1st European John Templeton Film Award 1997

The 1st European John Templeton Film Award went to "De Verstekeling" (The Stowaway) by Ben van Lieshout and was presented at a church service to the director on February 22, 1998, in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche during the Berlin Film Festival. The award was endowed with CHF 3.500, donated by the John Templeton Foundation.

Commendation

A film which brings together two of today’s social concerns, ecology and refugees, has been chosen as the winner of the first European John Templeton Film Award. The film, “The Stowaway” (original “De Verstekeling”) is directed by Ben van Lieshout and made by the Dutch company Egmond Film and Television in Amsterdam.

“The Stowaway” carries the slogan: “Those who do not believe in dreams, are not realists”, and in the film viewers should not be surprised at miracles! The film opens in the former fishing village Mujnak in Karakalpakstan, a republic in Uzbekistan. With the shrinking of the Aral sea family income from fishing has disappeared with the water. Orazbai, the son of one of the former fishing families dreams of another life and stows away on a boat ending up not, as he supposes, in New York but in Rotterdam. There he finds shelter and strikes up a relationship with a woman and her young son. Through the son he begins to learn the language. He fails to find work and is eventually picked up by the aliens police and returned to his village. Once home he recognizes that his future lies in his own country and not in his dreams. Miracles – yes, somehow the water returns to the Aral!

The film also won both the main and Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg film festival in 1997. In commenting on the Ecumenical Award, the jury said: “Magically and with a subtle sense of humour, the film tells the story of a migration and happy return. The director offers impressive, metaphorical images against resignation and hopelessness.”

Ein Film, der zwei der gesellschaftlichen Belange von heute vereint, nämlich Ökologie und Flüchtlinge, wurde zum Sieger des ersten Europäischen John Templeton Filmpreises gewählt. Es handelt sich um den von Ben van Lieshout gedrehten Film „The Stowaway“ (Originaltitel „De Verstekeling“) auf deutsch etwa „Der blinde Passagier“, der von der niederländischen Gesellschaft Egmond Film und Fernsehen (Amsterdam) produziert worden ist.

Der Film „The Stowaway“ trägt das Schlagwort: „Alle, die nicht an Träume glauben, sind keine Realisten“, und wer den Film sieht, sollte nicht überrascht sein, Wunder zu erleben! Der Film beginnt im ehemaligen Fischerdorf Mujnak in Karakalpakstan, einer Republik in Usbekistan. Mit dem zurückgehenden Wasser des Aralsees ist auch das Familieneinkommen aus der Fischerei zusammengeschrumpft. Orazbai, der Sohn einer der ehemaligen Fischerfamilien, träumt von einem anderen Leben und versteckt sich als blinder Passagier auf einem Boot, das nicht, wie erwartet, in New York, sondern in Rotterdam ankommt. Dort findet er Unterkunft und beginnt eine Beziehung zu einer Frau mit ihrem kleinen Sohn. Durch den Sohn beginnt er, die Sprache zu lernen. Es gelingt ihm nicht, Arbeit zu finden, und schliesslich wird er von der Fremdenpolizei aufgegriffen und in sein Dorf zurückgeschickt. Wieder zuhause erkennt er, dass seine Zukunft in seinem eigenen Land und nicht in seinen Träumen liegt. Und wie ein Wunder kehrt das Wasser in den Aralsee zurück.

Der Film hat am Internationalen Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg 1997 den Preis der Internationalen Jury und den Preis der Ökumenischen Jury gewonnen. Die Ökumenische Jury begründete den Preis mit den Worten: „Mit Magie und feinem Humor erzählt der Film die Geschichte einer Auswanderung und einer glücklichen Rückkehr. Der Regisseur zeigt uns beindruckende und metaphorische Bilder, die aller Resignation und Hoffnungslosigkeit trotzen.“

Jury: Robin Gurney, Hans Hodel, Karsten Visarius

Sermon for the Award Ceremony

by Hans Werner Dannowski, Hannover

during the International Film Festival Berlin

Sunday Estomihi, February 22, 1998, in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche

And now I will show you the best way of all.

1. I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I am without love,

I am a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

2. I may have the gift of prophecy, and know every hidden truth,

I may have faith strong enough to move mountains; but I have no love,

I am nothing.

3. I may dole out all I posses, or even give my body to be burnt,

but if I have no love, I am none the better.

4. Love is patient; love is kind and envies no  one.

Love is never boastful, nor conceited , nor rude;

5. never selfish, not quick to take offence.

Love keeps no score of wrongs;

6. does not gloat over other men’s sins, but delights in the truth.

7. There is nothing love cannot face;

there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance.

8. Love will never come to an end. Are there prophets? Their work will be over.

Are there tongues of ecstasy? They will cease.

