Srbenka

Theater director Oliver Frljić

 

Theater director Oliver Frljić

 

Film director Nebojsa Slijepčević

 

SRBENKA                  B+                 

Croatia  (72 mi)  2018  d:  Nebojsa Slijepčević                      Official site

An emotional powerhouse, where the artistic force behind the work is controversial Croatian theater director Oliver Frljić, who is known for his flair in taking on provocative subjects, where this began as a theater project.  Once rehearsal began, however, the idea for a documentary film was born, as this plays out on multiple levels and is sure to provoke reactions.  The underlying theme is that history has compelled us to remember traumatic events.  Frljić adapts his own play based upon a 1991 murder of a 12-year old Serbian girl, Aleksandar Zec, who was tied up and kidnapped along with her mother and father, taken to a mountain retreat, then shot in the head with an automatic rifle, all brutally murdered and their bodies dumped in a garbage pit by a 5-man militia group consisting of a special Croatian police unit near the start of the Yugoslav Wars.  While the offenders were apprehended by the police just a few days afterwards, they were released on a technicality, as their detailed confessions were taken without their lawyer present.  When later retried in 1992, they were pronounced not guilty, though the court was subjected to a politically charged atmosphere, taking place during an ongoing military conflict with Serbia.  To this day, no one has been held accountable for the murders, which is the backdrop for Frljić’s play, which is designed to evoke some measure of sympathy from a Croatian audience, but the extreme personalization of the subject matter makes it a universal story.  According to a 1994 special report by the UN Commission on Human Rights (listed under the paragraph heading Impunity for Unlawful Killings…) Croatia: A shadow on Croatia's future: Continuing impunity for war ...:

In December 1991, Mr. and Mrs. Zec and their 12-year-old daughter were murdered in Zagreb and several days later five persons were arrested as alleged perpetrators of the crime. According to reliable sources, four of the suspects were members of a special police unit. The five admitted having committed the murders; however, they were released soon after their arrest for procedural reasons, and have never been punished.

Frljić has done this kind of thing before, introducing a Polish play in Poland about the problem of anti-Semitism that was banned just a few days before its premiere, or a Serbian play about the assassination of former Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic that shocked audiences while also receiving excellent critical reviews.  His style is to directly confront audiences with their own history, including members in his own cast, as several times actors have refused to perform the material, which has been accused of blasphemy and led to ferocious attacks from the media calling for boycotts, including death threats from right-wing websites, yet he is considered among the best new directors of his generation.  According to The Guardian, “His work is satirizing the politics of the states of former Yugoslavia, the war profit, the rise of ultra right-wing nationalism," where his intent is to raise provocation by asking relevant questions, always searching for a better artistic approach to confront the spread of hatred in the region, “to stop the descent into nationalist hell.” (Who's afraid of Oliver Frljić? - Contemporary Theatre Review).  As he assembles a cast for his play, it’s all part of the multi-layered examination process, as he also interviews a Serbian woman who is particularly touched by the story of Aleksandar Zec, believing that was her at the same age, where it’s impossible not to identify with what happened to her.  By personalizing the material, the subject matter increasingly resonates with viewers.  To that end, he brilliantly chooses four 12-year old girls in his cast, the generation born after the war, as part of the play allows them to interact and ask questions of the deceased, who also responds and is curious about them as well, connecting the past to the present, while examining how it affects different generations and how peer pressure affects children of different nationalities in Croatia.  Powerful testimony is provided by Serbian girls who provide graphic detail about how they’re treated in school, repeatedly tripped in gym class, called horrible names using racial slurs, profaning their mother and family, where it’s clear after 20 years the perception of the Serbian minority has not significantly changed, as they are still viewed as worse than scum, where open hatred prevails. 

The former Yugoslavia contained a combination of ethnic groups, including Bosnians, Muslims, Serbs and Croats, who have all lived together in the same region for centuries, so blood feuds and ethnic hatred have been passed down to families from generation to generation, but what’s exacerbated the intensity is the growing belligerence of nationalism, where the state imposes its one ethnic priority over the entire population.  When that happens, children of other ethnic groups are treated differently, as they are devalued by the State.  Some of these kids have Croatian parents and grandparents, rightly believing they are Croatian, but what if their great-grandparents were Serbian?  Intermixing cultures and religions is not against the law, but children continue to be tainted by this nationalist stain of ethnic purity, where at some point in their childhood they have to confront their own family history, which can completely alter how others view them.  As the rehearsals progress, we hear the incendiary remarks of the attackers, using ethnic slurs for their victims, punching them, throwing them around, where they are vociferously attacked and assaulted even before they are killed, subjected to all manner of demeaning humiliation.  It’s difficult to hear this, much less perform it as actors, and even the director himself has difficulty with the material, so it’s presented in a more abstract style, quickly changing the focus, as the artists themselves reveal their own personal experiences, yet this film unflinchingly takes us through the process of re-living these horrible crimes, wondering how this generation will cope with the dark shadows of history. 

