Documentary Film Week Hamburg | Escape and Family

With its skill at staying ahead of historical developments, this year's Hamburg Documentary Film Week focused on precisely what concerns the right more than anything else: migration. However, since Donald Trump took office, the topic has taken on a new hue. The powerlessness of the displacers and the growing power of the displaced are finally becoming apparent. Most recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that, due to a shortage of harvest workers due to the mass deportations, he will expand child labor.

It may not be obvious everywhere yet, but the people being displaced won't just be missed; they'll soon own the world. Morally, they're already superior to us. A brilliant scene in Mehdi Sahebi's "Prisoners of Fate" proves this: At Christmas, children at a Swiss preschool are asked to write down their greatest wish. Little Elmira, whose parents are Afghan refugees from Iran, wishes for her six-year-old brother back, whom the authorities have denied entry to the country. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, wishes to be rich. Elmira warns him not to trade family for Swiss francs.

Family or money, connection or objectification – these often seem to be the alternatives. But although family is considered the last refuge, it now stands more for separation than for togetherness. In Kristina Konrad's "Tempi passati," to whom a retrospective was dedicated in Hamburg, the connection between mother and daughter is only restored after a long time, during which the daughter participated in, among other things, the Sandinista revolution. Now she observes the old woman's decline, evident in her increasingly slow cleansing rituals, which the film editing fortunately does not abbreviate.

There's something conservative, often reactionary, about family. This is what Samira El Mouzghibati tells in her very intimate "Les Miennes/(Y)Our Mother." The filmmaker's mother, originally from Morocco, is married to a boy from the neighboring village. They both move to Belgium, where the man pressures the woman to adapt to European conditions. He even takes her to the movies—the violence of which she is deeply disgusted by. Now she takes the veil again and persists in her rebellion against a violent modern world, even against her five emancipated daughters.

Family can bring speechlessness and trauma, as two touching short films demonstrate: In "O Ma/before then," Mengzhu Xue shares with her beloved grandmother, very indirectly (in English, a language the elderly Chinese woman doesn't understand), the secret of having been in a relationship with a friend for seven years. "I would have preferred to make a different film" by Suse Itzel tells of abuse by a father who—an unsettling detail—studied under Theodor W. Adorno. Both films are particularly visually powerful, perhaps because they cannot depict their secret (Xue) or their trauma (Itzel) and are therefore forced to resort to indirect forms of expression.

Back to migration once again. Not all films that address the subject opt ​​for close-ups. Nicole Vögele's "Landschaft und Wahn" (Landscape and Madness) captures the human migrations in a panoramic, almost monumental way. In "La Base" (The Base), Vadim Dumesh portrays taxi drivers from all over the world at Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport – and they take portraits of themselves with cell phone cameras. While they wait for a call, they play the trumpet, sing karaoke, pray, or clean. Above all, they prove themselves to be great philosophers who see the end coming. With self-driving cars, Uber, and the concrete landscape of the new base, the "Ère de rien" (Age of Nothingness), sung by Jacques Dutronc, is already approaching.

In Hamburg, a subjective view of the past prevailed, but at times one would have wished for more objectivity. In "A Fidai Film," Kamal Aljafari has artistically reworked shocking cinematic documents from the history of Palestine, which on the one hand deprives them of their historicity, while on the other hand freezing them into timeless horrors: Palestine 100 years ago, Palestine today – they are the same images. Milisuthando Bongela-Davis also has powerful archival material from an occupied country at her disposal in "Milisuthando"; like Aljafari, she is driven by the ambition to give the material a personal touch. But the film's political background – the Transkei homeland in apartheid South Africa – seems more interesting than the experience of racism, which the filmmaker unfortunately shares with many.

Like Vögele and Dumesh, but not impressionistically, but highly systematically, Marcin Wierzchowski in "The German People" assembles a collective drama from many individual voices. It concerns the 2020 Hanau murders. The victims' relatives prove to be admirably combative and intelligent, and they have equally combative and intelligent supporters, such as the agency Forensic Architecture. But one doesn't have to look at the coalition agreement of the incoming government to realize that the protest against a police force that sometimes acts openly in a racist manner was almost hopeless, and is even more so now.

Nationalism and militarism are marching forward with a roar. Two diary films by Heinz Emigholz were therefore hard to beat in terms of topicality. In "NYC, October 10, 2022," he presents a magnificent monologue by illustrator Art Spiegelman ("Maus") about the power of art and comics to outwit racist stereotypes. And in "Innsbruck, March 6, 2023," Emigholz subtly reflects on the commodification of war: In a hotel room, Karl Kraus's reading of his "Reklamefahrten zur Hölle" (1921) about Swiss tourists in Verdun is playing on the laptop, while the camera looks out the window and captures containers belonging to the logistics company Raben. This is a macabre coincidence, because in Kraus's "Last Days of Humanity" (1922), the ravens feasting on corpses are war winners: "Hunger has never tormented us, / since we followed your armies."

In a turmoil like that of our time, the inconspicuous becomes utopian. In "7 Walks with Mark Brown," Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré accompany a paleobotanist on his walk through Normandy. Time and again, he lets out cries of delight when he encounters plants, as if they were long-lost acquaintances. For him, the Bible should be rewritten: "And all grass is like meat." The past of native plants stretches back millions of years, but their future is as uncertain as ours. And it's not just the technology of war that calls humanity into question.

In the moving short film "The Engineer's Voice," André Siegers captures his father's efforts to electronically preserve the sound of his voice, which he will lose due to illness. Since his father has already delegated much of his work to machines, an assistant asks him if he wouldn't be content with some kind of speech robot. His father proudly replies that intonation is also a part of his personality. But what will still reliably be a part of our personality in a few years? And couldn't this article have been written by an AI? Many certainties will be shaken in this area—material for the coming years.