The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (Web Exclusive)
by Darragh O’Donoghue

The twenty-fourth Thessaloniki Documentary Festival was already going to be a low-key affair. There were few banner names in the program—Lucretia Martel with her short North Terminal; Ramin Bahrani’s first documentary, 2nd Chance, confirmed his decline from promising auteur to anonymous professional; neither filmmaker was to be in attendance. With Russia invading Ukraine less than three weeks before the festival started, the mood inevitably turned somber. The scheduled glut of films dealing with or filmed during the COVID pandemic—including the opening film How to Survive a Pandemic (David France)—suddenly seemed dated, despite the coronavirus continuing to be a live issue. If the “Post Reality” created by COVID (the name of one of the festival strands) could date so quickly, what of documentaries based on archival discovery and found footage that continue to dominate the genre?

The most important film of the festival was Pegah Ahangarani’s I Am Trying to Remember, a sixteen-minute film buried in a shorts program screened late at night, early in the festival. It was one of many films based on the “archive,” on recuperating a figure damaged by and lost to history through the use of photographs and home movies—in this case a family friend who suddenly disappeared after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This film, with its childlike, didactic quality, should be played at the beginning of all documentary festivals and to all students at film schools. And while we’re at it, to historians and archivists and “archive”-oriented artists as well. Can there be a more eloquent or poignant demonstration of the limits of the document and the archive; the ease with which they can be distorted or appropriated; the tremendous feats of empathy, imagination, and even bravery needed to recover the contexts that will allow the document to recover its “voice,” to speak its truths? 

I Am Trying to Remember begins with a photograph. A fairly ordinary family photograph, with smiling faces of all ages gathered around a tree in pre-Revolution Iran. But there is something odd about the photograph. What is that orange blotch near the middle? Some sort of ceremonial fire? A solar effect accidentally caught by the camera? A rip in the photographic paper caused by time? A closer shot shows that a face has been violently redacted. An attempt has been made to manipulate the historical evidence, to “prove” that a particular person wasn’t there that sunny day, that he never existed at all. Such redaction is an exercise of totalitarian terror that goes back to Soviet Russia at least, when photographs were doctored to remove traces of those who’d fallen from Stalin’s graces. 

This photograph is the only one of Gholam left in existence. Given his sociability and the fact that he was an image-maker himself, this implies that countless other photographs were destroyed, not even “honored” by vandalism and identity theft. The artifact would have remained simply that, a local mystery illustrating a generalized historical trauma and an eschatological gap. Luckily for Gholam, he knew Ahangarani. She reconstructs her memories of him, while also restoring and screening his films—home movies and records of the revolution in which he participated. Ahangarani’s narration adopts the tone and language of the child she was when she knew Gholam, and at first the viewer fears that this is going to be the story of a very different kind of trauma. The childlike discourse implies a narrator, a family, a society, and a culture that is stunted, immature, unable to function properly because of its refusal to confront the silences and erasures of history. The final intertitle states that Gholam was only one of four thousand political prisoners “disappeared” in Iran from the late 1980s. A devastating work.

Unfortunately, the documentarians at the festival had made their films before they had a chance to see I Am Trying to Remember. Too many documentary and other artists’ films in recent years have taken the easy option of plundering the “archive,” injecting a ready-made pathos into their works that hasn’t been earned. Particularly if the archival subject relates to trauma or horror such as Stalinism or the Holocaust. As direct witnesses die out, we are left with descendants undertaking research into forgotten lives. The alibi is that these researchers will uncover hidden, lost, or suppressed voices, but all too often they follow the Who Do You Think You Are? TV format and become more about the searcher’s quest than the suppressed life, with the former basking in the reflected “glory” (or, more likely, misery) of the latter. By the end of such a quest, the searcher’s expropriation of the narrative may be tentative and partial, so the remaining gaps are filled by bombastic music and epic cinematography to stir the viewer’s soul and divert her disappointed intellect—as is the case with the competition film Turn Your Body to the Sun (Aliona van der Horst), about a prisoner of the gulags. 

