Pues los exámenes del martes y el miércoles me salieron bastante bien, sobre todo teniendo en cuenta el número de horas que dediqué al estudio. Sigo sin parar en casa ni dormir las suficientes horas, así que os pego el artículo que escribí ayer para el Talent Campus. Está en inglés algo patatero, aviso.
En cuanto recobre algo de tranquilidad (que no creo que sea durante los próximos días, pues la Berlinale sigue su curso y yo ya me he gastado medio sueldo de ataño en tickets para las pelis) escribiré -en español, claro- más sobre todo lo que he visto y estoy viendo y os colgaré fotos varias.
In this edition of the Talent Campus several panels have analyzed different aspects of characters in cinema. Particularly, “Heroes vs. Anti-heroes” (which took place Monday) and today’s “Real Life Emotions”.
In the first panel the discussion was supposed to deal with “the identity of the contemporary cinematic hero”, but it was rather a pleasant chitchat between nice filmmakers who talked about the process of creating a main character. Nevertheless, it was an interesting and amusing conversation.
Ralph Ziman, director of Jerusalema (screening in the Berlinale Panorama) defended his choice of using a criminal as a main character in his last movie “as a way of getting under the skin of the problem” of South-African criminality without being “preachy” or feel like he’s giving moral lectures. Although people could think it’s shocking, the most important thing for him is that viewers understand the motivations of the main character, to show a different perspective of the problem. Benjamin Gilmour (director of Son of a Lion, the story of a Pashtun boy who wants to go to school and screening in the Berlinale Forum and Berlinale Generation) talked about the Pashtun culture, the real protagonists of his movie. Gilmour said that he wanted to show that the reality in Afghanistan does not correspond with the images shown after 9/11 and he also told a lot of funny anecdotes of the film shooting. Julia Jentsch (protagonist of Sophie Scholl and winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlinale 2005) was the only one who talked about “real” heroes. Although her intervention was the least substantial, she explained that in Sophie Scholl she tried to show that the protagonist was just a normal young woman, who only became a heroine because of the extraordinary circumstances under which she lived, the Nazi Germany.
Julie Delpy (director and protagonist of 2 Days in Paris) was the funniest speaker. She said about her character that "it’s a horrible person, that’s what makes her interesting", because "humans are stupid and do stupid things". She also talked chaotically about the process of writing and directing, stated her opinion about Forrest Gump, repeated a thousand times "it’s kind of, you know" and laugh the whole time. Maybe she didn’t talked much about heroes and anti-heroes, but she kept the attention of the public and made everybody laugh.
The panel “Real Life Emotions” gathered together three important filmmakers who have dealt with real life stories and put them in the screen. Director Steven Frears (The Queen), Sandrine Bonnaire (protagonist of Jeanne la Pucelle and director of Elle s’appelle Sabine) and producer Bernd Eichinger (Downfall) talked how they see the differences between the “truth” and its representation, that is, between the real life of historic characters and how their stories are told in a movie.
The discussion was interesting because the speakers had a different point of view. With an incredibly English sense of humour, Steven Frears said that he hadn’t done any documentation work on Queen Elisabeth because he had “lived with her for the last 60 years”, whereas Eichinger told he had spent 10 years researching on Hitler’s life before making Downfall. They also talked about the necessary “invention” of details when telling “a true story”, and Frears insisted that the most important thing is to be always plausible. Another main topic that kept coming during the conversation was distance. The three of them insisted on the fact that keeping a distance with the protagonists of the movie is essential. As Bonnaire said, if you don’t keep this distance, “the movie becomes voyeuristic” and there’s a danger of “stealing” this persons life. Last but not least, Frears summarized the point of view of everybody on stage when he asserted that those films were not biopics, but “records of the time”, and that what’s important after watching them is “to draw conclusions from a time period and from yourself”.
In any case, the conclusion I draw after those two panels is that there isn’t any magical recipe for writing an interesting movie with strong characters. Whether heroes or anti-heroes, historical characters or living persons, what counts is a good script, a good direction and good actors. And I have to say that I also draw the conclusion that filmmakers make films because they cannot speak about their stories: Frears answered almost every question about his film saying “I have no idea”.
Por cierto, por fin están publicadas todas las crónicas del Talent Campus en el blog de Cafebabel Berlin, que es donde debían estar desde un principio:
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