Berlinale

This year is the 58th annual Berlin International Film Festival, also known as the Berlinale. As a part of the cinema class that I am taking, we were required to go to two specific films that were being shown. The fact that we got to take part in such a large international film festival was really cool, but the fact that the movies we had to see were at 9 oclock on a Sunday morning was not.

The first film we saw was entitled 'Nach vor Augen' (Night Before Eyes) by Birgitte Bertele. Based on a book, the story follows a German soldier, David, returning home from his service in Afganistan. He returns home to his extatic girlfriend, his worried mother, and his admiring little brother. But his time in battle was not without grief; he sufferes from severe post-traumatic stress disorder after having shot a little boy in the head. He sees the child sitting on his bed everynight, he wets the bed, and has flashbacks of the incident. When David returns, his little brother wants nothing more than to be just like him. The psycologically damaged David takes this opporunity to deal with his grief in a sick way. David ends up making his little brother physically hurt David, kill his pet rabbit, and almost shoot David. Finally David's actions go to far and become too irrational that he has to go to a psyciatric hospital. The movie ends as David returns once again, with the question still looming of whether he is 'better.'

This film was a very hard, real subject, but very well done on both the part of the actors and the director. Having the director and the main actors speak after the showing gave insight into what they were trying to accomplish and how they felt about making this moving.

The second film we saw, Josef Fares' 'Leo,' was a stark contrast to this. Initially I was excited about seeing a film by Fares, since he is a Swedish director and has made good movies in the past. However, the film had almost no value in my mind, and having Fares speak after the showing of the film only made it worse.

The film begins with Leo coming home from his 30th birthday party with his girlfriend, when they get attacked by two men on the street. Leo's girlfriend ends up dying, and he cannot deal with teh grief. He decides that the only way he will ever feel any better is with revenge. From there it sprials into a hainous situation of revenge, violence, and psychotic decisions that only lead Leo and his friends into a darker hole.

Although perhaps something can be said for this movie talking about the randomness of violence and how revenge can never be the solution, the movie was far too violent and if this was the meaning, it was lost. However, from what Fares said after the movie, I'm not even sure this was his intention. When I asked why he chose to go from the comedies that he has made to this movie, he gave no meaningful answer. When others asked him about the making of this film, he kind of laughed and said that him and his friends just had fun with it. It was really unimaginable that they could have been having 'fun' while shooting something so serious, depressing, and dark. On my sundae of disliking this movie, that was really the cherry on top. I do not recommend the film.

After a dark Sunday morning spent inside a theater, the first movie was a pleasant suprise from European cinema, about a subject that seems better fitting of the United States, and the second an utter disappointment of Fares' work as a director.