They are the duo of good hope: Rebecca, the young miracle healer who is supposed to make the lame walk again – and Lawrence, her father and manager, who counts the believers and the money. She is the quiet one, he is the doer. The two have set up their evangelical ministry in the middle of the Amazon jungle, preaching God’s word to indigenous communities and putting on a magical show to boot. A scar runs across Rebecca’s face. It is from a plane crash that she survived as a small child – unlike her mother. It is the scar that gives her shamanic aura a visible sign.

 

Pia Marais invested many months of research in her new film Transamazonia. She accompanied a journalist who was investigating the conflict between an indigenous tribe and a neighboring logging town. Marais transferred this narrative into the film as a western element. It is about tradition and territory, about business and greed, and the evangelicals, whose missionary zeal contains a lot of materialism, are involved in this heated situation.

 

It is a feverish setting that the director creates in Transamazonia. The jungle, the tropical sultriness, sweaty bodies, the dreamlike, transcendental rapture when Rebecca appears as a medium. But the film also shows the brutalization of a society that is beyond the direct control of a regulatory power. The chainsaws cut through the ecosystem, in the shanty towns and on the gravel highway through the wilderness, the law of the jungle applies. Unlike in Systemsprenger – the role that made her internationally famous in 2019 – Helena Zengel acts as Rebecca in a controlled, almost absent manner. As the plot progresses, however, the teenager becomes more and more resistant. She no longer wants to be her father’s vessel of God and lucrative circus horse. She wants to develop her own identity. This coming-of-age motif links Pia Marais’ latest film with her first. In The Unpolished (2009), a 14-year-old suffers under her homeless, wandering hippie parents, who take drugs and celebrate free love and offer their daughter no restrictions on her freedom. The bourgeoisie the child longs for becomes an act of rebellion – an upside-down world, as experienced by the director herself.

 

Marais’ parents were also hippies, his mother was Swedish and his father was a Sud African actor. The house was always full, with constant parties and plenums, and the family was rarely alone. Marais grew up in South Africa, Sweden and Spain, went to the Waldorf School

and initially studied sculpture and photography at the Chelsea School of Art in London, the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and the Düsseldorf Art Academy. He later studied film at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin.

 

The 53-year-old has never been Berlin School. Her films are dynamic, playful and use offsets from different genres. Not everything has to be explained, not everything has to be resolved. In At Ellen’s Age, her second film, which celebrated its German premiere at FILMFEST HAMBURG in 2010, she follows a stewardess in a life crisis and lets herself be thrown off course with her. It is a meandering journey full of bizarre plot points, but without a systematic plot. In Layla Fourie, her first English-language production, she returned to South Africa in 2013. The country has changed since her childhood. Hope has turned into mistrust, the security sector is booming, surveillance cameras and barred windows are everywhere. The main character is a single mother who has made the wrong decision. Her fear and paranoia is that of an entire country. As in Transamazonia, Pia Marais unrolls perhaps her greatest talent in Layla Fourie: creating an atmosphere that settles over the movie theater like a tropical morning mist and makes the story sensually tangible.

MARK STÖHR

 

The film talk with Pia Marais will take place after the screening of The Unpolished on 28.09. at Metropolis.

 

27.09. 21:00 Abaton

TRANSAMAZONIA

 

28.09. 15:00 Metropolis

THE UNDEREDUCATED

 

29.09. 12:20 CinemaxX 2

LAYLA FOURIE

 

04.10. 20:45 Abaton

TRANSAMAZONIA

 

The apocalypse is already in its name. Or at least the interest in it. Joshua Oppenheimer grew up in New Mexico, overlooking Los Alamos, home of the US nuclear research project. He has repeatedly been associated with Robert Oppenheimer, the ≫father≪ of the atomic bomb, but there are no family connections.

 

In The End, his latest and first fictional film, the US director creates a nightmarish scenario: a wealthy family lives in a palatial bunker. The world outside has become uninhabitable, while inside the mother – played by Tilda Swinton – takes care of the expensive paintings. The father was an influential energy magnate. The 20-year-old son only knows the outside world from hearsay. The three consider themselves the chosen ones of a modern Noah’s Ark and their golden tomb the crowning glory of civilization. They sing about this in oppressive songs that hallucinate with confidence and block out everything. Especially the end of the world and their significant contribution to it.

 

Joshua Oppenheimer places his musical in the tradition of the US musicals of the 1950s. He attributes a ≫radical, groundless optimism≪ to them. They were the feel-good melodies of a society that turned a blind eye to the fact that its prosperity was directly linked to the precariat and the capitalist colonization of the Global South.

 

≫I was shocked to understand that American hegemony was built on bloodshed≪, said the director, who was born in Austin in 1972, in a recent interview. This early realization – his mother is a labour lawyer and union activist – is still a central motif in his work today. Added to this is a family trauma. Several members of the Oppenheimer family, some of whom had roots in Germany and Austria, were murdered by the Nazi regime. Oppenheimer grew up with knowledge of the Holocaust from an early age. He was aware of it even before Cinderella, he once said.

 

In the early 2000s, he traveled to Indonesia for the first time for a documentary film project. In The Globalization Tapes (2003), he investigated the situation of workers on a palm oil plantation. Hardly anyone there lived past the age of 40 because of the highly toxic pesticides. When the union demanded protective suits, the Belgian plantation operator immediately sent paramilitaries. The workers immediately dropped their demands.

They were more afraid of the hit squads than of the deadly poison. Joshua Oppenheimer quickly discovered the deep roots of this fear – and made his next film about it: The Act of Killing (2013), his multi-award-winning magnum opus.

 

The Act of Killing tells the story of what happens to a society when mass murderers go unpunished. The background is the anti-communist pogroms by paramilitary gangs from 1965 to 1966, in which over a million Indonesians were killed. The perpetrators were never prosecuted and even decades later enjoyed the protection and even recognition of those in power. In his film, Oppenheimer does not look behind the curtain of a cruel past, but at the curtain itself. In disturbing re-enactments, he has the murderers of that time re-enact the murders – and they act like movie stars in front of the camera, imitating their Hollywood role models from Al Pacino to John Wayne. For Oppenheimer, their boastful performances are an expression of guilt. In reality, they knew how pathetic they were. In one scene, one of the perpetrators says: ≫War crimes are defined by the victor≪. And he is worried that the movie will ≫reverse history≪.

 

A year later, Joshua Oppenheimer released the follow-up film The Look of Silence. After the lies of the perpetrators, the focus is now on the fear of the survivors. And their silence, which is broken for the first time – by an optician who confronts his brother’s murderers about their crime. A previously unimaginable breach of taboo. Joshua Oppenheimer originally planned a third part. But his life would no longer be safe in Indonesia.

 

The talk with Joshua Oppenheimer will take place on September 30 at 21:00 before the screening of The Look of Silence at Metropolis.

 

29.09. 19:45 Passage

THE END

 

30.09. 21:00 Metropolis

THE LOOK OF SILENCE

 

04.10. 21:45 CinemaxX 1

THE END

 

05.10. 21:30 Studio-Kino

THE ACT OF KILLING