The 71st International Biennale of Cinema is a calm exercise of soft power at a time when the world is slipping into conflict. Balanced curation by Alberto Barbera has resulted in a festival which allows us to see every side, while sharing our suffering with others past, present and elsewhere. Foreshadowed by official discussions such as today’s conference on ‘Cultural Diplomacy And The Role Of Cinema’ at Lido, there are perspectives and characters from all over the world, such as with Ya Shagayu Po Moskve (Walking the Streets of Moscow) by Georgij Daneljia, a 60s film about a mixed group of Russians and Ukrainians meeting and hanging out in Moscow.
This entails a dangerous proposition, if we can identify with people we have never understood, that do not share our language or history, then perhaps we are all much more unified than our simplistic identifications with ethnicity, age and gender lead us to believe. This is not too far away from the theme revealed in Ghesseha (Tales) by Persian filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad, who presents a variety of characters from the Iranian city, office workers, cleaners, intellectuals, illustrating their mutual drive toward romantic love. The festival format puts together movies from anywhere, exposing us to unfamiliar voices, in a way that is safe, but still essentially moving, because in the emotions we share with the characters and their circumstances we are never completely alone or separate. And perhaps we can even coexist with the multiple, contradictory ideas and ways of doing things presented to us in these stories.
The Venice Biennale includes a variety of initiatives to support young filmmakers and to find new voices from parts of the world that do not have a robust film industry. This year is the second edition of the Final Cut in Venice workshop, to support the postproduction of films from Africa, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Jordan. Rollaball by Eddie Edwards is a film made in Ghana about a team of soccer players who have been disabled by polio but still manage to play on old skateboards, their elation tempered by the reality of homelessness that most of them share. The point is to humanise the characters that so rarely get to add their voices to images rather than have them viewed as tragic and therefore inevitable. Other collaborations include a conference with UK Trade and Investment to encourage co-production between Italy and the UK as well as a meeting to look at various joint ventures between Italy and China.
The American film Good Kill by Andrew Niccol shows us the banality of evil from the perspective of a soldier who has turned fighting into a 9-5 job through the weird world of drone warfare. German director Fatih Akin premieres his film, The Cut which is about a man trying to find his family in the wake of the Armenian genocide, while Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb represents the historical importance of notions of hospitality, asking what may happen if you treat your worst enemy as your most cherished guest. Closing the event is Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui’s Huangjin Shidai (The Golden Era), a historical biography of one of China’s most famous female writers, Xiao Hong, an artist who moved from city to city, ultimately dying young. For Hui, the deconstructive style of narrative reveals the disjointed path of a genius confronting her fate.
The 71st Venice Biennale of Cinema is an opportunity to be unmindful of social, geographical and political boundaries. Middle Eastern director Suha Arraf’s film Villa Touma received Israeli government film financing but later listed her country as Palestine, leading to some controversy. Her film and name are now listed in the online program without a country of origin. Unable to identify with one home for fear of offending the other, she has been left with no identification at all. But what this edition of the Biennale teaches us is that simultaneity is possible, if not durable. That we can in fact identify with a perspective a million miles away from our own. That film is a safe yet powerful means to show us the emotions of the other side and make us share in them – thus reducing the distance between us. Even if the experience is only momentary, the power in this gesture is lasting, we then know that we have cared about and felt for and cannot choose between diverse sides of conflict, but must find a way through differences to some kind of unity.
The 71st International Venice Biennale of Cinema closes this Saturday, the 6th of September 2014.
Philippa Nicole Barr
