Berlinale-2024: THE ESSENCE OF LONELY SOULS AND MONSTERS

«Silver bear for Best director»: Pepe by Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias  - a story told from the perspective of a hippopotamus and  by his voice.  

     Years ago Pablo Escobar brought three hippos - in 1981. He had a zoo of exotic pets. After his escape mos of the animals  did not survive, but  hippos adapted to the local rivers. The story of the fight between the young hippo Pepe and the alpha male hippo  Pablito (named after his owner Escobar) was told to the director by local artist Camilo Retsrepo. Seeing it for the first time people from the local village decided that it was a water monster. Thus began the hunt for Pepe. This story contains references to Moby Dick and Hamingway' «The Old Man and the Sea». But the angle is completely different: we see the world through Pepe’s eyes. Pepe philosophizes and  what he says is deeply political. The last time we saw speaking animal – it was the tiger in Apichatpong Weerasethakul film. The director of Pepe doesn't have the ability of mesmorizing as Weerasethakul, but  with the help of a hippopotamus he tries to unravel the essence of lonely monsters.

     Berlinale catalogue: «A voice that claims to belong to a hippopotamus. A voice that does not understand the perception of time. A voice that tells of a historical event as if in a trance. “Am I making that sound that comes out of my mouth? And what is a mouth anyway?” The only thing the animal knows for sure is that it is dead. The first and only hippopotamus ever killed in the Americas. The Colombian press called him Pepe. Between encounters and misunderstandings, epiphanies and sadness, we enter a world full of stories replete with even more stories. In a serious and playful way, both authentic and deceptive, images and sounds narrate the overwhelming orality of places full of beings who, like Pepe, died without ever knowing where they really were…».

The only problem,  which I feel – why Pepe speaks in human language, but not in hippo dialect…

 “Golden Bear for Best Film”: “Dahomey” by Mati Diop.  It  is a documentary saga about the return of cultural property that was taken out of Africa by French colonialists, and has now been returned in its very small volume: 26 objects from hundreds. The wooden idol representing the Dahomey king speaks with us with a mystical voice. Mati Diop made ritualistic mysticism the moving instrument of her previous work, “Atlantics”, which won Cannes award. Here the technique could also work, but being involved in the debates about the successes and difficulties of decolonization, the director did not give free rein to her poetic imagination. Thus the narration stuck somewhere in the middle between discussions and fantastic tales.

“SILVER BEAR GRAND JURY PRIZE”: Hong Sangsoo’s “Needs of a Traveler.”

Sitting on a bench in a park the melancholic heroine (Isabelle Huppert) plays a flute, and the sounds fly aroung her like invisible microscopic birds. She herself is carried by some wind from France to South Korea. In order to earn money for dailylife she gives lessons of French Language, but these are strange lessons: she teaches in English, and her idea is to excavate deeply hidden emotions of “students”, made them formulate then and afterwards to translate the these sentences into French. The method will help people to remember words in foreign language. Probably, she’s right. As always in the films of this director – but, yes,  especially in this film - it's just a pure, inevitable and somehow indifferent "cinegénie". Impressionism and minimalism with an unbelievably  clear display of hidden  emotions  -  the director  masterfully plucks invisible strings. Just a few  directors are capable of that - thus it's pure art, but of course we could add the stories  about cyphes and etc. Huppert is mockingly Hitchcockian. Caricature vignette of her infernal images Finally  -  focus...