Poland’s ‘Kigali’ wins First Look at Locarno

‘Paula’ ranges from tragically romantic to jauntily comic

LOS ANGELES, Aug 9, (RTRS): “Birds Are Singing in Kigali”, an upcoming drama revolving around the Rwandan genocide by prominent Polish writer-director duo Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze, is the winner of the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival’s First Look event dedicated to pics in post.

The industry initiative is focused this year on Poland, which is currently an Eastern European cinematic hotbed.

The prestigious jury panel comprising Toronto artistic director Cameron Bailey, Rotterdam fest topper Bero Beyer, and Istanbul International Film Festival director Kerem Ayan, awarded the second prize to “Zgoda”, a first work by Maciej Sobieszczanski about a concentration camp where Germans were imprisoned following their 1946 World War Two defeat, and allegedly tortured by Jews and Poles.

“Birds Are Singing” turns on a young Tutsi girl and a European ornithologist who saves her life in 1994 during the slaughter in Rwanda in 1994. Tensions between the two women ensue.

It won Euros 65,000 ($72,000) worth of post-production services sponsored by Cinelab Bucharest.

Multiple

The co-directors’ previous film, “Papusza”, about the Romany poet Bronislawa Wajs, received a special mention in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s competition section in 2013 and went on to win multiple prizes at other festivals.

Poland scored the foreign language Oscar in 2015 for Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Ida” while the Berlin Silver Bear last year, for best director, went to his compatriot Malgorzata Szumowska for “Body”. “Brothers” by Wolciech Staron, scooped the critics’ week nod in Locarno last year.

The Locarno spotlight, formerly called Carte Blanche, is in its sixth year. Previous participating countries were Israel (2015), Brazil (2014), Chile (2013), Mexico (2012) and Colombia (2011).

Roughly midway through “Paula”, Christian Schwochow’s lush, involving biopic of iconoclastic German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, artistically inclined viewers will notice a brief character cameo by Camille Claudel — the ill-fated French sculptor who has received two major bigscreen portraits of her own. Her fleeting appearance in the narrative may cue us to expect an equivalent tale of woe, yet while “Paula’s” script repeatedly signposts its heroine’s untimely demise, it’s a film that daubs an unexpected range of tones, from the tragically romantic to the jauntily comic, onto the canvas with free abandon. Modersohn-Becker’s naive expressionistic style wasn’t subtle, so it’s apt enough that “Paula” often paints with a pretty broad brush; following its Locarno premiere, the attractive result should engage mainstream arthouse audiences at home (hitting German theaters just before Christmas) and abroad.

“My life shall be a short, intense party”, declares Paula (sparkily played by Carla Juri, seen most recently in the Sundance hit “Morris From America”) early on in proceedings, before announcing her ambition to leave the world with “three good paintings and a child”. It’s not the only time the film’s screenplay, developed over a period of nearly 30 years by veteran German scribes Stefan Kolditz and Stephan Suschke, goes in for rather schematic foreshadowing — though it hardly needs to be said that Modersohn-Becker, the first female painter in history with a museum devoted exclusively to her work, had considerably more good work to her name when she died in 1907. Whirling and busy with incident, “Paula” certainly captures the intensity of her life, with its artistic escapes to Paris, flirtations with hedonism and belated sexual awakening; as parties go, however, it could still be rather a lonely one.

Adversity

The opening stages of “Paula” promise a familiar enough tale of one plucky woman overcoming substantial adversity in an aggressively guarded man’s world. “Women will never produce anything creative apart from children”, bleats Fritz Mackensen (Nicki von Tempelhoff), her condescending instructor at a Worpswede artists’ colony, “correcting” her unorthodox brush technique by forcibly guiding her hand. (Call it “manspainting,” if you will.) But while feminist resolve drives much of the storytelling, the film’s gender politics grow more complicated in its study of her rocky romance with fellow painter Otto Modersohn (a fine Albrecht Abraham Schuch), an ostensibly kind figure with limited understanding of his wife’s gifts.

A widower whose superstitious fear of loss leads him to keep his marriage to Paula cruelly unconsummated for several years, Otto hovers on the brink of enlightenment, but remains susceptible to Mackensen’s chauvinistic bluster. He eventually agrees to fund his frustrated wife’s studies at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris — where sculptor Clara Westhoff (Roxane Duran) and poet Rainer Maria Rilke (Joel Basman) welcome her into the expat bohemian fold — though as she drifts further away from her marriage, her material demands on her husband increase. Neither the script nor Juri’s performance shy away from a certain hard-edged petulance in the character; however sympathetic her social circumstances, not every one of the film’s cards is stacked in her favor, as it evolves into an affectingly even-handed anatomy of a loving but dysfunctional marriage. (It should be noted that certain biographical and chronological details — particularly pertaining to Modersohn’s first marriage — have been slightly fudged here in the interest of romantic and dramatic tidiness.)