New representations of innocence and victimhood

This year Cottbus Festival was majestically opened with Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross (Poland/Sweden): a remarkable cinematic interpretation of Brueghel’s epic masterpiece "The Road to Calvary" (1564). The film offers reflections on the painting’s social and religious mission by developing the scenes captured on the canvas into cinematic vignettes so that a story is woven around the characters. At the centre of the painting, though not immediately visible, is Christ, collapsing under the weight of His cross, but transplanted into Brueghel’s sixteenth-century world. Majewski makes explicit the painter’s intention to place Christ’s passion narrative in the context of the Spanish crown’s oppression of Protestant Flanders and persecution of the ‘heretics’. He scrutinises the whole society from the perspective of a divine eye, perched in the elevated position of a mill high up on a cliff.  In the film’s final shot, as the camera zooms out to reveal the painting hanging on a museum wall, another masterpiece from the same period enters the frame, Brueghel’s "The Tower of Babel", as if to interrogate the viewer about the kind of civilization that humankind is erecting.

This question was taken further in the ten Eastern European feature films presented in the official competition. The Ecumenical Prize and also the Special Mention of the festival jury went to Anca Damian’s Crulic – The Path to Beyond (Romania/Poland) for its original form and topical content. This peculiar film is in the form of a documentary-like animation, which deftly combines stop-motion, collage, drawing, and painting with real photos of its homonymous protagonist. Such techniques make the viewer feel as if we are gaining special insights into the life of a real person. In a warm and sometimes humorous tone, Crulic’s voice narrates from beyond the grave his own story: a Romanian is arrested in Poland for a crime he didn’t commit, in response to which he embarks on a hunger strike as a gesture of protest, only to be left to die under the cold indifferent eyes of both Polish and Romanian officialdom.

While under the director’s hand the film illustrates the tragic destiny of an ordinary person elevated to universal significance, her special attention to Crulic’s personal objects captures the drama of a real, concrete person lost within the impersonal procedures of a judicial system. A metaphysical level is added to this at the bookends of the film which illustrate Crulic’s final journey home to his native town. As his body is carried away by the funeral car we see his soul returning to his homeland too. The rhythm of the narration slows down significantly as his soul, finally liberated form prison, is represented by a veil travelling not only towards home but also towards a ‘beyond’. For the viewer who has picked up the fleeting visual cues – a prayer book and Christ’s icon on the wall – this ‘land beyond’ is one that holds the promise of a justice denied by human institutions.

The Festival Jury’s First Prize for best film went to Twilight Portrait (Russia), Angelina Nikonova’s debut feature film. Casting again a cinematic eye on victimhood, the film presents the intriguing story of Marina, a social worker who, while fighting family violence in her profession, falls prey to violence perpetrated by the very institutions that are supposed to prevent it.  Not only a clever social investigation into Russian institutions and mores, the film is to an even larger extent a psychological portrait. Raped by a policeman Marina ends up falling in love with her own rapist. Twilight Portrait is filmed with Dogma 95 aesthetics, and offers a number of references to Danish cinema. A scene in which a despondent Marina exposes the hypocrisy and stifling conventionality of her close family and friends calls to mind Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998), while the crude reality of episodes in which she offers herself up as the mistress of the policeman imitates the Christ-like submission shown by Lars von Trier’s Bess in Breaking the Waves (1996). This second parallel is reinforced by the suggestion at the close of the film that the rapist has been somehow reformed through the unfailing love shown by his victim.

Complementing such reflections for the Ecumenical Jury was a delightful surprise from outside the festival. A group of talented young people from the SELK communities Cottbus and Döbbrik turned their hands to making a short film about their own faith. Suggestively titled Drei (Three) the film illustrates the occurrence of this number throughout the universe and the way in which the Trinity can become the stable foundation of human life. With concrete imagery using simple comparisons from daily experience as well as philosophical observations, the film cast a refreshing look at our faith. The jury, incidentally a triad of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox backgrounds, was very pleased to commend the achievement at the very welcoming ecumenical reception at the "Schlosskirche".