MILK TEETH

Modernism in literature and film has prominently featured the theme of ‘coming of age’ since its inception. Works depicting the transition from childhood to youth, where an individual develops their own understanding of the world through experiences, spread from Europe to all languages ​​where modernism took root. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is a prime example of this. In Tamil literature, from Pudhumaipithan to Ashokamitran, it has been a recurring theme for modernist writers.

The reason this theme became a central concept of modernism is fundamentally because Freudian psychology teaches that a person’s personality is shaped through intense experiences during youth. Whether or not Freud has a place in psychology, he has had a significant influence on literature and art. Freud himself developed his theories by studying works depicting coming of age, such as Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Turgenev’s short novels.

The Romanian film Milk Teeth, directed by Mihai Mincan, depicts the period in 1989 during the final days of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Soviet-backed communist regime, when the disappearance of children and young people was a daily occurrence. A fifteen-year-old girl disappears from her family—as shown in the film, she voluntarily gets into a vehicle and leaves. She may have gone to participate in the rebellion against the government. Alternatively, she may have been tricked and taken against her will. The film does not reveal her fate. The film only addresses the profound psychological impact that this disappearance created in the other children, especially in her younger sister.

The film depicts the coming-of-age of this younger sister. Since the film is told from her perspective, there is no mention of communism, oppression, or rebellion. The world presented in the film is one that she can understand. The transformation of her understanding of the reality of that blood-stained regime and entering the world of adults takes place in this film. There are two realities: the parents desperately searching for their missing daughter, and the government administration only pretending to search. The deeper reality is what the girl perceives through the imaginary world she has created for herself.

Her mother has kept the milk teeth that fell out when the missing girl was a child. It remains with her as a memento. The shedding of milk teeth signifies the transition from infancy to childhood. The second daughter moves from childhood to young womanhood.

The inner reality of this film consists of two dreamlike visions. One is the dark world that the children see when they enter an abandoned, dark building. The second is a psychedelic vision the younger sister experiences on the very day she wins an exam, receives a red scarf from the government of the time, and becomes a high school student. It is a vision of children immersed in blood and the light she finds there. When she understands the loneliness and loss of her father, who could not come out of the loss of his daughter, she enters the world of adults.

The strength of this film lies in its depiction of how a young mind understands political and historical realities through its personal dreams. However, as far as its screenplay is concerned, it tends to revolve steadily around a particular emotion beyond a certain point. Furthermore, its coming-of-age aspect is its weakness. A work of art attains its uniqueness through the element of originality—in Sanskrit it is called ‘ananyatha,’ which means ‘having no alternate.’ The theme of a child confronting political turmoil, revolutions, and losses and understanding them in their own way is a concept that has been seen many times in films. I view this film’s lack of innovation in that domain as a drawback.

 

As We Breathe

The consistent presence of a central metaphor throughout a novel or film lends coherence and focus to the work, like in Camus’s The Plague or Ashokamitran’s Water. This metaphor appears in the work with a specific meaning, and as the narrative develops, it acquires various layers of meaning, expanding and enriching the layers of the work itself. In literature, particularly in short modernist novels, metaphor is used as a powerful aesthetic tool.

The Turkish film As We Breathe, directed by Seyhmus Altun, uses fire as its central metaphor. The film begins with the devastating scene of a major accident. The fire spreads uncontrollably, engulfing the area. The government is failing to control it, or perhaps they are making only a partial effort to do so. The story revolves around the family of a local man who works in the factory. The fire surrounding them is suffocating them, and they are compelled to live there.

Here, too, ‘coming of age’ is the central theme. The film depicts how the family—a young girl, her father, grandmother, two younger brothers, and an older brother—copes with the fire and smoke that constantly surrounds them. After the accident, their livelihood depends on the cheese they make from their cows. Every day, the noose tightens. They try to shrink their lives further and further, attempting to survive within those confines.

