Four directors with features selected for the Tiger competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) discussed the many facets of death as a theme underpinning their feature films on Sunday (January 30.)
Filmmakers Maria Ignatenko, Gao Linyang and Mara Polgovsky spotlighted the Holocaust, pain and dealing with loss as they discussed differing aspects of death in the second of the festival’s live online daily press conferences for this edition.
Morgane Dziurla-Petit meanwhile addressed social entrapment and its complex effects as experienced in a rural village in Northern France where she grew up at the event presented by festival director Vanja Kaludjercic.
Taking place at the time of the Nazi occupation of the Baltic states, Maria Ignatenko’s Achrome follows a young man as he joins the Wehrmacht. Considered at best naïve by his fellow comrades, the quasi-religious fervour with which he ackles his military role evaporates when he is confronted by fellow soldiers’ unacceptable behaviour, after which he takes it upon himself to save a young woman of the area.
“We are really looking for ways to talk about the past. These topics are taboo in the former Soviet Union, so as a film director I was looking for a language with which to talk about this topic,” Russian director Ignatenko said. “The question of forgiveness and the ability to forgive touches me deeply. It is an underlying condition of human beings, and it is very related to the ability to ask for forgiveness.”
Ignatenko’s second feature film was inspired by a book about the horror of the Holocaust in the Baltic states and local collaboration with Nazi occupiers by Lithuanian author Rūta Vanagaitė.
In To Love Again, Gao Linyang portrays a poignant picture of an elderly couple so traumatised by political upheavals of the past that their wounds may never be fully healed. In this first feature film Linyang confronts the thorny mentality of a generation so deeply scarred by life’s events that death is welcomed willingly into daily planning, with attempts made to accommodate new spouses into previous burial plans.
“I had a girlfriend whose grandmother married again after her original grandfather died. The issue arose of the grandmother being buried with the grandfather as well as with the previous grandfather during a meal we were having,” Linyang said. “The proposal was refused by the family in a very Chinese way, with everyone ignoring it and continuing to eat in silence. This had a big impact on me and is the reason why I decided to develop this theme.”
Morgane Dziurla-Petit instead discussed the motivation behind the filming of Excess Will Save Us, including being “stuck” in an unwanted environment for many decades, an experience tantamount to social death her father went through as well. The feature sees the young filmmaker return to her family home in a hamlet in Northern France to investigate a report about terrorist activities, with her eponymous 2019 short making up the first 15 minutes of the film.
“It’s about finding how you can become your own self inside the family and how the family can become a weight on the freedom to be yourself,” said Dziurla-Petit. “As a filmmaker coming back to the village I felt free in that I chose to be there, and that compared to the feelings I had in my childhood of being stuck there.
Mexico’s Mara Polgovsky came across the material she edited into Malintzin 17 when her brother Eugenio died suddenly, aged 40. The outcome is an observational documentary revolving around her brother and her young niece monitoring a bird nesting on an electricity pole across multiple days and their gentle discussions during the multi-day filming process.
“I was moved by this material, as I was mourning and missing him and because of his sudden death it brought me very close to him,” Polgovsky said. “It kind of made sense to start from this very intimate project and then move on to other material” left incomplete at the time of his death
The IFFR runs January 26 - February 6, with the winner of the Tiger competition to be announced at the February 2 awards ceremony.
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