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Sarajevo Roses (2016)
Searing documentary about the siege of Sarajevo
SARAJEVO ROSES
The terrible siege of Sarajevo lasted the best part of four years, from April 1992 to March 1996 and is calculated to have resulted in 5434 civilian deaths. An American photo- journalist, Roger M. Richards, arrived in the city early on in the conflict equipped with a pair of cameras and 30 reels of film, and stayed for the duration of the war, in the course of which he recorded many iconic images.
Now he has returned to the spot to make a documentary about the siege, seen through the eyes of three principle witnesses: a surgeon-turned-psychiatrist called Asim Haracic; an immensely engaging musician named Vedran Smailovic; and a bank worker, Sanda Skrabic, who was the subject of one of Richards's celebrated photographs of the time – snapped in color and in mid-air stride (so to speak) as she leaps forward towards the camera, valiantly dodging snipers' bullets.
The quality of the documentary is intimately linked to the articulacy and thoughtfulness of these very well-chosen talking heads. All three are amazing personalities. Haracic, the doctor, is serious, kind and modest. He has wise words to say about the depth of the trauma suffered by the city's inhabitants, and about how art-based therapy (he is an artist himself) can slowly bring healing. An inspiring humanist, in short. So is his colleague, Smailovic, the musician. An eyewitness to one of the conflict's first big civilian massacres (27 May 1992: twenty-two people killed by a single shell), he took his cello to the spot of the mass killing the next day, where he played, in mourning, an adagio by Albinoni . His friends urged him to repeat his performance the following day – and the day after that, and the day after that. His daily performances, lasting many months, became a symbol of the city's resistance. In September 1993 this man accepted an offer to leave Sarajevo - first to London, then to Northern Ireland (where he became a biker). Now he has come back to tell us what he remembers about the siege. The nightmare of that initial explosion still lives with him and has made him an ardent pacifist. "Believe me, walking on a street where blood has been spread is so much harder than walking on ice. Nothing in the world is more slippery!"
The third witness, Sanda Skrabic, received her fame only accidentally, you could say, through the wide dissemination of Richard's "road runner" photograph. Yet, having been tracked down by the filmmakers, she turns out to be just as engaging as the other two – just as brave, modest and eloquent. She reminisces about her happy middle-class childhood, and chides herself about being nostalgic for Tito's days. Her assessment of the hardship of the siege has not a shred of self-pity about it. And yet she is able to say about the whole experience in summary: "They {the besiegers} ruined the life I was supposed to have. What happened can never be erased."
Two other witnesses have smaller but equally affecting parts in the film: Amin Oprasic, and Sanela Tasic. Married now, they were orphaned street children at the time of the troubles, and they tell their story with simple unaffected dignity.
Films like this remind us how fragile are society's bonds, and how easily and carelessly civic life can become shattered. One moment, Sarajevo was a peaceful, prosperous provincial capital city, where different nationalities and religions lived together, in harmony; then, suddenly, almost for no reason at all, people found they were at war with each other.
An epilogue shows the recent peace-giving visit to Sarajevo of Pope Francis (June 2015); and the movie ends with a medley of children's voices, their young faces speaking directly to camera, sweetly telling us their hopes for the future.
Rudolf Nureyev. Island of His Dreams (2016)
A dancer's relaxation
Nureyev in exile had a number of Turkish friends and came to admire the Turkish way of life hugely. On one of his frequent trips to that country in the 1970s the idea came to him that it would be fun to buy a little Turkish island, and build a home there. The search for this dream forms the basis for this charming though ultimately melancholy documentary. Its "selling point" is the wonderful home-movie footage that survives of Nureyev among his friends at different stages of this adventure, either splashing around in the sea or relaxing on terraces. These archive scenes have been spliced with modern sequences of his friends reminiscing about the time in question, against equally lovely sunlit backgrounds. And they are very pleasant, these friends - very civilized and articulate. Yet it is all a little sad because, first, this genius of the ballet is no longer with us (we see episodes towards the end where his body is plainly wracked with illness), and second, because the dream, in the event, never came off. The island they found, after much effort, wasn't available. Never mind: the dream obviously kept him going for a crucial period of his existence. Ensuring this documentary is fun to watch, there are plenty of "action sequences" showing Nureyev, both on stage and in rehearsal: together with the recorded conversations, they remind us of his compelling beauty and charisma.
Finding Family (2013)
Finding Family
Searching-for-one's-origins documentaries don't come more engaging than this. Oggi Tomic, born with a water-on-the-brain condition, was abandoned as a child by his Bosnian Serb mother to a life of institutions and orphanages - one or two of them child-friendly, most of them not. Yet his condition wasn't crippling and he grew up a normal lad who in due course developed a passionate interest in photography. The talent that emerged led him eventually to England and a place at the National Film and Television School. His excellent training there has ensured a fluent filmmaking technique which he has put to good use in undertaking this odyssey to track down his birth mother. At first his emotions are somewhat negative, but as he draws nearer his goal his feelings become more interesting and more complicated. Was his mother really to blame, and what would "blame" mean in such a context? A fascinating meditation on fate, identity and history, the film draws us into a world, and a value system, that most of us are rather unfamiliar with. Nonetheless, the theme of the film is universal, and in its own way momentous: nothing less than the necessity for forgiveness.