The mode prevails to such an extent that several of the films screened at Thessaloniki had some sort of archival component. Nelly & Nadine (Magnus Gertten) looked like it was going to rehash the same clichés. The solemn, slo-mo examination of archival footage. The “protagonist,” Sylvie, middle-aged grand-daughter of Nelly Mousset-Vos, a celebrated Belgian opera singer before the war, who in awkwardly staged scenes with her farmer husband discusses how it is now time to deal with her family’s legacy. She opens an old chest of souvenirs, and fingers documents, photographs, objects, and Super-8mm film reels with loving reverence. Finally, the film’s subject is the Holocaust, and so has an inbuilt pathos.

The wonder of Nelly & Nadine is that it begins with such lack of originality and goes somewhere else entirely. I hope it is not frivolous or disrespectful to say that this is the first Holocaust documentary to leave its audience with a feeling of pure joy. For once, the Holocaust is not a terminal point, but the start of a romance that transcended genocide and dehumanization and created an affective Utopia in postwar Caracas. In Ravensbrück, Nelly met Nadine Hwang, socialite daughter of the Chinese ambassador to France, and onetime chauffeur/factotum/lover of writer Natalie Clifford Barney. Their flourishing romance is retailed through letters, Nelly’s diaries, photographs, memories of family and friends, and, most precious of all, Nadine’s home movies of the couple’s life in Venezuela. Like I Am Trying to Remember, Nelly & Nadine is partly about the discovery of an unknown filmmaker—in her shots of Nelly at rest or thought, Nelly generates some of the most affecting images of love and portraiture ever taken. There is something impertinent about the way Sylvie and director Gertten rearrange the story of Nelly and Nadine when the latter took such pains to document it themselves. It must be admitted, however, that the resultant “onion” structure, with each narrative layer peeling back to reveal another astounding revelation about the couple, their wider social circle, or Nelly’s family, has an overpowering cumulative effect. This is one of those rare films that makes its many aesthetic and ethical flaws irrelevant. I defy the stoniest-hearted viewer not to be moved. 

I Am Trying to Remember had been the work of a young filmmaker trying to resurrect a man said not to exist. Milan Kundera—From The Joke to Insignificance (Miloslav Šmídmajer) is a film about one of the most famous cultural figures of the postwar period, but is similarly framed around the absence of its subject, here the failure of the filmmaker to meet the Czech émigré writer who has refused to give interviews since the 1980s because of his inability to control the process and the image he wants to project. The documentarian tracking an elusive prey has a not-quite-reputable tradition going back to Michael Moore’s Roger & Me and the films of Nick Broomfield. But at least these latter were critical works, using their pursuit of shady powerbrokers to expose wider malaises such as postindustrial capitalism, South African apartheid, or Thatcherism. Milan Kundera is pure, fawning hagiography. Kundera may be as unapproachable as Gholam, but there is plenty of archive footage from the time when he was happy to give interviews; plenty of essays and autobiographical writings to quote from, plenty of allies (friends, collaborators, critics, and academics) ready to attest to his importance.

Whereas Ahangarani interrogates what isn’t there in her photograph of Gholam, Šmídmajer is too inpressed by the dazzling reputation of Kundera to investigate or even acknowledge the two greatest assaults on it. The first was Joan Smith’s feminist critique in Misogynies (1989) on the deep-rooted sexism in Kundera’s work. Second was the accusation that Kundera as a twenty-one-year-old student denounced a military deserter to the police. One doesn’t have to buy into either of these accusations but considering that much of Kundera’s work is built on what the film calls its “erotic” content and his public support for rapist Roman Polanski, and considering that so much of his early reception in the West depended on his rejection of Czechoslovak totalitarianism, they deserve to be discussed. Instead, with Šmídmajer’s loving, even fetishistic shots of Kundera book covers in multiple languages, the whole thing comes off like a glorified publisher’s blurb. 

The most original new Greek work at the festival was Memories with a Tail, about a nonagenarian painter. An essay film in the true sense of the term, Memories, like the work of Irish filmmaker Bob Quinn, adopts a folksy tone to conceal formal and thematic complexity. It doesn’t necessarily all hang together, but the huge ambition within such narrow means deserves encouragement. The painter narrates incidents of his adolescence during World War II when Amvrakikos on the east coast of Greece was occupied by the Italians and Germans. Amidst the atrocity there were unexpected grace notes—an Austrian officer singing near the painter’s house allowed him to identify his mother’s lullaby as a Schubert serenade; the Italian brass band in the town square introduced him to opera.