Is there knowledge? It will vanish away;

9. for our knowledge and our prophecy alike are partial,

10. and the partial vanishes when wholeness comes.

11. When I was a child, my speech, my outlook, and my thoughts were all childish.

When I grew up, I had finished with childish things.

12. Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face.

My knowledge now is partial; then it will be whole, like God’s knowledge of me.

13. In a word, there are three things tha last for ever: faith, hope, and love;

but the greatest of them all is love.

1. Corinthians 13,1-13

Dear Friends!

This famous thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, this “Song of Love” is a guidepost – or in the terminology of Jewish teaching – a Halacha. “And I will show you an even better way”, Paul writes to the Corinthian congregation and introduces thus this chapter. The congregation in Corinth was an agitated, a lively church body, charismatic, with spiritual and ecstatic experience also in the area of “speaking in tongues” – which at times may have seemed more akin to the melody “I’m dancing with you in heaven”.  Paul does not even reject all this and writes in that which follows this chapter a long passage dealing with “speaking in tongues”, this glossolalia of the direct revelation. But he puts these gifts of the Spirit – as is typical of the Halacha – into a ranking order. In other words, he takes Christians of then and now along on the road of Jesus. “See, we are going up to Jerusalem”. The road to Jerusalem is the road through Jericho, where the blind sit at the wayside and the beggars at the church door. Nobody gets settled and filled on this road, and the bad conscience of one’s own limitations and imperfection becomes one’s companion. Exactly for this road St. Paul wrote the 13th chapter of the 1st Letter to the Corinthians. “In a word, there are three things that last for ever: faith, hope and love; but the greatest of them all s love.”

Although – as the historical situation of the origin of the text shows us, this love which St. Paul means is more that of (the intensity of) ethical and moral action than of (intensity of) feelings and emotions, please allow me to begin the interpretation of the text with a personal experience of love.

What exactly happens, when I fall in love? I would guess that no one here among us is so far away form this experience that he or she has no memory of it. Falling in love with someone is an astounding extension of my range of potential. Not only am I suddenly “on cloud”, I could embrace the  whole world. I am suddenly capable of things, even slightly mad things, I take on challenges which I would otherwise never consider. My ego – which  up to this time was only able to establish itself as the centre of my  consciousness by closing itself off from the rest of the world, suddenly opens up, expands. New perspectives hitherto unknown appear from seemingly nowhere. The person I love becomes the gateway through which the world, closed out by my ego, begins to flood in on me. In a feeling comparable only to a mystic union my experience of myself is extended to the ends of the world. Love becomes the road which carries me beyond everything I ever knew. Love “is patient”; “there is nothing love cannot  face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance”, as St. Paul says. “Love will never come to an end”, is something I will always say in such moments. “I love you forever and ever.” “Delimitation” – Unbounding -  is the hallmark of love. It gets me into motion toward another person, another “ego”, and that makes love the greatest and most beautiful thing on earth – no, in heaven and on earth!

The greatest and most beautiful is, however, always also that which is the most precarious. The many “dramas for the sake of love” are innumerable, and the range of action in the spectrum between love and hate goes as far as manslaughter. Perhaps the worst of these possibilities is that which seems to be the most rapidly increasing today: That of people who don’t dare to love at all for fear of disappointment. And there is a fork in the road of love which must be recognised as such, or the road will lead into a desert. Delimitation, this hallmark of love itself, has the tendency toward dissolution, assimilation into a larger unit which surrounds me.  In this dissolution, however, I give up my self, I am no longer my own person. That means that when the veil of happenstance falls from love, I encounter a YOU which in addition to its beauty and greatness also has its pitifullness  just as I do – only in different places. And that is the critical point: Will I renounce my experience of delimitations as having been an illusion, or will I hold onto it and be able to take it on into my area of conscious activity. That ,means that – for instance – not only my wife’s or partner’s loving tenderness has a meaning for me, but also their anger and rage speaks to me, brings me a little way away from my Island of self-isolation. Shouldn’t I perhaps pay a great deal more attention to whatever may have caused the conflict? “Delimitation” remains the leitmotiv in this active interpretation of love. And leaving this intimate area of experience, I could cite examples in everyday life: the beggar who asks me for small change at station Zoo here nearby and whose runny nose repels me. Or in a sense less physical: the Moslem fundamentalist, whom I do not understand, asks me a question which I a forced to deal with. The delimitation of the Christian understanding of love extends to the love of one’s enemies, and it is no coincidence that the Good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable has become the archetype of love  and mercy. There is really more than a kernel of truth in the saying that  the biblical concept of love moves from outside to inside, in concrete action, in carrying and being carried, in the sensuality of embracing and comforting love comes into the world. Everything else is perhaps just projection which has to end in disappointment.

