Berlin Dispatch. 5.

Now that I've been covering the Berlinale for a decade or more, I can say that Berlin seemed to be the poster city for the late 20th century notions that borders were coming down and cultures were mixing. And they did in Berlin, but now we're seeing that the notion of borders collapsing was as utopian - albeit far more naïve than cynical - as the public argument for building the wall in the first place.

But who needs walls when you can fight a culture war over cartoons, or when every airport that I seem to visit has an immigration jail? The downside of globalization isn't just that European manufacturing workers are losing their jobs, but that people who believed in crossing borders to find peace or security are being proven wrong. The US is a prominent offender, despite the public rhetoric extolling free trade, but the films in the Forum that I've seen target the problem elsewhere.

Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon addresses border anxiety in one of the places where that anxiety is felt most acutely, South Africa. The director, Khalo Matabane, turns his film into a quest, the search for a Somalia woman named Fatima who has fled to South Africa rather than stay in a country torn apart by war. (Remember the US "invasion" that led to a botched Marine mission followed by high casualties, bodies of dead GI's dragged through the streets and a quick retreat, and all of it on television. Read Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden, a book that is even better than the respectable film made about the US Somalia gambit.)

In Matababane's repetitive quest, a journey that seems in love with its own process at times, he has the chance to talk to plenty of refugees. Some have been in South Africa for a decade or two, yet they admit that that don't consider it home - home, sadly, is often the place where the killing is, but it's still home. Refugees from Sudan, Zimbabwe and Bosnia say the same things. Some are themselves killers. A former soldier from Zaire who's now in South Africa recalls ordering troops to fire on a crowd. If that isn't grim enough, Matabane, a natural charmer, goes to camps where women from Mozambique and elsewhere have taken shelter. Some talk, but some won't even show their faces. Is it to avoid being found by police and deported, or is it the shame of rape that keeps them from looking at the camera? Most show the pain of displacement, and these are the ones who were lucky enough to get out.

Ultimately, Matabane finds Fatima, and has another conversation with another refugee. It's revealing as an additional chapter in the story of refugees seeking protection in a country that produced its own refugees less than twenty years ago, but before that we see a troubling extended scene. Matabane visits a holding jail where illegal aliens are detained. They come from all over sub-Saharan Africa. All they have are the clothes on their backs, and they talk of unbearable conditions that they fled, only to be be rounded up and jailed before deportation. Their testimony to Matabane makes the unconscionable conditions of US immigrant jails seem humane. The men, appalled at their treatment by police in a Black country, are sick from conditions in confinement, and there is absolutely no sign that things will change. Just before the door to the holding pen clangs shut, we see a crowd of men inside. Given horrendous political and economic conditions in Congo, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Sudan and any number of other places, that crowd will probably grow.

Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon is not cinematic. It is a series of conversations, evidence of just how many refugees are struggling to keep from being sent home from South Africa. Just as revealing and just as raw technically is Inatteso (Unexpected) by Domenico Distilo of Italy, which follows immigrants who are seeking asylum in there.

The title is never explained. We can assume from what we see on the screen that the refugees never expected the cold treatment they receive upon arriving. When they arrive, in this film, it involves being taken off ships by Italian agents, lined up like prisoners of war on the ground or the deck of another ship, and marched to detention camps. So much for free borders. Those of us who have watched Italians behave like other Europeans towards immigrants - bureaucratically and begrudgingly, at best - will find nothing unexpected. Suffice it to say that the Pope doesn't raise his voice in support of these victims of poverty and oppression. Chilling stories of torture and mistreatment don't convince examiners, who turn down requests from three different asylum seekers.

Once again the documentary approach to these stories is to turn on the camera and let it roll. There isn't much editing here in this Distilo-tion, although we have to assume that Distilo shot much more than he is showing. (Why pay an editor when he or she costs money?) Sometimes the technique contributes unexpected dramatic effects - the film's title is Unexpected, after all - when the mayor of a small Italian town where the immigrants have turned up holds the microphone as he responds to the filmmaker's questions.

I'm not sure what's going on here. Is this a new ultra-vérité style, or is it a new primitivism, or are the filmmakers so overwhelmed by their information that editing is barely necessary? The crudeness of the filmmaking, so far, doesn't make these films any less watchable.

The same is the case for Congo River: Beyond Darkness, a documentary by Thierry Michel of Belgium who shoots from the deck of a barge on the Congo. Perhaps the slow tracking camera is the appropriate observer of Michel's subject, modern river life as compared with the images of that life under the colonial power in the first half of the 20th century. Michel is not new to the Congo, and he's well aware of Belgium's rape of the place.

There's a lot to be discovered here in these crates that barely float, and some that simply don't, especially in the wake of the Egyptian ferry sinking just last week which caused a thousand deaths. The Congo boats are far less seaworthy. Perhaps the presence of life-threatening danger helps explain why those who speak are so passionately religious. There's more preaching here than you'll find on a riverboat on the Mississippi. (They gamble on those riverboats now.) But in Africa, where the material standard of living that we see is as precarious as the boats on the river, these seem to be problems that only God will solve in the short run.

The film's title needs some clarification. Most of the voyage that we observe sails down a wide river rimmed with fog and abandoned shrinks, like the river that leads us to the Conradian destination that the title implies. Rain is pouring down most of the time. There's no romance here. Constant sorrow? Yet we're told that this film is taking us beyond the darkness. The darkness begins on the shore, and flows up the countless tributaries that feed the river. We never enter that darkness, in which most of the people who live their live their lives. Another film? We can guess what its style might be.

Posted by dwhudson at February 13, 2006 11:29 AM