For a year, over all four seasons, Stéphane Manchematin and Serge Steyer keep returning to the Vosges where Suzanne lives. By now she looks back on more than nine decades of life, an old lady who stoically clings to the self-sufficiency of the house where she was born. The place lacks all comfort, neither electricity nor water supply help with cooking or heating. Nonetheless, Suzanne wants for nothing: When the indoor temperature drops to single digits in winter, she simply takes a hot-water bottle to bed and adds another layer of blankets. In the bathroom, water reliably flows from a groove, and if the light hits the surrounding glass carafes, it soon dances through the room.
Manchematin and Steyer know how to stage everyday procedures and conditions alertly and sensitively – their film’s meanderings are as casual as they are focused. And Suzanne, too, becomes more and more approachable. After a very short time, one develops a sense of her habits, registers with amusement her eternal twirling of the telephone cord, or discovers a quite assertive person behind the wheel. All this happens without romanticisation or kitsch. Instead, the observation is characterised by abundant laconic wisdom.
“See you next year!” a Portuguese fire warden says as he dismantles his control equipment at the end of the season. Humans and nature in southern Europe may be used to forest fires, but that does not change the facts: The ever more massive conflagrations are caused by climate change. We have long been living in the age of fire.
In the Portuguese interior, a forest fire has just devastated a large area. Wounded nature is silent, not a single bird is heard, only the wind that makes the charred tree trunks rustle. But the vegetation recovers astonishingly fast. Where all life seemed to be gone, greenery soon sprouts from the ruined trees. The residents of the affected region are engaged in the reconstruction with great respect for their natural environment. Because plants, too, are sentient creatures. In quiet, almost melancholic, but also hopeful images, the film pays tribute to the strength of the trees and illustrates how essential it would be for humanity to learn to live in harmony with nature again.
Before photography and film were invented and constructed the “Wild West”, the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis, whose travels made the westwards expansion of the still young USA possible, died under mysterious circumstances. The present-day narrator of this film, a distant descendant, portrays him as the tragic hero of a speculative gay love story. The potential lover, Meriwether’s “Louisiana Creole” servant John Pernia, is historically documented. But the archive material, which favoured the white folklore of the so-called age of pioneers, lays no trail to this romance.
Ben Young wilds the early Western imagery and queers the nationalist historiography from the perspective of people who are missing in the tales of glory and whose originally free space was occupied by the settler movement and its subsequent legend formation. He uses associative montage and gossip to rehabilitate John and Meriwether, the undocumented romantic couple, as the real pioneers. And they have a score to settle with the U.S.
In 2002, the filmmaker moved into an apartment on the 15th floor of a Kyiv high-rise. She was twelve at the time. Today, from the safe distance of another country, she talks to people who remember the flat and the time spent together. Coming-of-Age, the love of cinema, a sense of community and the erotic charge of individual moments combine to create an image of missing home and intimacy. With every memory, we zoom a little out of the still image on screen: three windows facing southwest, a balcony facing southeast, a rooftop protected from view, a high-rise panorama. The warm and personal gaze at the sky and houses of Kyiv is mirrored in the cold attentiveness of international war reporting.
Our memory is not to be trusted; it is interwoven with wishful thinking, dreams, romanticisations or repressions, superimposed or replaced by accidentally glimpsed images. If you want to make sure of your history, you might seek out the places of your childhood or youth to embark on a journey into the past. But what if those places are long gone, themselves as fleeting as the memories of them?
Director Won Taewoong was born in 1981, at a time when the city of Seoul, devastated in the civil war, was rapidly developing. Under the South Korean military dictatorship rice paddies turned into business and residential areas, multi-storey department stores with long escalators and attractions for children were built. In front of the Universe Department Store in Cheonho-dong on the eastern outskirts of the city, a space shuttle was erected that made the children’s imaginations run wild. But while modernisation was picking up speed, most of these malls closed down again after a few years. “Universe Department Store” is an attempted reconstruction. In conversations with peers whose memories often show enormous discrepancies and in hypnosis sessions, the director gets to the bottom of what memory is and discovers a dazzling universe between fact and fantasy.
Does farmer Ly have dealings with the Chinese, who have recently been tampering with the infrastructure of the village of Sitabaomba, not far from the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo, director Nantenaina Lova asks as bluntly as mischievously. Ly denies it. However, it becomes increasingly clear in the course of “Where Zebus Speak French” that the various development measures, often introduced by foreign initiatives and fuelled by corrupted politicians, also affect him.
Focussing on Sitabaomba, Lova shows over several years how the village population attempt to defend their farmland. Their fight is reminiscent of David against Goliath but doesn’t lead to despondence. Because in Madagascar, a very unique form of artistic, especially linguistic expression has always been cultivated which, at its best, allows people to maintain an inner independence. The commentary is therefore spoken in the style of “Kabary.” This polite, rhetorically sophisticated and sometimes mocking form of speech elegantly circumvents criticism, thus stating it all the more clearly. An artist also visits the village repeatedly and makes stones speak with the children, confirming an attitude Nantenaina Lova describes as follows: “Laughing at injustice rather than crying, resisting rather than pitying.”
A film that teaches us mindfulness. In his audiovisual diary, award-winning Swiss-Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler says farewell to his mother and father. But the film transcends his personal work of mourning. In an always dialogue-oriented search movement over the cycle of life, he reflects on this world and the next, on existence and time. It is an eternal circuit and flow – like the continuous passing of clouds and rivers.
Visually as well as intellectually, Peter Mettler draws upon personal conversations, philosophical and spiritual texts as well as his own film and sound archive. His approach is characterised by openness and humility towards life and nature. This attentive attitude characterises the director’s notion of “film-making” per se that has shaped all his works. “While the Green Grass Grows” comprises two parts of a larger epic diary project with the same title.