The director is personally attacked on right-wing media outlets, receiving death threats, where at the last minute he wants to insert some of their venomous rhetoric into the play, but the actors openly defy that idea, not wanting to offer a platform for poisonous comments because “Then we’re giving them space they don’t deserve.”  Throughout the process Frljić is very open about how each actor plays their part, not insisting that any one way is right, where they’re allowed to choose what they say or don’t say, where the biggest conflict comes down to one of the 12-year old girls, who happens to be a Serb, but is afraid to say it, knowing the inevitable consequences, as she’s kept it quiet up until now.  There’s a beautiful use of snow falling on the set, reminiscent of Fassbinder’s use of white noir (film blanc) in Veronika Voss (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss) (1981), where white becomes symbolic of forgetting, a metaphor for Germany after the war, which works brilliantly here as well.  But as the audience arrives for opening night there are protesters outside asking why plays aren’t written about 12-year old Croatian girls who were murdered (which the director addressed, claiming he was open to the idea, but only if it was shown in Serbia), providing a boisterous backdrop for the opening of the play, where the most riveting moment is when the deceased Aleksandar asks the young girls their ages, nationalities, and hobbies, which flows by easily until they get to the one girl, where there is a long pause of hesitation that lingers interminably before she quietly answers, “I am Srbenka.”  When the play is over, the other young girls are skipping around with glee, feeling a sense of exhilarated relief, but the Serbian girl quickly gathers her things and can’t escape fast enough, as the camera follows her from behind as she quickly walks down the street, eventually vanishing out of sight where a new world awaits.

Soul On a String

SOUL ON A STRING           C                   

China  (142 mi)  2016  d:  Zhang Yang

Following on the heels of the Russian revisionist film Paradise (Rai) (2016), this is another example of a nation literally appropriating another country’s language, land, and culture in an attempt to alter the world’s perception of China, which is the occupying force in Tibet.  Imagine the Nazi’s making a fantasy film in French about Paris during their WWII occupation, Israel making a mythical film in Arabic about the Palestinians during their armed occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or Britain making a film in Gaelic about the Northern Irish while under British military rule in the 70’s.  A visually stunning film like this, with its panoramic vistas, has a way of elevating one’s appreciation for the ravishing beauty we see onscreen, but completely leaves out any background historical context.  Mao Zedong’s Communist Nationalist army took over Tibet in 1950, hailing the act as a liberation from an old, feudal system that included both British and American imperialist influence.  Resentment for the Chinese grew in Tibet over the following decade with armed rebellions breaking out.  In March 1959 the capital of Lhasa erupted in a full-blown revolt, where asserting Chinese nationalism, anywhere from 200,000 to a million Tibetans were killed and approximately 6000 Buddhist monasteries were ransacked and destroyed, forcing the Dalai Lama, the widely revered Tibetan spiritual leader, to flee to India, where he has lived in exile ever since.  China’s assertion for its territorial claim goes back to the 13th century, when both Tibet and China were absorbed into the Mongol empire.  Known as The Great Khanate, the empire contained China, Tibet, and most of East Asia, becoming known as China’s Yuan Dynasty.  Throughout the Yuan, and subsequent Ming and Qing dynasties, Tibet remained a subordinate principality of China, though it retained varying degrees of independence.  The Himalayan mountain range provides a mountainous wall of strategic security for China, while Tibet possesses a significant mining industry, also serving as a primary water supplier.  China has invested billions into Tibet and flooded the nation with Chinese immigrants over the past decade where its resources have been included in the economic development plan for Western China known as China Western Development.  Like the former satellite nations of the USSR, all answering to Moscow, the needs of Tibetans, who are devout Buddhists, residing in an economic zone described as a Tibet Autonomous Region, now answer to Beijing, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party and are under constant threat by overzealous security forces.  This conflict of limitless spirituality and occupying military rule has resulted in the self-immolation of more than 140 Buddhist monks in protest of Chinese rule in Tibet since 2009, as documented by Tsering Woeser, a well-known Tibetan writer and activist, Why Are Tibetans Setting Themselves on Fire? | by Tsering Woeser ..., which includes passages from Tsering Woeser’s Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule, from The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2016. 

