| Film Festival Report : GOTHENBURG 2008 |
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| Monday, 18 February 2008 | |
 BERGMAN'S PUTATIVE HEIRS SHOW OFF THEIR WARES An exclusive report from the 2008 Gothenburg Film Festival ALWAYS a festive occasion in a likeably boisterous - but civilised - port-city, this year's Gothenburg International Film Festival (GIFF) necessarily carried with it a tinge of sadness. Back last mid-summer, GIFF lost the man who had been its honorary patron since 1994 - and Sweden, Europe, and the world, lost one of the great names of cinema history. By the time Ingmar Bergman was appointed patron, the festival - an event which dates back to 1979 - had already become the best-attended and most high-profile film event in the whole of Scandinavia. This year's event included, of course, a hefty, 51-title Bergman retrospective. But the focus was on the present and the future as well as the past in a cinematic jamboree whose numerous sections and sub-sections were compiled under the guidance of new festival-chief Marit Kapla. Most intriguing and promising was a selection of brand-new films collected under the 'Nordic Competition' banner: features from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland (nothing from Finland, disappointingly.)  Expecting to unearth 'a new Ingmar Bergman' would be, needless to say, an unrealistic ambition. But perhaps the eight directors might yield evidence that this not-exactly-overpopulated corner of the world - also responsible for Ingrid Bergman, Anna Karina, Stellan Skarsgard Victor Sjostrom, Greta Garbo, Sven Nykvist, Liv Ullmann, Max Von Sydow, Lars Von Trier, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Aki Kaurismaki and Bille August, among others - will continue to punch above its weight in terms of contribution to cinema? The answer: maybe. Of the eight, only three stood out as especially above-average: from Sweden, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In (an unlikely but ambitious hybrid of teen-bullying drama and vampire horror), plus a pair from Denmark - well-established Danish director Ole Bornedal's enjoyably post-modern neo-noir Just Another Love Story, and, freshest and most accomplished of the bunch, Omar Shargawi's Go With Peace, Jamil. A startlingly bold and invigoratingly different kind of Scandinavian film, Jamil is is director/co-writer Shargawi's pummellingly intense study of masculinity, family, revenge and violence among Copenhagen's Muslim community. We begin in media res, with bullish, thirtyish Jamil (Dar Salim) preparing an unspecified violent act. The ominous mood braces us for some kind of terrorist atrocity - but it turns out that Jamil is in fact engaged in inter-ethnic Sunni/Shia strife, a long-running battle which has already claimed the life of his mother. Jamil finds himself torn between the need to avenge his parent and to make a better world for his young son, Adam (Elias Samir Al-Sobehi)... Formerly a stills-photographer, 33-year-old Shargawi - son of a Palestinian father and a Danish mother - makes an auspicious big-screen debut here. "I was born and raised in safe, secure Denmark myself," he said last year, "but I have a lot of friends who lived through the war in Lebanon in the 1980s. They lost loved ones in the war and it's still fresh with them. From the sidelines, I always wondered about the smouldering hatred between Shias and Sunnis... They are all Muslims like myself, yet there is conflict. In many ways, making the film was a search for an answer. All the same, this conflict is only the backdrop for the film's story. I have no theological ambitions." On Go With Peace, Jamil Shargawi shares a scriptwriting credit with 65-year-old Mogens Rukov, who previously co-wrote internationally acclaimed titles including Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration (Festen) (1998) and Per Fly's Inheritance (Arven) (2003). These are films which helped make familiar faces out of performers such as Ulrich Thomsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Paprika Steen. Perhaps too familiar, in fact - and the total absence of any of the usual Danish stars is just one of the reasons why Jamil feels like such a refreshing change. Indeed, the film is very careful to avoid geographical signifiers of any kind: one must have eagle eyes to spot a Caucasian face anywhere in the picture's 90 minutes; there's no mention of Copenhagen, Denmark or even Europe; Arabic is the predominant language (though it's clearly no accident that the youngest participant, Adam, mainly speaks - and is spoken to - in Danish). Shargawi's preference for very close close-ups, meanwhile, places the emphasis on the characters rather than their general environment. These men (and they're nearly all men) live within a kind of cultural bubble: they aren't shown interacting with any "outsiders" at all. Indeed, the early sections might as well be taking place in Lebanon or Syria - it comes as a bit of a surprise when, at the end of the first reel, the protagonists runs into what's visibly a European city. "We'll fill the streets with their blood" cries one of them - and one could argue that the ironically-titled Go with Peace, Jamil doesn't exactly paint a flattering picture of Muslim immigrants in present-day Denmark. This is, one recalls, the country which became focus for hot-potato religious and political issues in 2005 after the newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. Most of the individuals we see are motivated by what's referred to at one point as "mortal hate": they're knife-wielding, clannish, hot-tempered, reactionary, consumed with their blood-feuds. But Shargawi is carefully even-handed in his approach, taking the time to show the positive sides of Muslim life: the strong bonds within family-members and between friends ("brothers"); respect for community elders; and, via the increasingly tortured figure of Jamil, a desire to move forward, away from bloodshed, via clemency and reconciliation. "My past is eating me up from within!" he cries at one particularly fraight juncture, as his faith, his identity and his self-image all come under harrowingly intense pressure. This is an authentic, insiderish take on the "immigrant" experience - something of a pity, then, that the plot should skirt melodrama, predictability and heavy-handedness at several key stages as the grim cycle of vengeance unfolds. In addition, Shargawi's focus is so intense that it's sometimes difficult to keep track of the relationships between the characters and the specifics of their discord. The emotional impact of the climactic scene is undercut, meanwhile, by a slight vagueness about exactly what has happened and why. There are, however, compensations aplenty in this film of impressively grim, gripping force - a somewhat blunt instrument at times, but one which hits very hard and leaves a lasting mark. Cinematographer Aske Foss gets up-close and very personal throughout, producing slick images full of moodily saturated colours - while no fewer than three editors keep proceedings cracking along with the urgency of a Hollywood thriller. Indeed, broodingly charismatic newcomer Salim could easily pursue a career in the more commercial avenues of cinema. Shargawi, likewise, now has numerous options. While it may be premature to label him a Danish "cousin" of Paul Greengrass, there aren't many film-makers who are able to tackle such tricky social issues with this kind of confident, accessible brio. It'll be fascinating to see where he goes from here. Neil Young 5th February, 2008 for Tribune magazine 
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