Yes, my friends, humanity in motion, the delimitation of the world and of mankind in the direction of something new. “If I spoke with tongues of men or of angles, but were without love…” That love which has infinite patience, which does not indulge itself in bitterness or keep score of offenses but rather simply forgets, which is glad to find the truth wherever

It appears… This Love as Delimitation is described so totally that the history of the interpretation of this chapter is full of the question of  whether it is possible to speak so radically and all-encompassingly of human love. Perhaps the chapter means the Love of God? God loves you so all-encompassingly, so totally. He carries you and is patient with you, He delimits Himself and – as paradoxical as that may sound – He draws human beings into His own horizon. That is certainly right and true, but if St. Paul  hat wanted to say here that God is Love, then he would have said it. Or then we have the version which Karl Barth taught us: Everywhere where you read “love” in the New Testament”, substitute “Jesus Christ”, only then are you reading totally correctly. This is His love which is so patient and  friendly snd slows us sinners to appear good in the eyes of the Eternal Father. Yes, that is definitely right. But doesn’t it also entail a backing of in the fact of the gigantic challenge of this love. Isn’t it nearly an infantile cuddling into the happenstance nature of love (the fact that “love just happens” to us)?

Here we really are speaking of the challenge to humanity to love, contained in the revelation of God: “If I spoke with the tongues of men and of angels but were without love…” It is wonderful to love, I say then. It is the absolute privilege of human beings to be able and be allowed to love. On this and this alone will a human being be measured. What would happen if Christian congregations and churches saw this as the real end goal of their way through time?

This 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians gives us some good questions as stumbling blocks laid in our road. It is, however, not the question: “Am I loved?” which is paramount. It is “Do you love?” “Do you love God?” “Do I love Him so much that I don’t want to defend myself against Him, that I want Him to touch me in all the beautiful and all the difficult experiences in my life?” “Do oyu love Christ?” “Do you love Him so much that you want to grow into His words and actions so that He takes on a form in you?” “Do you love humanity, creation?” “Do you feel a pain in your soul, when you see the way human beings throw away their own dignity, their humanity, how they despise it and tread on it?” Certainly our love is only partial. But if I “speak in tongues of men of of angels”, and don’t have this love – what would be the result?

Finding examples of this love is easy for me today. Later on in the framework of the announcements we will be giving an award to a film, and this film is like a guideline for the experience of love up to and including its active implementation. An English Christian by the name of John Templeton has donated a European film prize which is to be awarded this year for the first time. The film to be citated should – according to the stipulations of the foundation, be a film which serves “religious progress”. My interpretation of this goal is that the film should serve to broaden our  religious consciousness, to aid us in discovering new aspects of “delimitation”. The European Council of Churches in Geneva and the jury of the ecumenical film organisation INTERFILM have selected as their prize winner for the past year the Dutch film “De Verstekeling” (“The Stowaway”) by Ben van Lieshout, who is here among us in this church.

The film’s protagonist is a young man, Orazbai,  who lives in the broad expanses of Russia on Lake Aral in a country with the tongue-twisting name of Karakalpakstan: Lake Aral has dried out an became a steppe, the ships are stranded on the sand. The father, a fisherman, watches his boat as though he thought it could perhaps float again. For the younger generation it is in spite of all possible ingenuity and creative energy a hopeless situation. Orazbai dreams of New York, and one day he is up and gone. But instead of landing in New York, he finds himself in Rotterdam. A seaman’s family takes him in. The husband is often away, and the family is in a crisis. Orazbai becomes a second father to the son, and one day the woman takes him into her bed. An atmosphere of tenderness and understanding grows up around these three people – until one day immigration officers arrive at the flat. Suddenly Orazbai is back on Lake Aral. His sister’s wedding is being celebrated, and his father brings him the girl who has been chosen for him. Once more he begins to dream of the other world. But then he is sitting with his bride on a little hill, the village and the steppe landscape in the sand below them. “What has changed?” she asks cautiously. “You have seen with your oqn eyes how others live.” It’s not so different here, he replies. And it cam hardly get worse. Who knows, she answers, laughing softly. The viewer knows that they will succeed with each other. Love’s experience has been transformed to love’s proving, even in the worst circumstances imaginable.

An accompaniment on the way is this 13th chapter of the 1st Letter to the Corinthians – as I said at the beginning. A Halacha. An instruction for to road of life we all are on: Love is the experience of delimitation, unbounding. We all belong together, on Lake Aral and in Rotterdam, wherever we come from and whoever we are: It is only small steps on this road of love which we can take. But they are steps – steps into the one, into God’s, new world.

Amen

Translation: Karla Schmidt, Hannover