In a conversation in the press area of the Palacio del Festival, two German journalists refer to Argentine cinema as the cinema of the gauchos. They spoke before the 2022 World Cup and remembered the good times of their team and the famous mockery of the “dance of the gauchos”.
The chronicler of an important Berlin newspaper said “there were many gaucho films”. He is right. It is the Latin American country with the most titles: six feature films in different sections, one in Encounters, the second competitive section.
Inside me I’m dancing, by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann, had its world premiere on Thursday followingnoon. With a full room, as usual at the Berlinale, the playful and rhizomatic biographical essay begins in Buenos Aires at various Jewish weddings where klezmer music is played and ends in different mountainous regions of Romania and Moldova.
It is impossible to imagine in the first act of the film everything that will happen in the random cross between a cameraman and a clarinetist: a love story and the portrait of a Jewish family in Argentina, in counterpoint with a Yiddish reading of a story In which Spinoza is repeatedly quoted, passing through Vienna, where the filmmakers seek, with the help of an Austrian colleague, to raise funds for a film regarding klezmer music, the film by Koch and Schachmann completely frees itself from all the promises it holds. announces in the last 25 minutes.
The elegy that the cameraman dedicates to his grandmother when he arrives in the town where he was born and the clairvoyance gained on the journey of knowing that he is without roots but alive, and the final sequence shot with the musicians playing and other people dancing in some remote part of Moldavia, are two aesthetic rewards that symbolically reorganize the entire film and resignify it in the end.
The Forum tradition
documentary film the judgmentwhich observes the trial of the main perpetrators of State terrorism during the dictatorship, by the Argentine filmmaker Ulises de la Orden, is among the first eight titles in the Forum section, dedicated to experimental cinema at the Berlinale.
The birth of the Forum refers to so many other appendices that arose at film festivals when the official sections might not accommodate the most risky and political proposals. In this prestigious exhibition space there are always remarkable and provocative films.
In a virtual conference with some journalists and critics from different countries held at the beginning of February with Cristina Nord, the current artistic director of the section, who has the last word on everything, explained that the trial had moved all the members of the selection committee. He added that it was an essential film in the programming of the year.
The Delphi lounge was packed. The filmmaker Ulises de la Orden was accompanied by deputy Leandro Santoro, who addressed the public saying that he had been a friend of President Raúl Alfonsín, whose political will to carry out the trial was decisive.
After contextualizing the Trial of the Juntas, the 177 minutes torn from a material of 540 recorded hours pass without time wearing away the attention: the testimonies are always moving, some brilliant arguments, others fallacious and there is no shortage of abject ones; The montage divided into chapters with titles that are quotes from some essential concept said by someone separate the instances of the trial, beyond the fact that the narrative concept is linear.
It is likely that the trial does not reach a million viewers, like Argentina, 1985but it is ideal for verifying the scope of fiction in the face of a similar situation and the limits of the documentary in terms of summoning the uninvolved and distracted.
In both films there are shocking sequences; in both there are moments of comedy (what happens here in a passage with the legal defender of the genocidal Videla, doctor José María Orgeira, is as funny as it is shameful, due to the imbecility of his concept of honor).
In both, too, there are controversial decisions: in Mitre’s, to falsify the fact that the trial was broadcast on television; In De la Orden’s film, the question involves the irruption of shots on some testimonies that suggest simultaneity in images that do not seem to correspond and that modify the force of a discourse or the memory of a survivor. Such an indication does not detract from its cinematographic value, much less its political value.
The obscenity of the genocidal is as palpable and repulsive as excrement. So is the mentality that was complicit in that annihilation, a way of thinking that is far from being overcome.
