ScreenFish

where faith and film are intertwined

Argentina

Azor – Soulless Banker

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What does “Swiss bank” bring to mind? A numbered account? Secrecy about ill-gotten gains? Do you think of politics and class warfare? Azor, from Swiss director Andreas Fontana, shows us a bit of that behind the curtain world. Sure, its about money, but even more, it is about power.

Yvan De Wiel, a private banker from Geneva, and his wife Ines have just arrived in Argentina after the mysterious departure of his business partner. The year is 1980 and the “Dirty War” against political dissidents is underway. (We only see a bit of this on the street as the De Wiel’s are on their way to their plush hotel, but it is an ever-present tension in the air as we move through the film. Yvan has come to meet with various clients—all part of the upper-class. This is a world of estates, race horses, elite dinner parties. He is there to reassure them and to make sure he can keep their business as the Swiss commercial banks have begun to cater to the clientele that have relied on private Swiss banks.

The film uses Yvan’s partner’s absence to build some tension, especially when Yvan finds a note in the partner’s apartment with an unknown client’s name. Throughout the film Yvan always seems a bit on edge. Is that because he’s just not that good dealing with people (Ines does that much better), or because he’s uncomfortable with the Argentine situation?

The director’s grandfather had been a private banker. It was in trying to learn about his grandfather’s past that he began to dig into the world of Swiss banking and developed this story. He uses Yvan’s journey as a way of looking into the way Swiss banking has provided safety to the upper-classes and to dictators through the years. It has also served to help in the funding of repressive regimes, as Yvan ends up doing—and feeling a bit proud about himself.

In more recent years some of the Swiss banks (at least the large commercial banks) have faced some revelations about money laundering, tax evasion, and the way they have supported oppression and torture. In this film we see a banker who may or may not be comfortable with those facts, but takes part because it is his business. It may be somewhat cynical to see him as soulless, but what soul he has is clearly damaged in the process. Maybe that is what happened to his partner.

Azor is showing in select theaters.

Photos courtesy of Mubi.

Thursday at AFIFest 2020

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As AFIFest 2020 Presented by Audi comes to an end, I want to thank the festival for allowing me to cover it again this year. This is always one of the highlights of my cinematic year. It is always an enormous task to put on a festival, especially one like AFIFest. This year has presented festivals with many challenges. AFI has come through with a tremendous event.

The Argentinian film Piedra Sola, from director Alejandro Telémaco Tarraf, is an ethnographic fiction film. In the highlands of Argentina we meet a llama herder as he and his son make a long journey to sell meat and hides. At home his herd is being killed off by a puma he cannot find. Other herders convene to discuss the need to be in harmony with Pachamama (Mother Earth) by sacrificing some llamas to the puma. As he journeys to satisfy the puma and the natural order he also must confront his own mortality. Much of the film is made up of long, meditative scenes. This is the kind of film that takes viewers into a very unfamiliar world. The lives of the people we meet are very different than our own. We often may not understand what they are doing, but we do find a common sense of the human condition.

Rival, from German director Marcus Lenz, is the story of Roman, a Ukrainian boy who is smuggled into Germany to be reunited with his mother Oksuna, who has been serving as a caregiver for the last three years. Now that the woman she has been caring for has died, she has stayed on with the woman’s husband Gert. Oksuna and Gert are in a relationship, and young Roman is not happy about it. He is always sullen when Gert is around. Roman clearly has some Oedipal feelings towards his mother. Roman continues to act out in various ways. But when his mother takes ill and is hospitalized, Gert takes him to a country house to avoid authorities since Oksuna and Gert are not in the country legally. Awaiting Oksuna’s release, Gert and Roman begin to bond a bit, but then Gert too is stricken, leaving Roman on his own not really knowing where he is and not speaking German.

I also took in a few shorts to round out my week.

Blocks (11 minutes), by Bridget Moloney, is the story of a mother of two small children struggling to keep up with it all. And they she begins vomiting Legos. Eventually, those Legos will provide her with a bit of an escape.

In Heading South (13 minutes), by Yuan Yuan, an eight year old Mongolian girl is taken from her home on the grasslands into the city for her father’s birthday. She learns that his father has remarried. She is very much an outsider at the raucous celebration filled with loud voices and drinking. We sense that the only relationship between father and daughter is what is forced upon them.

Dustin (20 minutes), from Naïla Guiguet, follows a young transgendered woman through a night at a nightclub. As she interacts with her friends, we sense her unhappiness as the story moves from hysteria to melancholy. The kindness and love she longs for are hard to find.

The Last Suit – Road Trip to Grace

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We often try to bury the past—to forget the pain and suffering. That can be a good thing if we move on with life and find fulfillment. But often that buried past comes to haunt us. It may actually prevent the good life we hope for in the future until it is recognized and addressed.

Abraham Bursztein (Miguel Ángel Solá) is an 88 year old Holocaust survivor who has made a life for himself in Buenos Aires. But his health is failing. His children have sold his home and he is scheduled to move into a retirement home. But he has a secret plan to make one last trip—to return to Poland to take a suit to the Christian friend who saved his life after the War. But this is a trip that is not just about the gratitude he owes that friend; it is also about the resentments he has carried all these years.

The film is a road movie of his trip to find what has been missing from his life. In part the trip is an attempt to be in control of his life. His children have made all the decisions for him. But the trip is also driven by a long-forgotten promise. His life cannot be complete while that promise has not been fulfilled. He sees this as a one-way trip, as though he is doing this as one final task before he is ready for the end.

Abraham is a severe, judgmental, and bitter man who holds grudges forever. His family knows that he considers “Poland” a dirty word. As he makes this trip he refuses to say the word himself. He’ll only show a piece of paper with the word on it. We know that Poland is where terrible things happened to him. He continues to hold on to the anger against Poland, and even more Germany.

