Panorama.doc is Message to Man’s traditional documentary programme with an established festival trajectory and a glorious history. The films in this section vary in character and form: they may explore new facets of the observational method, boldly step into the realm of live-action film, or experiment with genre.
The programme will open with the Russian premiere of Anselm, the new film by the German cinema master Wim Wenders, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Wenders delves into the creative universe of artist Anselm Kiefer, whose monumental works tackle grand themes of history and fate, the struggle between good and evil, crimes against humanity, and the responsibility for those crimes. “People search for lightness, because they shy away from burdens, the abyss. Fundamentally, they don’t want to see it. That’s why this lightness exists. If you take a look at the entire history of the world, the geological, cosmological history, then what we are is not even a drop in the rain. We’re less than a drop, we are an atom. Then you can obviously say: ‘We are very light’,” says Kiefer in one of the rare moments where the director gives him direct speech. These words could be taken as an epigraph to the entire programme.
Not one but two Panorama.doc films confront the human world with something incomparably greater: the elements, nature. In Nocturnes, set high in the mountains on the border between India and Bhutan, people merely observe processes in the vast, unknown world of ancient moths, which are under threat of extinction. The film, filled with the live sounds of the forest and footage of these nocturnal, almost alien creatures, won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and has since toured dozens of festivals worldwide. In the film Pirópolis by Chilean documentary filmmaker Nicolás Molina, the emphatically simple, straightforward world of a team of volunteer firefighters faces a terrible fire that devours everything, and in this confrontation, a profound poetry emerges.
The more voluminous the images of global catastrophes, the less explicable human cruelty seems. Seven Winters in Tehran (a Berlinale and CPH:DOX prize winner), about 19-year-old Iranian Reyhaneh Jabbari, sentenced to death for a murder committed in self-defense, documents just such cruelty and the lack of justice. The heroine of another film in the programme, Citizen Sleuth, pursues justice in her own way, investigating a mysterious death in a small American town. These two films, entirely different in tone, explore the possibilities of courtroom drama and true crime through documentary material, and in both cases, the results are compelling.
Elizabeth Lo takes an equally bold and inventive approach to human relationships in Mistress Dispeller, which premiered to great success at the recent Venice Film Festival.
Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó, whose previous film The Next Guardian was screened in 2017, return to Panorama.doc with their new film, Agent of Happiness. This film about how the Kingdom of Bhutan measures “gross national happiness” and what can truly make us happy, still offers some faith in humanity and hope for a well-deserved sense of “ease.”
Natalia Pylaeva