The grandmother suffers from shortness of breath. The young boy is dying from severe lung damage, bleeding from his nose. The cows perish. One by one, everything is lost. Officials urge them to leave the area. They don’t know where to go or how to live. As the noose tightens, the father of the family tries to survive by further constricting his life within its confines. On one side, two children play, oblivious to the realities of life, while on the other, adults suffocate in the harsh realities of existence. This film depicts the journey of a young girl as she moves from the world of children to the world of adults. She wants to tell her father something, but he is helpless.

The metaphor of fire is intensely portrayed visually. In particular, a shot where the girl sees her present surroundings as a towering, all-consuming inferno is profoundly impactful. The depiction of this lower-middle-class family’s world is realistic and natural. We should see the tightening noose of everyday life as a reflection of current global events. People, particularly in cities like Delhi in India, must endure increasingly oppressive environmental conditions. I believe the movie is important because it effectively captures this contemporary predicament.

However, the surrounding fire exists only as a singular, one-dimensional metaphor in the film. It doesn’t develop further as a total image. For example, the fire is what they use for cooking and keeping warm. Because this metaphor remains static, the contemporary narrative also becomes one-dimensional, lacking layers of complexity. This, in my opinion, can be considered a flaw in this work.

 

Spying Stars

Today, certain themes in literature and film are considered fashionable globally. Social activists and those with political agendas who have infiltrated the fields of art and literature prioritize the subject matter over the art itself. Therefore, they only promote works that align with their preferred political narratives. Such works are even being awarded prestigious prizes worldwide. Many novels and films that received international awards in the past were chosen by the judges solely because they addressed certain currently accepted themes, even though they were artistically inferior. However, engaging in a discussion about art with these activists proves impossible.

In this context, numerous attempts are being made in world literature and cinema to artificially create works by incorporating all the themes favored by the judges. Vimukthi Jayasundara’s film Spying Stars is one such example. This film is a silly attempt to haphazardly combine, without any logic, themes such as compassion for the third gender and LGBTQ+ community, concerns about artificial intelligence surveillance, fears about global pandemics, perspectives on Gaia or Mother Nature, and absurd Eastern mysticism.

This is in no way a work of art. It does not deserve to be screened at a reputable film festival. Unless strong criticism emerges against such counterfeit works, good works will continue to be suppressed in world cinema and literature.

 

Lost Land

One of the crucial challenges facing contemporary works of art is the question, ‘In what way does this work of art offer emotions and thoughts that can only be generated by this specific artistic creation?’ This applies to both novels and films. For example, a documentary can portray a particular slice of life with great intensity. Even today’s news reports record the realities of life in enormous detail and with considerable nuance. What a film offers beyond these is the proof of its artistic merit.

Often, a narrative structure and visual composition are created with the intention of immediately drawing the audience into an intense emotional state, emphasizing a particular emotion or idea. However, the critic needs to step outside that emotional sphere and examine the unique qualities of the work. Akio Fujimoto’s Lost Land is a film that depicts the journey of refugees caught between life and death. But in what way does it become art?

The Rohingya Muslims are people who migrated from Bengal to old Burma. There, they face severe oppression and genocide. From there, they are fleeing as refugees to various countries. This film depicts the perilous and long journey of a Rohingya family attempting to reach Malaysia by sea and the subsequent journey of two children who get separated from their father and end up stranded in Thailand.

This film revolves around the journey, suffering, and fate of the two children. The scenes are crafted to immerse the viewer in an intense emotional state. However, the film fails to establish credibility in its depiction of reality. The two children, who travel for many days under the scorching sun at sea and then become isolated in a forest and subsequently walk long distances through cities, mostly do not undergo any significant physical transformation. They are not shown to be exhausted. How they obtained food is largely not shown. It is unclear how sugarcane could serve as their sustenance. It is also unrealistic that no one pays any individual attention to them during such a long journey.