Pustoy dom (2012)
The Empty Home
Nurbek Egen and Ekaterina Tirdatova's film (Kyrgyzstan's nomination for the forthcoming foreign language Oscars) is very impressive: the viewer immediately gets the sense that these are film-makers who know their business. A rich, detailed and unsentimental picture emerges of life in post-Soviet society, and how tough it is out there in the demise of traditional social values. The skill of the film-makers is shown in the way that they trust the audience to pick up the story without necessarily having every last detail explained to us: we fill in the gaps ourselves and quite soon understand that a coherent network of social relationships – intelligently delineated and systematically developed – governs the overall drift of the story. The movie's sophistication can be discerned in the way that the excitement of the tale (and it's very exciting) isn't dependent on straightforward genre conventions of torture and revenge. Certainly, there is a prey and there is a pursuer. But who will outwit whom in this game of high stakes is kept back to the very last moment. The milieu that is sketched here is beginning to be familiar to Western viewers through powerful films like last year's Elena. It is a world where crime is an ordinary part of life, and where middle-class values of decency and respect for the individual hold little sway. "Each man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost!" Yet even in Darwinian cesspools there are distinctions to be made. The heroine Ascel, for all her single-minded ruthlessness, keeps a kind of innocence: this is what is moving about the film – it's not completely a story about corruption. The actress in question (Maral Koichukaraeva) is absolutely brilliant – as brilliant as she is beautiful. But in fact all the acting is good, the secondary parts as well as the principals. The Empty Home is properly ambitious in its imaginative grasp of an evolving society in all its complexity. But where it is most ambitious is in refusing to condescend to the audience. There are no "feel-good" let-out clauses. At the end you find yourself thinking: This is the real thing.
Sezon tumanov (2009)
Dilemmas of expatriate life
Hollywood and art house: the two basic forms of contemporary cinema. One of them tends towards being entertainment and escapist-oriented; the other delights in exploring the vagaries and trials of real life. It takes an artist to make 'real life' entertaining, especially if the film in question is dealing with flat and grey matters like the everyday disappointment of expectations. Two recent British films seem to me however to have hit the authentically Chekhovian note: one of them Joanna Hogg's 'Archipelago', the other being the film under review, an Anglo-Russian production directed by Anna Tchernakova.
Marina, the heroine of 'Season of Mists', is, like the director herself, an expatriated Russian living in the West, and one of the questions the film asks rather subtly is whether it is possible to have a fulfilled life in a country that isn't one's own. (The same question, as a matter of fact, that Tarkovsky was asking in 'Nostalghia'.) Language comes into the matter, but also the genius of the locality. Tchernakova makes a good job of showing how rural south Leicestershire is the most ordinary place on earth - yes, even downright boring - but at the same time magical and wonderful, and imbued with misty poetic grace.
So, why wouldn't you want to live there - especially if you were happily married? That's the question. True love tends to cut through every dilemma, but, although living companionably enough with her garage-mechanic Welsh husband Gregory (a nice performance by Ifan Huw Dafydd), one pretty soon gets the feeling he doesn't come near to fulfilling Marina's highest and deepest ideals. Thus, when along comes a party of Russian musicians - quarrelsome, talkative and fond of the bottle - of course she falls for one of them: it is inevitable. Since this is a film rather than a piece of theatre (or indeed a television play) we can actually go to Moscow with Marina, and take another look around at her birth place. What a lot of life there is in the city, compared to sweet little middle-class England! But is it the right kind of life? And what does one mean by 'a lot of life' anyway? The temptations inherent in the situation are nicely and evenly drawn by Tchernakova. We watch with fascination our heroine trying to make up her mind at the onset of a ferocious mid-life crisis (it makes it more piquant that a child or, rather, children, are involved). Should she obey the promptings of desire (such promptings may after all be merely temporary), or settle for what she has - knowing, or fearing, that in doing so she is opting for second best? Such is the dilemma the movie hinges upon, with some freshly-observed secondary characters, just to make the situation complicated and interesting. Whatever happens, it is not going to be a conventional happy ending. But are we left therefore with an inevitably 'tragic' ending? This is how the film seems to me to be very clever. Often, in life, we simply don't know what our blessings are - or whether indeed blessings come into the matter.Is the colour of life grey, or is it silver? Or both at the same time? Are we - in this film - in spring or in autumn? And what would Chekhov have made of Marina?