These subjective reminiscences are counterpointed by more “objective” commentators—a neuroscientist seated in a cave or sewer who explains the meaning of the painter’s memories and mnemonic processes; the painter himself, who demonstrates the technique of watercolor painting; a marine ecology biologist who explains how eels return to their birthplace to themselves give birth before dying; and a pair of photo shop owners who chance upon an undeveloped plate documenting the Occupation in an old camera they were repairing. The metaphorical language of the film isn’t subtle—the burial and transmission of the past through mental processes, oral history, and artistic interpretation, is linked to the movements of the natural world. Nevertheless, Memories with a Tail is a stimulating and refreshing change from the “detective” approach to most films about archives and the past. 

The retrospectives were devoted to two filmmakers I am ashamed to admit I had never heard of before the festival: Laila Pakalniņa from Latvia and Virpi Suutari. Pakalniņa’s amazing, wry, and formally adventurous work is currently available on several streaming services, so I shall concentrate here on the less accessible Suutari. The Finnish filmmaker at first seems part of the condescending school of satiric social documentary represented by the likes of Martin Parr, Ulrich Seidl, and Errol Morris. Such documentarians sneer at “ordinary” people with awful tastes and opinions, filming them with brightly colored, deadpan hyperreality. Where the surface is the endpoint for such social documentarians, it is the start for Suutari. She allows her often unattractive characters to speak for themselves, negotiate their own self-presentation, and articulate their shifting thoughts and positions. She listens to their dreams, fantasies, anxieties, and disappointments. The most ecstatic moment in her cinema relates to Jani Laine, one of the subjects of Entrepreneur (2018), an overweight, sad-eyed man who travels with his large family across the outlying parts of Finland, selling meat and mounting occasionally defective fairground attractions. His past is blighted by his accidental killing of his brother, and his future is marked by his beloved wife’s heart attack. He narrates his dream of flying over the landscape of his youth, and as he speaks and details the landmarks he would see, the camera undertakes the journey, looking straight down over the fields and buildings like a gliding, unencumbered, liberated soul. Brilliantly, Suutari doesn’t leave it there. At the end of the film, Jani makes the journey himself, his physical and spiritual weight a part of, yet transcended by the flight.

For this writer, easily the best film screened at the festival was Ruth Beckermann’s Mutzenbacher. After the audiovisual flash and rhetoric of most other documentaries, Mutzenbacher has the austerity of a controlled laboratory or sociological experiment—one white room and a population of men of various ages and backgrounds, all asked to perform the same task in order that similarities and variations could be noted. Camera movement is minimal, and there is no enveloping sound design or even music until the closing credits.

The men’s task is to read or perform extracts from a famous fin-de-siècle work of Austrian pornography, and to discuss their feelings toward the text, and its relation to their own life experiences. Josefine Mutzenbacher, or the Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself (1906) has been attributed to Felix Salten, author of Bambi, and has been accused of sanctioning pedophilia as its heroine recounts sexual adventures that are clearly instances of child abuse but celebrated as milestones of joy and emotional growth. The text serves as a litmus test for the men who discuss it with the off-screen female director guiding their responses. The setup is simple—older men narrating the first-person confessions of a young woman describing her childhood, in a text probably written by a man, for a film directed by a woman. Emotional and power dynamics are laid bare under a calm female gaze that controls a variety of often troubling male looks.  

This setup may sound as dry as a scientific experiment or formalist film exercise; the result is anything but. Mutzenbacher is revelatory, warm, funny, and disturbing, its artifice and encouragement of performance and role play far more revealing of sexual politics and post-#MeToo male grievance than more pious interventions. Mutzenbacher seems like a willful rejection of cinematic means in favor of literature and theater, but like many great directors before her (such as Dreyer, Oliveira, Bresson, and Warhol), Beckermann’s response to meaningless audiovisual overload is to return to degree-zero filmmaking, using minimal means for maximal meaning and expressivity.

If more documentary filmmakers took heed of the lessons offered by Ahangarani and Beckermann, more documentary films would seem like urgent and individual artistic responses to the world, rather than the glorified news reports or calling cards to Netflix that too many of them are.

For more information on the festival, click here.

Darragh O’Donoghue, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 3