Apart from the relationship between the two children, especially their blindfolded game and the way this game is presented as the film’s concluding sentiment, there is no subtlety in this film; it is merely a single, gentle piece of poetic imagery. Moreover, we have continuously seen similar types of films. ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ kept coming to mind while watching this movie. This film could even be described as a weak imitation of that film.

This film does not possess any quality that would allow it to stand out as a unique cinematic work. Even a simple documentary about the Rohingyas’ journey could convey this reality far more powerfully than this film. However, it undertakes the responsibility of art to stand with the oppressed and hunted, voicing for justice. This element gives the movie depth and power.

 

REBUILDING

 

The world perceives the United States as a great superpower, maintaining its economic hegemony through military dominance. However, those who travel in the US can see tens of thousands of homeless people on American streets and a large population of lower-middle-class people in America’s rural areas. Most of them are small farmers. Farming life is a tremendous struggle all over the world.

The farmer’s struggle is on two fronts: one with nature, and the other with the modern economic system that has emerged based on industrial production. The modern economic system seems to thrive by exploiting agriculture. The farmer must obtain the price for his produce through negotiations with this modern industrial system. Most of the time, the farmer loses these battles. His defeat is because he is not a member of a unified, organized system; every farmer is an individual. But an inner instinct compels the farmer to fight tirelessly. It is a quality he derives directly from nature. That very quality has brought humanity this far.

The American film Rebuilding, directed by Max Walker-Silverman, struck me as a film that depicts this relentless struggle of the farmer. Although the film is described in all its reviews as a record of an individual’s attempt to rebuild himself, I believe it can be considered an expression of the continuous struggle that permeates the entire history of the farmer.

The film begins with the protagonist, who arrives alone at a disaster relief camp in a semi-desert region of North America after his farm is completely destroyed by a wildfire. His wife has already divorced him and is living with another man and their daughter. She abandoned him to escape from farming life. The protagonist joins a small group of people who, like him, have lost their land in the fire and sought refuge there, and he forms relationships with them. The film naturally depicts the gradual blossoming of these relationships and their mutual recognition of each other through shared losses. The film also portrays the relationship between the protagonist and his daughter in a natural progression.

There are no villains or negative characters in this film. They can be described as people living their lives on their paths. The grandmother, who leaves a portion of her property to her divorced son-in-law, seems in a way to be a symbol of the land the protagonist is fighting for; the fact that she wishes to be buried in that land reinforces this idea. The land ultimately becomes the grandmother herself.

The film ends with the protagonist, having gathered his strength, returning to fight for his land. He derives this strength from the land and from his fellow human beings. Many stories with a similar theme have been written in Tamil; while in those stories the hope comes from the land, in this film, the people also provide that hope. Despite fire and destruction, a small sprout emerges from the land, proclaiming, “I remain by your side.” It is the smile of the land. Even after such a massive catastrophe, people share food and show that they are with him.

With natural acting and realistic cinematography, this film possesses a perfect artistic unity. At the end, we can identify two subtle artistic deviations. The first deviation is that the protagonist invites everyone staying with him in the small camp to his land. A person running a farm would already be acquainted with numerous employees and people. The idea that he newly discovers a group of people, a human foundation, and derives an emotional movement from it is an imaginative element that deviates slightly from the strong realism the film establishes.

Similarly, the fact that the American government and its system offered no assistance to the burnt and devastated land, and that a government official arrived within a few days to order the dismantling of the camp, seems like a slight exaggeration for the sake of the narrative, considering American life. The US is one of the world’s biggest farm subsidy providers.

The inclusion of an extra layer in the narrative through the myth of the flying boots, which the protagonist’s daughter discovers, feels like an outdated technique. In contemporary literature, the use of myth to enhance a realistic story is rarely seen.These exaggerations and flaws arise because of the artistic unity that appears elsewhere in the film, trying to create the impression of ‘untouched reality.’

