Despite all expectations, or perhaps precisely because these were too high, Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope, “a European comedy about refugees” as it was dubbed by Deutsche Welle, did not receive the Golden Bear for Best Film at Berlin’s International Film Festival. The prize went instead to the Hungarian director and screenwriter Ildikó Enyedi for her film On Body and Soul (Hungarian: Testről és lélekről).
Another Central Eastern European film, Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor (Polish: Pokot) received the Silver Bear “for a feature film that opens new perspectives”. But the crucial parallel between the two films lies less in their region of origin than in their strikingly similar opening scenes. In both films, as soon as the lights go off and the screen ignites, the spectators, crammed in their seats, suddenly find themselves out in the open — in a forest and among deer. [...]
Moving between the genres of thriller and comedy, Spoor tells the story of Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), a charismatic retired engineer, feminist, vegetarian, and astrology enthusiast. She lives in the Polish countryside with her two female dogs and fights the local patriarchal customs based on hunting, money, religion, etc. [...]
Nevertheless, I could identify with the film’s obsessive and somewhat helpless rage at the face of the reactionary developments under Poland’s new government, epitomised by the infamous remark by Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski, resenting the “new mix of cultures and races, a world of bicyclists and vegetarians”. [...]
If dreams gave voice to Marta’s and Endre’s unfulfilled desires by sending signals that circumvented the limits set by their rationality, then cinema as an industry of dreams can be seen sending, with these two films, its own warning about the current state of affairs. If we allow ourselves to inhumanly repress the animal within, then, to quote the famous opening of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian classic Twelve Monkeys, “once again the animals will rule the world”.
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