(Berlin) In the next square in the Delphi Palast, a nearly century-old cinema in the former West Berlin, a young woman sobbed, then sighed angrily when she heard the audience's laughter, confided in her neighbor, and then sobbed even harder. Like me, she discovered Intercepted on Sunday, a moving documentary by her friend, Montrealer Oksana Karpovych, about the war in Ukraine.
Posted at 4:14 p.m
Oksana Karpovych, a Concordia University graduate who has lived in Montreal for about a decade, had just returned to Kyiv when Russia attacked her homeland in 2022. She became a “fixer” (translator, guide, etc.) for various media outlets in Ukraine, including Al-Jazeera. “I never thought I would have to do this, but I thought it was important to show the world what was happening,” she said after her film's screening on Sunday.
At that time, she discovered recordings of telephone conversations between Russian soldiers and their relatives, which were intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence services and forwarded to YouTube. “I was shocked by what I heard. It gave me the idea of making a film that shows two parallel realities. The violence of war that I experienced every day and that of the Russian soldiers and their families. »
“Intercepted,” co-produced by “Les movies du 3 mars au Québec” and presented in the Forum section of the Berlinale to a packed hall, is the marriage of these two realities. Based on 30 hours of excerpts from around 1,000 telephone conversations, Oksana Karpovych has written a film script in which images of the desolation of war in Ukraine – destroyed apartments, bombed-out neighborhoods, rubble and rubble – are offered as a counterpoint to the bloodthirsty discussions.
Russian soldiers speak with varying degrees of detachment about those they plunder, torture or kill, resigned to their own imminent and inevitable deaths. But it is their interlocutors – their mothers, wives, companions, sisters – who utter the harshest and most inhumane remarks towards the Chokhols (the contemptuous nickname given to Ukrainians).
We understand that their prejudices are not only the result of propaganda, but also the result of decades of hatred between these two brotherly peoples.
PHOTO CHRISTOPHER NUNN, PROVIDED BY PRODUCTION
Image by Intercepted
There is a contrast desired by the filmmaker between the often poetic images – stills “in which time stands still, as if there was no future,” says Oksana Karpovych – and the words that Russian soldiers and their relatives often exchange nearby Limit of compatibility. “I was interested in what these people said to each other in private, and I was surprised that the cruelest words came from women. I still don’t understand why,” explains the young filmmaker.
It is an intimate story of fear, of what should never be said. The soldiers talk about the civilians they are supposed to kill, about the corpses piling up in the streets. “We killed a mother in front of her two children,” one of them said to his wife. “Of course,” she replied in a neutral tone. She counts. She is also one of the enemies. »
“I was a good person and now I kill people,” a soldier said to his mother. “Are you sure they are people?” She replies. “Are you making kebabs with the meat of the Khokhols? A woman asks a soldier. Kill them all and grill!” A soldier explains in detail a torture technique called “21 roses” , which affects fingers, toes and penis and is said to open like a flower…
It is a film that bears witness to the inhumanity and dehumanization of war. These Russians talk about the Ukrainians as if they were animals put in cages.
A Russian woman claims that COVID-19 was manufactured in Ukraine with US help and insists despite her husband's protests. Some soldiers admit that they have not released anything at all, that they were sent to the front for the wrong reasons, that this war is absurd. A woman tells her husband that Russia claims many soldiers died of strokes so they can't pay financial compensation to their families. “Make sure our son doesn’t go into the army,” he replied. That is my last wish. »
PHOTO CHRISTOPHER NUNN, PROVIDED BY PRODUCTION
Image by Intercepted
“These soldiers and their relatives are victims of propaganda,” notes Oksana Karpovych, “but they also bear collective and individual responsibility for the acts they committed.” I do not agree with the idea that this is Vladimir Putin's war. These are real people committing real crimes. I looked for empathy in these recordings, for an awareness of their responsibility, but unfortunately I didn't find it. »
Insult or compensation?