That being said, one must be extremely suspect of how China appropriates Tibetan culture, as it is just another form of political exploitation.  In the not too distant past, China outlawed filming in Tibet, where actress Joan Chen defied Chinese censors by shooting there in her directing debut film XIU XIU:  THE SENT-DOWN GIRL (Tian yu) (1998), an overt condemnation of the Cultural Revolution and winner of seven awards at the Taiwanese Golden Horse Film Festival.  While there are current Tibetan filmmakers, such as Pema Tseden’s THARLO (2015) or Sonthar Gyal’s RIVER (2015), who provide an authentic view of life in modern Tibet, the rest of the world remains cultural outsiders.  Films about ethnic minorities, and in particular films about Tibet, are subject to special scrutiny in China, where anything filmed in Tibet requires approval by the Tibet Committee of the United Front Work Department which operates under the Communist Party’s Central Committee — not just the state media regulator, as is the case with most films.  According to Shelly Kraicer, Toronto film critic and scholar of Chinese cinema, “At the end of the day, everybody is still using and exploiting images of Tibet.”  Director Zhang Yang previously directed overly commercial works like SHOWER (1999) and SUNFLOWER (2005), but before making this film he decided to spend a few months living in Tibet in 2013, where some of his experience is captured in the documentary PATHS OF THE SOUL (2015), which follows the Werner Herzog template established in WHEEL OF TIME (2003).  While Herzog and his crew travel to a Buddhist pilgrimage site in Bodgaya, India, Zhang, in a part documentary and part fiction film, follows the journey of a group of Tibetan Buddhists on a pilgrimage to Lhasa, the holy capital of Tibet, much of it reflected in continuous repetition of prostrating one’s self on the ground.  Zhang’s new film, where all of the actors in the film are Tibetan and speak Tibetan, is based on a story by the prominent Tibetan writer Tashi Dawa, drawing on Tibetan folk traditions and magical realist elements as it follows the adventurous exploits of a man named Tabei (Tibetan actor Kimba) who is brought back to life by a living Buddha after being killed by lightning, offering him penance to cleanse his murderous past and a chance for rebirth.  The film follows his elongated and roundabout journey, including a collection of eccentrics he encounters along the way, as he pursues a mission to bring a Dzi bead, or sacred stone, to a mythical holy land. Using a comical, over exaggerated Sergio Leone spaghetti western style, the film continues to view Tibet as a fairy tale land of fantasy and exoticism, leaving out any references to ethnic abuse or signs of a culture repressed, as thousands of Tibetans are being forced to leave their grazing land and an agrarian way of life that is centuries old, replaced by Chinese bulldozers and more widespread pollution, with fear gripping an occupied community, not to mention arbitrary arrests and brutal detentions that continue without due process under Chinese communist rule, including torture and shoot-to-kill policies in effect, many for something so commonplace as flying the banned Tibetan Snow Lion flag. 

The film is the exact opposite of that grim reality, painting a picture of staggering opulence, like a reworking of Wong Kar-wai’s visually luxurious ASHES OF TIME (1994), blending Buddhism with Western motifs, set in endlessly vast desert landscapes, all captured in widescreen by cinematographer Guo Daming, featuring sweeping aerial shots, Soul on a String by ZHANG Yang - Trailer - YouTube (1:58).  At two and a half hours, this overlong yet epic journey of mythological self-discovery combines two of Dawa’s best-known short stories from the 80’s, Tibet, a Soul Knotted on a Leather Thong and On the Road to Lhasa, featuring a prologue, a shoot-out, a battle-hardened, resurrected criminal on a new mission, where he prefers to be a loner, but along comes a girl named Chung (Quni Ciren), who leaves her sheep and goats behind as she’s smitten by his strange appeal after a night in the same bed, remaining by his side throughout the journey, followed by Pu (Yizi Danzeng), a dwarfish and peculiarly mischievous mute with psychic powers.  Following them are two brothers, trigger happy Guori (Zerong Dages), seen in the opening shoot-out, and the more measured older brother Kodi (Lei Chen), as both vow to kill Tabei to avenge the killing of their father.  However Guori has a habit of killing a rotating cast of companions named Tabei, leaving behind a trail of wrongful men named Tabei whose killings had nothing to do with the crime, which eventually start to weigh on his karmic consciousness.  Also following him are Gedan (Siano Dudiom Zahi), a mysterious stalker who seems to be recording the events on paper and may be the narrator, and Zandui (Solange Nima), a lone wanderer with a goofy dog named General.  Many of the secondary characters provide comic relief, growing more ridiculous over time, where all are one-dimensional characterizations, while the film, as resplendent as it may be, is little more than escapist entertainment, featuring swordfights and honor codes that play out in western lore, set against a backdrop of awesome visual splendor.  It’s something of a confused curiosity where recurring characters randomly cross paths, reaching for a strain of pop mysticism, with the title referring to the leather string that Tabei wears around his neck that holds the stone, as well as Chung’s habit of counting the days of her romance by tying knots on a leather cord, where both, according to Buddhist teachings, need to free themselves of all earthly burdens and attachments.  But that being said, while it’s immaculately gorgeous, there’s really no successful resolution by the end, as the journey simply ends.  This may remind some of Tarsem’s THE FALL (2006), a visually extravagant film shot in twenty-five different countries over the course of four years, which is equally breathtaking to look at, but it does a better job of conjuring up images from a 5-year old’s imagination, taking a kaleidoscopic trip literally around the world, extending the limits of storytelling, and doing a better job of blending fantasy and reality, ultimately becoming a much more intimate and rewarding experience.