 Polizeiruf 110 (TV series – 3 episodes) 
• 2011 Dreileben (TV series – 1 episode) 
• 2010 Im Angesicht des Verbrechens (TV series – 10 episodes)
• 2009 Deutschland 09 – 13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation (segment “Der Weg, den wir nicht zusammen gehen”) 
• 2008 Kommissar Süden und der Luftgitarrist (TV movie) 
• 2007 Das Gelübde (TV movie) 
• 2006 Eine Stadt wird erpresst (TV movie) 
• 2006 Der rote Kakadu 
• 2004 Kalter Frühling (TV movie) 
• 2003 Hotte im Paradies (TV movie) 
• 2002 Die Freunde der Freunde (TV movie)
• 2002 Der Felsen 
• 2000 München – Geheimnisse einer Stadt
• 1999 Deine besten Jahre (TV movie) 
• 1999 Bittere Unschuld (TV movie) 
• 1996-1998 Sperling (TV series – 2 episodes)
• 1997 Der Skorpion (TV movie) 
• 1997 Denk ich an Deutschland – Das Wispern im Berg der Dinge (TV documentary)
• 1996 Reise nach Weimar (TV movie) 
• 1996 Doktor Knock (TV movie)
• 1986-1995 Tatort (TV series – 2 episodes)
• 1994 Die Sieger 
• 1985-1993 Der Fahnder (TV series – 11 episodes)
• 1993 Morlock (TV series – 1 episode) 
• 1990 Spieler
• 1989 Tiger, Löwe, Panther
• 1988 Die Beute (TV movie)
• 1988 Die Katze
• 1988 Bei Thea (TV movie)
• 1985 Drei gegen drei
• 1984 Treffer (TV movie)
• 1982 Neonstadt (segment “Running Blue”)
• 1982 Das zweite Gesicht
• 1979 Der kostbare Gast
• 1975 Carlas Briefe (short)

FIlm Review: The Ressurrection of a Bastard, by Guido van Driel (2013)

Eduardo, played by Goua Robert Grovogui, in a dream

Saint Boniface fought wood with faith, and he was killed because of that. By destroying the Donar’s Oak, a sacred tree in the region of Frisia (today one of the northern provinces of the Netherlands), he imposed the abstraction of the Christian God over the naturalism of the sacred trees and groves.

Ronnie B. (Yorick van Wageninen) is his alter ego. But the main character of The Ressurection of a Bastard isn’t a missionary, not even a devout christian. It is actually one of the ruthless criminals in the Amsterdam area. But while his colleagues find joy in their extort and torture routine, he doesn’t.

Far from showing any kind of guilt or just respect for anybody else, this huge gangster is driven by anger, moving nearly in a complete blindness, dominated by his instincts. He never shows any joy, but I guess it’s because he has never experienced it.

Ronnie B. (right, played by Yorick van Wageninen) and the mob boss James Joyce (interpreted by the late Jeroen Williams).

Guido van Driel’s modernized the the story of the killing of Saint Boniface to fit the contemporary context, first in his graphic novel entitled Om Mekaar in Dokkum and after that in this feature film.

That’s why Ronnie can be an alter ego of a saint. The gangster, though, is actually the field in which the fetishist faith is subdued by the abstraction of the christian morality, understood as the golden rule of Jesus Christ or Kant’s moral imperatives as well.

The destructive way he creates gets back to him and a near death experience awakens an enteriley new person: not driven by anger or money and for the first time in his life finding something likable.

In front, the victims, but also part of this field of religious and moral revolution. Eduardo, the epicentre of an oniric connection and a dramatic resolution, and the victim’s family, converted into violence by Ronnie’s spiral.

Beautifully written to keep the story moving on, the movie flows like the graphic novel that keeps in its core. The cinematography is devoted to recreate the weird angles of the comic book, thus respecting the visual narrative of the format and adding intensity to the image’s violence and colourfullness.

Rough but also beautiful, sometimes reaching surrealism, The Resurrection of a Bastard is a fine candidate for one of the Hivos Tiger Awards and a real adaptation of a graphic novel, the kind that really encourages us to enjoy both formats. 

The Resurrection of a Bastard (De wederopstanding van een klootzak)
Directed by: Guido van Driel
Written by: Guido van Driel and Bas Blokker
Cast: Yorick van Wageninen, Goua Robert Grovogui, Juda Goslinga,…
Netherlands, 2013