This road trip turns into a series of encounters that put his anger in perspective. He keeps meeting people who, in spite of his cheerlessness and even rudeness, seek to help him. Each of these people bring a touch of grace into his life. He begins to connect with them in ways that start to knock down the walls of his anger. When he comes to his final destination, we learn that what he is really trying to return to is the place where he first met grace in the actions of another. This time grace was a chance to return to life after being in the realm of death that was the Holocaust. When those walls are finally destroyed, Abraham is then free to love as he has not done for many years.

Watching the film, I constantly wondered why these people would respond to Abraham with kindness when he was always so mean-spirited. But then that is what makes it grace. Grace reaches out to those who do not deserve it. It is freely offered just because it is needed. The film does not talk about God, but it does show the way God—and God’s people—touch lives and bring new life.

Photos courtesy of Outsider Pictures

 

Operation Finale – Capturing a War Criminal

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“We’re all animals fighting for scraps on the Serengeti.”

One of the most celebrated trials of the twentieth century was when Israel put Adolph Eichmann on trial. Eichmann headed the SS Office for Jewish Affairs and was one of the key architects of the Holocaust. But before they could put him on trial, they had to find him and get him to Israel. Operation Finale is the Mission Impossible style account his capture.

In 1960, Eichmann (Sir Ben Kingsley) is living with his family under an assumed name in Argentina. There is a community of Nazi supporters there, including many in the Catholic Church. When a young Jewish girl connects that this person is Eichmann, word gets to Israel. In the past Israel has looked for Eichmann to assassinate him, but now the government wants him captured to be put on trial for his crimes. A select group of Mossad (intelligence) and Shin Bet (security) agents develop a daring and dangerous plan to capture him and smuggle him out of the country on a special El Al plane.

Among the Israelis on this team is Peter Malkin (Oscar Issac). Malkin had taken part in an earlier assassination attempt that targeted the wrong man. As the plan develops, Malkin is the man who actually grabs Eichamnn just a few yards from his house. But after the capture things get complicated. The team is now told that they must get Eichmann to sign a document saying he agrees to be tried in Israel. At the same time, the right-wing Argentine security forces begin the hunt to rescue Eichmann.

As the time for the getaway draws near, Eichmann is understandably reluctant to cooperate. He says he should be tried in Germany. He says he could never get a fair trial in Israel. Only one person on the team was to negotiate with Eichmann, but when no progress was made, Malkin offered a different approach. Over a period of days Malkin and Eichmann discuss the realities of war, of nationalism, of human nature. Finally, Eichmann agrees, but they must still get him out of the country before being found.

Much of the film is a thriller—both the plan to capture Eichmann and the cat-and-mouse game between the Israelis and Argentinians. But what elevates this over other such films is the near philosophical discussion between Malkin and Eichmann. Both men have agendas that they bring to this dialogue, but in their back-and-forth they move each other to deeper levels of understanding. Eichmann strives to manipulate Malkin by pushing him on a personal level.

That seems to be a major difference between the two men. For Malkin (and the other Israelis) this is something that touches their lives. All had lost people in the Holocaust. For Eichmann it is about massive numbers. There is a sense in which 6 million Jews may overwhelm us, but there is more power in the knowledge of a single person we know. Eichmann did not know those whose death he oversaw. They were annoyances to be exterminated.

The actual trial of Eichmann is something of an anti-climax in the film. It is shown briefly, but the real testimony of the film is in these scenes of speaking about victims, justification, and our common human nature.

While the film doesn’t accept Eichmann’s rationalizations for his crimes, it does show him to be a man who cared for his family and his country, just as Malkin and the other Israelis cared for their families and nation. It is this humanizing factor that serves to point out the basis for all of Eichmann’s sins in the Holocaust—the failure to see that humanity in others.

Photos courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures

Day 6 at NBFF

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Why should people go to film festivals? Because it may be the only chance they get to see films like Meerkat Moonship. This South African film by Hanneke Schutte features wonderful cinematography and a story of overcoming fear to be able to embrace life. Young Gideonette de la Rey lives under a curse. All the Gideon de la Reys in her family tree have died young. Her father named her that to show the world the curse wasn’t real. But after his sudden death, Gideonette is more convinced that ever she is doomed. She is sent to live on her grandparent’s farm. She tries to hide from anything dangerous. But then she makes friends with Bubesi, a deaf boy who is training to be an astronaut and fly away in the makeshift rocket Gideonette’s grandfather is building for him. When death once more comes into her life, Gideonette must determine how she will face the curse.

From Italy comes The Laplace’s Demon, directed by Giordano Giulivi. When a group of researchers have perfected the ability to predict exactly the number of pieces there will be when a glass falls to the floor, they are invited to a remote island by a mysterious professor. There they become the subjects of an experiment about human behavior. It becomes a cross of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and the philosophical debate about free will and determinism. This film is shot in black and white and makes excellent use of light and shadows to set the mood for this creepy mystery.

Wednesday was set as the Latino Showcase with films from Brazil, Mexico, and a joint production from Chile and Argentina. The Desert Bride, directed by Cecilia Atari and Valeria Pivato, is the story of Teresa, a middle-aged maid who has been with a family most of her life. When they sell the house, she must take a job in a far off city. But when the bus breaks down in the desert, she loses her bag with all her possessions, and must rely on the help of an affable vender named Gringo to search for it. This area venerates an unofficial Saint Correa, who seems to miraculously bring people together. Teresa seems to have a thoroughly joyless life, but perhaps there will be a miracle for her that will bring some joy into her life. The Desert Bride opens in some theaters on Friday.