Underneath our Reality

Ghosts, Sappho, treasure hunts - in its fifth edition the Encounters section seeks to explore and question the limits of genre and cinematic truths. Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian and Head of Programming Mark Peranson discuss the 15 selected films and cinema’s quest to make the invisible visible.

MP: Generally when you watch a film in Encounters, you realise that it is made by a human being. Even when they are making a big budget movie, it's still a very personal film. You can see and tell that there's somebody behind the images. Of course, the budget of the film also influences the amount of freedom you have as a filmmaker. The more money you have, the less freedom you have. With Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing by Travis Wilkerson – a film set in Split, Croatia that is about a police detective and also about fascism and the long-term effects of the breakup of Yugoslavia – we don't know what the budget of that film was and I don't think the filmmaker knows it either. He woke up every day and decided to shoot something. The result is totally hybrid. I asked him if it‘s a documentary or a fictional film and he said he didn’t know and also didn‘t really care.

Staying with the films that tend to be more on the documentary side - in Ruth Beckermann's Favoriten, we spend a lot of time at a Viennese elementary/junior high school. In addition to many funny and touching moments, a long sequence in the middle of the film shows the teacher asking the children about their information and opinions on the war in Ukraine. She receives interesting and challenging answers. What do you think of this specific insight into a cross-section of our society?

Mãos no fogo is a film on a film. It‘s a film that is shot in a place where other films were shot. The previously shot films belong to a different era and in the act of filming a secret is being told. And here we are again talking about the relation between genres. I found quite striking that Margarida Gil tackled the power of the camera to trap people from a female perspective.

Something we are quite conscious of in Encounters is that most of the films show that there is no truth. Or they at least give the audience a specific position, which is not “I take you by the hand and I show you things”, but rather “If I take you by the hand, I show you that I'm taking you by the hand”. Hands on Fire is a film that very clearly depicts this.

MP: The film also doesn't want to guide the audience in a certain direction. The treasure, in classic cinematic terms you could call it a MacGuffin, propels the plot. You're invited to project yourself into what this search is about and maybe discover that in the end it doesn’t really matter what they find but the search itself is the point. They might not even find anything and just keep looking, keep looking, keep looking. Which is, in a way, also kind of a metaphor for cinema. Film is essentially the art of trying to make the invisible visible. Just like there's no objective truth, there's also really no objective realism. I mean, on a philosophical level, cinema used to be a photochemical process. Now it's a digital process of somebody filming somebody. So at the heart of that, there's always an illusory aspect to it.

CC: We were very surprised with Khamyazeye bozorg because it's not the usual film you expect from Iran. After the beginning, which depicts a “casting” where the protagonist is looking for the right person for its quest, it doesn’t really focus on society anymore or not in a realistic way. The journey quickly becomes something more metaphysical and existential. But it also features elements of humor here and there. We know that we will never solve the unsolvable. Aliyar Rasti plays with the idea of not giving the goal - like many films in Encounters: it's not about finding the result, it's more about what happens along the line.

On ghosts and treasures

Arcadia by Yorgos Zois tells a ghost story and asks what it means to remain connected to a deceased person. A very literal reflection on the statement "I still carry them with me". Were these questions at the forefront of your selection or were the innovative and sometimes very bizarre rules of the spirit world the deciding factor?

CC: Arcadia is a ghost story, a love story, a story about cheating, a story about a bar frequented by dead people. It's a story about how reality fades away every time, and this is something that connects the films. What I personally like is that it is very hard to capture the film in one single element. Because you might label it as a ghost story or a zombie story but if you explain the film to a friend, I'm sure they will have a different take, because it doesn’t feature the usual types of ghosts or zombies. The film fights against realism, which is very relevant because nowadays we are surrounded by images and think that images are reality.

To fight against realism

CC: Relations are always ambiguous. It might involve cheating but it’s more about a problem in communication: I give you a message and you receive a different one. I think most of these films deal with this circumstance and the fact that if you have the desire to communicate, you also have to do so on a very primal level by making love or just being together. In this communication there is always a distance, which I find interesting. This year, maybe more so than the years before, we have films that deal with sensual love. Maybe cheating is the most visible version of this form of (mis)communication, because it’s so conventional, it's the most banal thing that you can do in a relationship.

MP: Technically, there's no cheating in Matt and Mara. It's emotional cheating which is a bit different. Somebody comes in from the past and it stirs up old emotions, and that's something that everyone experienced at some point or another. It's a film that touches on infidelity, but there's universality to the way the subject matter is treated.

I would say what links a lot of these films is that – maybe you can sense it – they are very specifically rooted in a place or in a way or behavior which is typical to specific countries or cities. Matt and Mara, for example, is not a film about for example New York. It's very much a film about Toronto. We can apply this to any of the Encounters films and where they are taking place. The Brazilian film Cidade; Campo by Juliana Rojas is partly about the city but then the film moves to the countryside – how do the characters behave differently in these locations? If you take location as a framing device for these films, then maybe you can look at ideas of, say, infidelity or cheating and observe how they play out differently in these places. What does that say about the place where the film takes place?

How is the make up of the filmmakers behind the Encounters selection this year?

CC: This year we have less first features, there are more sophomore films. We have a good number of second feature-length films: Dormir de olhos abertos (Sleep with Your Eyes Open) by Nele Wohlatz, The Fable, Arcadia, Ivo. But this is not necessarily what we think about when we do the selection. Encounters is also not exclusively a section for first and second feature-length films. It's a section that embraces different kinds of filmmaking. We are interested in having a good balance between new voices and established filmmakers. Kong fang jian li de nv ren (Some Rain Must Fall) is a first feature, but the short films of the director Qiu Yang were awarded, including the Palme d’Or for Best Short, so his is a highly expected debut film. The Great Yawn was probably the biggest surprise. Christine Angot is a well-known writer and a public figure in France who also wrote Claire Denis’ Berlinale awarded Avec amour et acharnement (Both Sides of the Blade). I don’t consider Une Famille a debut because it comes from a person who has already shaped culture.