FILM OF THE WEEK
INTERVIEW | Europa PLC: On Berlin screens, not all seems fair in love and war |
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| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Tuesday, 11 March 2008 | |
 'Be Like Others' director Tanaz Eshaghian at the Teddy ceremony. Photo by Fabrizio Maltese. Europa PLC ("Europa Public Limited Company") is the op-ed column of european-films.net editor Boyd van Hoeij. It analyses events and trends in European cinema and will appear every week except during festivals. The 22nd Teddy Awards, the Queer film prizes associated with the Berlin Film Festival, were all about the real thing. Feature films with queer content were almost uniformly ignored in favour of provocative pieces of non-fiction, with recurrent subjects including the life and work of gay artists (including such names as Derek Jarman and Gilbert & George) and the difficult cohabitation of homosexuality on the one hand and religion and politics on the other. The title of one of the Teddy documentaries says it all: A Jihad for Love.
Almost all winners of the 2008 Teddy Awards were documentaries, including the two prizes decided on by the audience. Even the Best Feature Film winner The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, from Icelandic director Olaf de Fleur, is technically a fiction/non-fiction hybrid. Be Like Others from Iranian-American director Tanaz Eshaghian went home with two awards and offers probably the most shocking material of all the queer documentaries on offer in Berlin. The film, a co-production involving Canada, Iran, the UK and the US, portrays the lives of several men who have recently undergone or are about to undergo a sex change operation in their native Iran. Though homosexual acts are a sin in Iran and could lead to a death sentence, sex change operations have been legalised some twenty five years ago by Ayatollah Khomeini, to "right a natural wrong" for "diagnosed transsexuals". The result of what at first might seem like progressive stance is that many same-sex couples feel the need to have one of them undergo a sex change so that they may live together in all openness as an officially heterosexual couple after the operation. Many couples would gladly avoid such an operation altogether had their circumstances been different and the film’s central couple, the young hairdresser Ali and his 20-year-old boyfriend-turned-girlfriend Anoosh/Anahita, clearly show all the difficulties and profound emotional shake-ups such an operation causes for them and their families. Eshaghian had to rush into filming when her Iranian filming permit suddenly arrived but nevertheless has enough coherent material for a spellbinding documentary that shocks not with its explicit contents – there is none – but with its raw and ugly emotional truths. It is unapologetic about the impact of the operation on the physical and emotional lives of not only the men that undergo one but also the people around them. The most interesting aspect of the work is the portrayal of the Iranian state’s complicated stance on the subject matter – for example, pre-operative males can get a written permit to go out in public in all-covering female clothing until they are operated on – and how this rigid thinking influences the behaviour of the men involved. (Eshaghian also filmed some candidates for a female-to-male operation but they ended up, as per the press notes, on the cutting room floor.)  'A Jihad for Love' director Parvez Sharma in Berlin. Photo by Fabrizio Maltese. While the latter two have a very narrow geographical focus (Football Under Cover follows an all-girls Berlin football team that plans to play the Iranian national women’s team in Iran, while Das andere Istanbul paints a picture of gay life in the titular metropolis), A Jihad for Love travels the globe, with stops including South Africa, France, Egypt, Turkey, Iran and India. While the scope of the documentary is certainly admirable, its globetrotting antics turns what could have been a cohesive argument into small glimpses of a much larger narrative that never really comes into focus. Amongst other things, director Parvez Sharma explores in A Jihad for Love whether Islam considers or should consider homosexuality haraam ("sinful"), while for Western audiences the most noteworthy aspect of the series of talking heads may be that none of them is willing to renounce their faith just to accommodate their difficultly accepted sexuality. For the gay men and women portrayed, being gay and being Muslim is not a question of either/or but a continued search for a workable compromise, even if it means suffering to the point of having to flee to another country. As one of the protagonists puts it: "People may leave or abandon their country, but not their faith". A member of the Teddy jury revealed that this year's jury was indeed more impressed by the documentaries rather than the fiction films, and while the subject of this year’s queer documentaries in Berlin might have a clearly felt urgency and be highly topical, it is equally true that most of the documentaries impressed because of their content, often leaving form by the wayside. "There is nothing really cinematic about this year’s crop of documentaries," concurs Davide Oberto, one of the programmers of the Turin GLBT film festival who attended the Berlin Film Festival, "most of them would be equally impressive on TV, which is not exactly a compliment". There are two documentaries that did stand out for their formal qualities: the aforementioned Das andere Istanbul and the Italian documentary Improvvisamente l’inverno scorso (Suddenly, Last Winter) from and about real-life couple Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi. The former, the graduation work from director Döndü Kilic, is perhaps the least revelatory and compelling in terms of content (gays rights in Istanbul find themselves somewhere between East and West, reflecting the city’s geographical position) and the documentary has a tendency to ramble (a prolonged wedding sequence adds to the running time but nothing to the film itself). But while there may not be truly shocking material such as in Be Like Others or A Jihad for Love, Kilic does occasionally show a flair for striking images that include well-framed static shots of the city and some poetic shots including the silhouette of a single belly-dancing male at the waterside against the setting sun.  Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi, directors of 'Improvvisamente l'inverno scorso'. Portrait by Fabrizio Maltese. What sets the discovery in motion is the discussion of gay rights in Italy on a political level that occurred last winter. In an imaginative manner that includes voice-over, rudimentary stop-motion animation and acted sequences of domestic bliss that toy with gay stereotypes, Hofer and Ragazzi have pieced together a portrait of a society that seems not only intolerant but, in some instances actually spiteful of gay rights. With self-irony and humour that never feels too calculated to please, the documentary also paints a vivid picture of the jungle of Italian policy-making that is comprehensible even for those who could barely find the country on a map. That it does so in a personal manner that can only be described as a mixture of post-Big Brother and post-Michael Moore documentary filmmaking does in no way diminish neither the inventiveness nor the candidness of its makers. Clearly, the cohabitation of homosexuality, religion and politics are an area worth exploring and if Berlin is anything to go by, then non-fiction filmmakers have got a head start on their fiction filmmaking brethren. Rendez-vous in Berlin next year for some fiction films that tackle the same subject? Related links on the web:
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