fri 29/03/2024

theartsdesk in Locarno: Swiss rules, Swiss rain | reviews, news & interviews

theartsdesk in Locarno: Swiss rules, Swiss rain

theartsdesk in Locarno: Swiss rules, Swiss rain

Thrills, and lots and lots of spills, at the annual Alpine film festival

Think what you will about Switzerland and the Swiss – calm, ordered country, treasured environment, cautious, democratically precise people – but look behind the scenes and things can seem quite scary. Vol spécial (Special Flight), by Swiss-French-speaking Fernand Melgar, is one of the most intense documentaries I have ever seen. Depicting asylum seekers in a detention centre, it is a vibrant portrait of human (entirely male) endeavour warping into despair under an unkind but, as the Swiss see it, necessary law of repatriation: in 1994, they voted for what is known as the federal law on coercive measures. Few citizens today know about it.

Historically, Switzerland has a mixed record in its border controls. It was far from the easiest country for Jews to get into during the Holocaust when tens of thousands should have been granted refuge there. In ensuing decades, foreigners have generally been welcomed, to work and pay social security. But if they don’t have proper ID and are unable to acquire citizenship – ie, remain sans papiers (“without papers”) – they can, even after years in the country, be thrown out. Criteria for Swiss residency are evidently angrily distinct from those in the EU.

VOL_KosovoThe men in this film are mainly African new arrivals who’ve flown in to better their lot; there are also two Kosovans, one who’s lived and worked in Switzerland for 20 years, the other a Roma (pictured right) who believes he’ll be killed if he’s deported. The Frambois centre near Geneva Airport is an ordinary-looking house surrounded by a network of caged courtyards which doesn’t want to be a prison but is. The men can move about freely through the centre during the day, ask for as many chicken legs as they like to cook in the communal kitchen, but are locked into cells at 9pm.

While their cases are being processed, they write letters, receive visits from partners and children, play sport, watch TV, in one case compose rap lyrics. Almost all the cases end in the same result: a flight “home” which becomes, if they choose not to leave willingly, a “special flight” – transport by police to a Swiss plane in handcuffs, surveillance throughout the flight by up to three guards per deportee, rigorous guarantees that he will return to the exact spot (Kinshasa, say, and not just Lomé) where he started. This is all very shocking. None of these men is a criminal.

 

The Africans are exuberant and inventive – one of them, with a small child and about to marry, pastes a security policeman with a Ciceronian defence of his human rights and is actually freed, though another, in an obscure episode, dies in transit at Zurich Airport. The handful whom we’ve got to know must at the film’s climax, strip-searched and handcuffed, leave forever. Back in Africa, they face the street, torture or death.

Though they might look less than tender, the centre’s guards are as humane and affected by the men’s plights as they are determined to do their job correctly. Fernand Melgar takes no sides but Swiss law takes no hostages. This is a haunting and controversially nuanced documentary which no one in any European nation wrestling with immigration should miss.

TAHRIR_Bandage_ResizedAnother documentary freshly minted for Locarno is Tahrir - Liberation Square, by Sicilian film-maker Stefano Savona. This charts the mass-demo early in the year in central Cairo which ousted Hosni Mubarak. Savona doesn’t attempt historical or even journalistic narrative. Over several weeks, his camera simply follows a number of individuals, the most thoughtful being a poet (apparently), Elsayed (pictured above left), who sticks around in Tahrir Square resolutely, along with thousands, until Mubarak goes.

Slogans are chanted, banners waved, fires lit, bits of pavement gouged out for ammo – rather quixotic, that, given the huge weaponry at the security forces’ and army’s disposal, to say nothing of bizarre cardboard protective helmets Elsayed’s co-resisters wrap round their heads. But men in ties, women in headscarves – two of whom try to draw up a new constitution on notepaper – students with smartphones and 60-year-old patriots who grew up with Mubarak all hope for the same thing: a secular Egypt with an equitable distribution of wealth.

It hasn’t come about. The country is in stasis. Tahrir - Liberation Square records thrillingly the raw chaos of history, gives us the guts of revolt and will fascinate for years to come whatever besets the abused nation who is the film’s main character. Both documentaries share an almost feral desire to trap the real. Both are punishingly serious. Sorry, did someone say fun? Festival? Feature films? Frenzy, frivolity?