Another documentary, this one even more impressionistic, even supernatural, was shown in competition at the Berlinale on Sunday: Mati Diop's Dahomey, which was screened by Atlantique in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. The French-Senegalese filmmaker was interested in the restitution from France to Benin in 2021 of 26 royal treasures from Dahomey. Works looted by the French colonial ruler in 1892 and until recently exhibited at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.
PHOTO ODD ANDERSEN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Filmmaker Mati Diop
Mati Diop filmed the transport of these stolen works from France to Benin. But it is in the metaphysical interrogation of the souls liberated by these uprooted sculptures – I said “supernatural” like Atlantique – and in, more specifically, the students of the University of Abomey, that this atypical documentary finds its full meaning.
The works are exhibited in the presidential palace, which is guarded by soldiers. Of the 7,000 works stolen, only 26 were returned. Is this an insult or the start of repair? What does this say about the relationship with the colonizer? Is this an opportunity for the Beninese or French president to clear his conscience? Will this reappropriation of heritage only benefit the elite?
All these questions and many others occupy and haunt this powerful, barely hour-long film about colonization and its effects on the deculturation of the African population.
Star Wars among the Ch'tis
In a completely different register, completely unconventional, the Frenchman Bruno Dumont unveiled on Sunday L'Empire, his expected pastiche of Star Wars, an Ed Wood-style Series Z film to be appreciated to the fourth degree. As usual with Dumont, we find a story set in the north of France and a voluntary forced marriage of amateur and professional actors, including Camille Cottin, Anamaria Vartomolei, revealed in Audrey Diwan's “The Event”, and Fabrice Luchini, who looks like he came straight out Peau d'âne in an intergalactic version.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY TESSALIT PRODUCTIONS
Fabrice Luchini in The Empire.
Jony, a young crab and lobster fisherman, lives in a seaside bungalow with his mother and her son, a baby who, we quickly discover, is neither more nor less than the Prince of Darkness… 0s and 1s, who dispute it as well as the fate of mankind, in order to impose either kindness and forbearance or damnation and hell.
In this parody, which has nothing to do with Spaceballs, we mainly make fun of this eternal debate between good and evil, which is taken very seriously in the Star Wars saga. There are capes and lightsabers, but unlike Star Wars there is also blood, sex and swear words.
Against a backdrop of peplum music more akin to Jesus of Nazareth than John Williams, we find Bruno Dumont far removed from The Life of Jesus, Mankind, Camille Claudel 1915 or even more recent France, but we reconnect with the investigators from the delicious series P 'tit Quinquin and the unique humor of the filmmaker from Ma Loute. It's funny, it's beautiful, but he's running out of energy (THE strength) to want to reach new heights of absurdity. And it remains a very strange choice for the official competition of a festival like the one in Berlin.
Not just a queer story
Kristen Stewart, president of last year's competition jury, returned to the Berlinale on Sunday to promote British director Rose Glass's “Love Lies Bleeding,” in which she stars. Presented out of competition, it is a film with strong retro accents that tells of the complicated love passion of two young women at the end of the 1980s. Not complicated for the reasons you might think, but because Lou (Kristen Stewart), manager of a training room where she meets bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O'Brian), is the daughter of an arms dealer (Ed Harris) hunted by the FBI. .
PHOTO ODD ANDERSEN, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Actress Kristen Stewart
“I don’t want to just talk about the reasons for it anymore [les personnages queers] are excluded, but from their real experience. What they like, what their wishes are, where they come from, where they want to go. And then not having the impression that as a speaker you always have to use all platforms,” explained the American actress when asked at a press conference whether her view of the way queer stories are addressed in cinema has changed become.
“Love Lies Bleeding”, presented for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival, is reminiscent of an old film by Michael Mann or Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”), with the difference that “Rose Glass” seems to take itself much less seriously his Danish colleague. The film, which will be released in Quebec cinemas on March 8th, successfully combines genres (there is also the supernatural here). It's funny, exciting, surprising and it doesn't last for a minute.