But the major problem with this movie is it is quite ordinary; its simple humanistic vision is a worn-out theme in the realm of literature, and it is depicted in this movie in a very usual way. Today, presenting humanism as a solution may not be the effective way; instead, the real challenge for any form of creative expression and thought is to recognize the forces that operate against humanist values within us.

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WHITE SNAIL 

 

When I travel to some countries in the world, I have seen that everyone there is filled with an intense urge to leave the country and go somewhere else. Some are leaving in search of work due to economic crisis; others are trying to escape somewhere due to political turmoil. The country functions as a temporary camp, and this sense of temporariness and tension is evident in all the relationships formed there.

My friend Shahul Hameed is a sailor. Once, after unloading cargo from his ship, seven people climbed onto the bulbous bow of the vessel, which was now above the water, and tried to escape from Africa to Europe. In that area, which sways with the waves, even a slight lapse in concentration could lead to falling into the sea and being sucked into the propeller, resulting in death. They were facing extreme cold and starvation. What kind of country must it be that forces people to escape under such life-threatening risks? Refugees from around the world are endangering their lives in this way. North Korean boats in Japan are washing ashore with the decaying corpses of passengers who perished at sea. In India, thousands of refugees from Bangladesh cross the border daily, risking their lives and possessions while defying Indian military security in their search for work.

“White Snail,” directed by Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter, is set in Belarus, a country melting under the heat of war and economic problems. The film depicts the tense and lonely relational environment of those yearning to emigrate. The protagonist is trying to prepare herself as a model and emigrate to China. As the film progresses, the suspicion arises that this modeling career might be a gateway to prostitution. She undergoes training for this reason. Her goal is to create an ideal body and develop precise, graceful movements within it.

But something else is throbbing within her with intense sorrow. She practices walking with great grace, as if floating, but after practice, when she walks alone in the city at night, she rushes along like someone being chased—the opposite of her training. Her inner self is depicted as a snail: clinging to the ground, extending its antennae, remaining motionless, and carrying its house on its back. She meets another snail; he is an artist who works as a morgue attendant. If the ideal body she is creating is one world, then the world of bodies dissected and examined due to the diseases and decay of old age is another extreme.

The paintings are the artist’s inner world; it is composed entirely of decaying bodies. A relationship develops between them. Two snails recognize each other. They decide to part ways, fulfilled, each going their own way. This film portrays the extraordinary nature and suffering of that relationship without altering its essence. The protagonist is testing how much her lover yearns for her, his anger at being subjected to such a test, and the turbulent relationship that develops between them as a result can be considered the climax of this film.

The magical ritual performed to expel that ‘other’ from within her gives the film another layer of meaning. What can never be expelled is the house she carries within herself, like the snail.

This film successfully delivers a powerful portrayal of life. If there is any minor artistic flaw in this film, it is the author’s deliberate planning in creating these contrasts. The concept of the model and the morgue artist was initially created as a ‘concept’ by the creators, not as an inner experience that arose organically within them. In art, the author’s deliberate creation of contrasts is considered an artistic flaw. However, I consider this film to be good because it effectively and naturally presents these contrasts.

Silent Friend

The ancient Indian belief holds that plants possess a soul and that they live here observing and interacting with us, just like other living beings. Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose was a pioneer in conducting research on the life and sentience of plants.

The film “Silent Friend,” directed by Ildikó Enyedi, explores the fundamental question of whether plants have feelings and intelligence and what our relationship with them is within a scientific context. The initial plot revolves around a Chinese researcher who arrives at a laboratory in Europe, identifies a rare tree standing alone, and attempts to communicate with it through modern technology. Through this, the film reveals the tree’s relationship with the previous two generations.

The novelty of its premise is its main appeal. The film stands out because it goes beyond the simple humanism and political correctness often found in typical world art movies. It also offers a refined visual experience through excellent cinematography and editing. As an Eastern viewer, I did not find the film engaging because it handles the subject matter superficially, lacking deep exploration or insight.