Back to the unreal world. Enter Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig and Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks. Cowboys and Aliens (director: Jon Favreau) crosses standard Western with goopy weirdos from outer space digging for earthly gold, and its European première on Saturday night was undoubtedly the first enormo-splash in Locarno’s Piazza Grande.

ALIENS_Craig_Back_ResizedCraig (pictured right: yes, that is James Bond's back) and Ford were both in attendance, the latter being accorded a Lifetime Achievement Award, then in a bog-standard speech nearly confusing his host, artistic director Olivier Père, with his delectable co-star Olivia Wilde, but no one has ever accused the great Harrison of rhetorical alpinism. Everyone does what they’re supposed to do in this mad, holiday-audience-guzzling thunderclap of a movie – but theartsdesk will elsewhere be offering more incisive appreciation than my bludgeoned brain has space for here.

For lighter fare, in competition alongside the above-mentioned documentaries and 17 other films, is the delightfully named Mia Hansen-Løve’s Un amour de jeunesse (Goodbye, First Love). It’s very talkily about a girl who can’t recover from her boyfriend flitting off to South America. Very French. But reflected on after Dan and Harry as grunting cowboys, it takes on a charm that its slightness on first viewing seemed to conceal. Altogether more satisfying, however, is a small film called Terri.

Directed by Azazel Jacobs, it stars the dependable John C Reilly as a harassed but playful vice-principal trying to coach lump-of-lard saddo Terri - Jacob Wysocki - in life skills. Though he is sad, and terribly overweight, Terri is actually kind and temperamentally flexible, matured not least of all because, parentless, he lives with and looks after an uncle with dementia, while his fellow pupils, including the rat-like Chad (Bridger Zadina), only talk of girls in scuzzily anatomical terms. Heather (Olivia Crocicchia) (pictured below with Jacob Wysocki) becomes the class outcast after a sexual indiscretion and bonds with Terri, especially in an excruciating but nonetheless redemptive scene in Terri's uncle's shed. The revelation of this film is Wysocki himself who - yes, he is a fat boy - has a remarkably sleek, seductive voice.

TERRITerri is one of those movies which can probably only rise to the surface in a festival - it will surely do modest box office (and is out in the US) - but, once enjoyed, will have you scooting back to Locarno's competition for more. Oh, did I mention rain? Cowboys and Aliens only just squeezed in between colossal downpours and two of my evenings planned in the Piazza have been complete washouts. Forget the Piazza. In the coming week, I can recommend Back to Stay from Argentina and Among Us from the Netherlands. Enjoy the world's infinite variety: stay indoors. And for more on the dispersees of Vol spécial, keep an eye on the web: Fernand Melgar has promised updates on some of his subjects. Their stories will be heart-rending.

Sunday 14 August 2011. Locarno is over and the winner of this year's Golden Leopard (pictured below: statuette) has been given to: Abrir puertas y ventanas, mentioned in theartsdesk's round-up above (in English, Back to Stay: the Spanish means "open doors and windows") and indeed enjoyed by its visiting critic, though absolutely not tipped to win.

Leopard Final

It's a slow, desultory portrait of three sisters in a family house at the end of a summer: orphans of the dictatorship, free spirits but lost in the bigger tides sweeping across a contemporary, fragile Argentina - one of the great founding forces of 20th-century South America inexorably reduced by terrible politics and flattened, by the start of the 21st century, by disastrous economics. This is a first feature by director Milagros Mumenthaler and actress María Canale also won the Best Actress Leopard. Back to Stay is a typical Locarno winner: left-field, quiet, thoughtful.

Current Argentine cinema reflects an extraordinary country in extraordinary crisis, but maybe this mirrors a general trend in nations grappling with dreadful recent pasts: as, of course, Germany and German cinema once did, in the 1960s and 1970s. Romania has done the same since the end of Ceauşescu's especially toxic form of communism. These conundrum cultures don't produce movies likely to be seen by eager audiences worldwide. But Locarno, as always, shows its mettle by inviting them and, when they strike chords, honouring them.

Share this article

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters