Persecuted Iranian director Mohammed Rassulof crowns the Berlinale competition with the masterly death penalty drama "There is no evil".
This is also a Berlinale tradition: at the end of the festival, the cards are gladly shuffled again. One could have guessed that the last competition entry by filmmaker Mohammed Rassulof, who was persecuted and detained in Iran because of his political activities, could be a work of special dimensions.
Berlinale ends on Saturday
Little was known about the 150-minute German-Czech-Iranian co-production than that it would deal with the death penalty: with several hundred enforced judgments, Iran is right behind the People's Republic of China. But the film "Sheytan Vojud Nadarad" ("There is no Evil"), narrated in four episodes, does not add any further death row drama to the many, in some cases important, feature films on this topic in film history. It is not about the guilt of the condemned, but rather that of the executioner.
This is unusual enough, but as is so often the case in the special, indirect narrative culture of Iranian film, this enormously powerful film also reaches a higher general level: Rassulof, the filmmaker convicted in his homeland, shot a masterpiece of civil disobedience in a dictatorship , Never before has one of his films been released in his own country, and the regime must be particularly afraid of this.
Berlinale shows family drama
The first episode could be an Iranian family drama like many others if it weren't for the last scene with its disturbing twist. Completely unprepared, the viewer witnesses a group execution carried out in shameless banality. Describing this scene here would also rob it of its effect.
The second story introduces the terrible Iranian custom of having executions carried out by military personnel. A young man sees himself unable to do so and plans his escape. Before Rassulof explains the consequences of this story two decades ago in the last episode, he blinds the reality of a family of regime critics who has just lost a loved one through an execution - not without telling at the same time about the young soldier who carried them out.
Each individual sequence is extremely narrative, which is particularly surprising for a few moments of real pathos. Because despite all the gloom, Rassulof also wants to promote a spirit of resistance, and that even includes emphatic agitprop. Who would have thought that in an Iranian film one would hear the singer Milva with her version of the revolutionary song "Bella Ciao"? It is the original version of the song as sung by rice pickers at the beginning of the century in protest of working conditions.
Berlinale shows candidates for the Golden Bear
How did Rassulof manage to create his greatest masterpiece given the persecution and difficult situation? What artistic precision, what security of feeling, what discursive acuity was he capable of?
There have been other worthy winners at this festival, most notably the US independent films “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” by Eliza Hittman and Kelly Reichardt's Marxism western “First Cow”. Christian Petzold's "Undine" also enchanted with his original look at the present of history and myth, some also see Burhan Qurbani's theatrical Döblin modernization "Berlin Alexanderplatz" as a candidate for the Golden Bear. But it is difficult to imagine how the jury can get past Rassulof's work.
The last day of the festival started on a very dark note. "The body never forgets," says Rithy Panh. The filmmaker from Cambodia has repeatedly dealt with his trauma as a survivor of a Khmer Rouge torture camp in his work. In his most famous film, "The Missing Image", he uses elements of the puppet film as a kind of metaphorical placeholder for the undocumented, suffered crime.
His latest film is different: "Irradiés", ("Radiations") is the one and a half hour essay entitled. Starting from the Japanese atomic bomb victims in the Second World War, the montage film creates an oppressive panorama of war crimes and state murders and tortures of the 20th century. The canvas is divided into three parts, which sometimes exaggerates the archive material less than involuntarily - for example, when the outer triptych wings show pictures from Auschwitz, but the center is for a different crime scene.
Among other things, Panh uses images from Alain Resnais' Auschwitz film "Night and Fog", but the sphere of influence does not always seem appropriate to these important visual testimonies of human crime. His own artistic approaches to the suffered - choreographed scenes that work in a semi-abstract way with other survivors and contemporary witnesses - seem much more convincing than the archive material spread over the three canvases. This Saturday evening the Berlinale ends with the award ceremony.