The film fails to clearly depict the inner world of the researcher attempting to understand the plant. It is unclear whether he is conducting this dialogue through intuition or through precise technological understanding using his instruments. The knowledge provided by positivist science is extremely limited; it remains within the possibilities of humanity’s collective knowledge. That is, it is human knowledge about plants—bringing plants within our framework of understanding. Intuitive knowledge, on the other hand, involves man transcending the limits of his knowledge and entering the world of the plant.

This film repeatedly shows the researcher using instruments to understand the tree. Although the film creates a cinematic experience, it only highlights its limitations. The idea arises that the plant perceived through instruments is not the plant itself, but rather an image created by science about the plant. Therefore, it only seems that the researcher is just learning about how a tree’s bioelectricity functions. This film fails to convey the vast existence of the plant world. The film unfolds across three different time periods but fails to develop a single central theme throughout them.

When the relationship with the tree reaches its climax—the understanding that the tree is lonely, that it has sexual needs, and that man fulfills these needs and makes it flourish—it seems that the film presents a very simplistic understanding, completely neglecting the spiritual aspect that the story’s premise demands. This can be described as anthropocentrism, a fundamental presupposition of European thought. Due to this human-centric view, the film fails to create a cosmic vision.

The film’s fundamental perspective has been shaped by the attribution of human emotions and complexities to plants, as well as the mindset that humans can help the world of plants and act as a kind of god to nature. Therefore, rather than unveiling the expansion of creative thought, the film’s final part depicts it retreating into its familiar, narrow European confines.

In this film, the scene of the protagonist’s selection process and her success, which takes place a hundred years ago in the world of research, is beautifully crafted as a separate segment. Otherwise, due to the lack of vision and the re-presentation of a conservative European perspective, it remains a film that fails to achieve its intended purpose.

NINO

 

A film where everything—story, screenplay, sound design, sound recording, direction, and acting—is flawlessly executed initially satisfies us. In commercial cinema, it will also be a successful film. However, an art film should always be evaluated through the lens of the director’s worldview behind it. Often, a work with an immature, artificial, and clichéd perspective can be crafted with outstanding technical finesse.

Throughout the world, art film enthusiasts view films solely as a path leading to the director’s vision. Therefore, works with a very strong worldview have been widely accepted, even if they possess less sophisticated technology and a somewhat less accomplished screenplay. In reality, technical proficiency is not the primary condition for approaching a work of art; it is the inner world of the artist expressed through it that truly determines whether a work is a work of art or not.

The French film Nino, directed by Pauline Loquès, is a technically refined work. The film meticulously crafts every frame from its beginning to its conclusion. Natural acting, skillful editing. It could completely immerse the viewer in the film’s setting. But the film is fundamentally conceived in a very immature way. Therefore, that very refinement created a sense of dissonance.

The story revolves around a few days in the life of a young man named Nino, who is diagnosed with throat cancer caused by a sexually transmitted infection, and his struggle to cope with the news. He goes to tell his mother but returns without being able to. He tells his friends, but they don’t seem to take it seriously. He accidentally meets a female classmate. Through her, he finds release from a major predicament. That’s all there is to the story.

The central event of this film revolves around sexuality. It is unfortunate that the director’s primary focus seems to be the collection of a man’s sperm when he is diagnosed with cancer, as the treatment will lead to infertility. Even more absurd is the notion that he is unable to extract the sperm himself and requires a female friend to read pornographic fiction to assist him.

The only subtle, and one might say artistic, part of this film is when the protagonist, after being told about the sperm collection, casually tells his school friend, whom he meets coincidentally, that he is going to have a child. At that moment, a profound depth of his inner self is suddenly revealed.

The perspective that views human life solely through the sexual organs exists in French literature, and it predominates in French cinema as well. Moreover, the central event of this film resembles the expanded daydream of an immature person reading erotic literature. A discerning film viewer could actually surmise that this sexual daydream was the initial concept for the film, and the cancer and the related complications were added later. This entry is one of the most immature films in this film festival.