Berlin Film Festival: the year of political movies, especially one about Guantanamo

Political Films Dominate Berlin International Film Festival – by RICHARD BERNSTEIN

BERLIN — When the annual Berlin International Film Festival started last week, the expectation was that this was going to be the year of politics.

"I know sex, football and politics was big last time," said Dieter Kosslick, the festival's director, at a news conference marking the opening of the event, known as the Berlinale. "But this time, if there is a trend, then it's definitely political."

"All around the world," he added, "there is a very strong tendency of political cinema, one that's close to reality and shows a tough world, and I'm glad that the Berlinale is taking part in it."

Mr. Kosslick, of course, is mostly responsible for selecting the films being shown here, particularly the 19 entries into the main competition, 17 of which are being shown for the first time.

Leading the charge in the political category — and earning an almost reverential reception here — is a hard-hitting "dramatized documentary" called "The Road to Guantánamo," in which the United States is essentially put on trial and found guilty of grave violations of human rights.

Directed by the British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom , "Guantánamo" is about three British Muslims who traveled to Afghanistan just as the United States is embarking on its military campaign to rid that country of the fundamentalist Taliban and to destroy Al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks.

According to the men, who are played by actors, they first went to Pakistan so that one of them could meet a prospective bride. Then, inspired by a sermon they heard at a mosque to help the people of Afghanistan, they went there, initially to Kandahar, the Taliban center, and then to Kabul, the capital. Finding little to do there, one says, they tried to return to Pakistan by bus. Strangely, however, the bus takes them to Kunduz just as it is being captured by the pro-American Northern Alliance. They find themselves in the middle of the battle, and are picked up by Northern Alliance troops.

They are hooded, beaten, transported with other prisoners in a packed truck and eventually turned over to the Americans, who beat them during interrogations and fly them to Guantánamo, Cuba. There they live outside in small cages, not allowed to stand or to talk to one another, at times shackled, while unbearably loud music is piped into their cells over loudspeakers.

The film accepts the men's claim that they were innocent feckless travelers, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no effort to confirm their story, and no American or British officials are interviewed to provide what might have been the perspective of soldiers and interrogators. Asked by a reporter watching the press screening on Tuesday why he had shown caricatures — all Americans as bad and all Pakistanis as gentle — Mr. Winterbottom replied:"We were not trying to portray Americans badly. We were simply trying to show what happened."

"Guantánamo," with its depictions of the harsh treatment of prisoners at the United States naval base, is consistent with many other accounts. The German newspaper Die Welt, predicting that the film would win the overall festival competition, called it a "masterpiece" that "emotionalizes with facts."

But critics complained of Mr. Winterbottom's use of fictional reconstructions in a film that purports to present facts. Other questions could be raised about the film: Were the three men indeed just hapless travelers? What were American interrogators supposed to make, in the heat of battle, of three foreign Muslims in Kunduz? After all, Al Qaeda consisted overwhelmingly of foreign Muslims, and the Americans were looking for Al Qaeda. Mr. Winterbottom's film does not addresses these issues.

In a festival with about 400 films in various categories, it is difficult to isolate other overall trends. Documentaries are strongly represented, as they have been before, and range across many subjects.

One, "Paper Dolls," by the Israeli director Tomer Heymann, portrays Filipino transvestites caring for old people in Israel. Katharina Otto-Bernstein's "Absolute Wilson" is about the groundbreaking theater director Robert Wilson . "My Dad Is 100 Years Old" honors the Italian director Roberto Rossellini on the 100th anniversary of his birth and features Rossellini's daughter Isabella, who wrote the script.

But perhaps, even more than politics, the theme of this year's festival was the portrayal of life as gritty reality.

Among the most highly anticipated films was "The Elementary Particles," a German adaptation of the book by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq. It is about half-brothers living through opposing neuroses: Bruno is politically reactionary, sex-obsessed and miserable; Michel is scientifically brilliant, sexually uninterested and depressed.

The film, directed by Oskar Roehler, contains scenes of group sex, swingers at nudist camps, despair and suicide, but critics said it failed to reproduce the spiritual and psychological extremism of Mr. Houellebecq's original.

In Mr. Houellebecq's relentlessly dark novel, for example, Michael commits suicide; in Mr. Roehler's film he finds true love and, as the film ends, seems on the way to emotional fulfillment.

Another harsh, if less colorful portrayal of life, was an Argentine entry, "El Custodio," directed by Rodrigo Moreno, which is told from the perspective of a bodyguard whose dreary life is subordinated to that of a government minister. "Candy," directed by the Australian Neil Armfield, is the story of two lovers who use heroin to enhance their pleasure in each other. "The Free Will," a German entry directed by Matthias Glasner, is about a convicted rapist and his relationship with a woman who doesn't know about his past.

On the cheerier side, and also in the competition, is "A Prairie Home Companion," directed by Robert Altman , written by Garrison Keillor and inspired by Mr. Keillor's radio show of the same name.

And then there has been fantasy, with a new film by the Chinese director Chen Kaige , "Wuji," or "The Promise," the latest entry in the vogue for artistically elevated martial-arts epics.

Mr. Chen, who gained international fame with such movies as "Yellow Earth" and "Farewell My Concubine," tells the story of a woman who, as a young girl, made a kind of Faustian bargain with a sorceress. She will have beauty and fame, but will lose all the men who love her. These include a general, an emperor and a slave, who fight each other with cutting-edge special effects and quite a bit of computer assistance.

"The Chinese suffer from the American disease now, trying to copy the recipe for successful blockbusters ad nauseum," Die Welt wrote, consigning "Wuji" to the "fantasy swordplay racket" genre.