Malika Rabahallah: Hamburg Film Festival 2024: She shows courage

After 21 years, Malika Rabahallah replaces Albert Wiederspiel as director of the Hamburg Film Festival. At her first festival edition, she focused on highlights from festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Locarno and Toronto; out of 124 films and series, 43 were films by women.

Over a total of ten festival days, Rabahallah not only shared her love of cinema, but also of France, presenting newcomers (27 debuts) as well as old masters of cinema in equal measure. The opening film, Louise Courvoisier’s “Kings of Summer,” is a debut without any stars. The tragicomedy is about an 18-year-old who, due to a bereavement, takes over his parents’ farm and the care of his seven-year-old sister. It smells of hay and Comté cheese.

Fittingly, there was a stand to taste this cheese at the opening of the 32nd Film Festival. You can feel how happy Rabahallah is to pass on her enthusiasm. This isn’t just the case with cheese. With the day of free entry on German Unity Day, the film festival director has fulfilled a dream. The fact that she brought Jacques Audiard to Hamburg with the French Oscar entry “Emilia Pérez” is another.

Audiard received the Douglas Sirk Prize on the first Saturday of the festival. In the eulogy for Audiard, “Jacques Audiard fanboy” Fatih Akin described Audiard’s life’s work so precisely that he embarrassed the director: “If I heard you like that, then I would say that Jacques Audiard left us too early.” He wanted to already making more films. With his tenth film “Emilia Pérez”, this time a musical drama, Audiard creates a stirring story about a Mexican drug lord who faces up to his crimes as a woman (Karla Sofía Gascón). Zoe Saldana shines as lawyer Rita, and not just in the powerful dance scenes.

Director Andrea Arnold, who tells a strong underclass drama with fairytale elements in “Bird,” was, like Audiard, honored with the Douglas Sirk Prize. Chiara Fleischhacker, who is already making big waves with her feature film debut “Vena,” praised the “Queen of Cinema” in her laudatory speech on Wednesday evening. Arnold shows “pure appreciation” for each individual figure. Since Arnold was sick at home in England instead of Hamburg, the award ceremony took place without her, but was recorded for her. Arnold’s acceptance speech was read at the end of the awards ceremony.

The fact that Fleischhacker gave the eulogy is a stroke of genius on Rabahallah’s part. She connects two women who know how to transform pain into art. Fleischhacker’s feature film debut “Vena” (named after the umbilical cord vein) about a pregnant woman addicted to crystal meth (played forcefully by Emma Nova) received, among other things, the First Steps Award (in Berlin) after the Thomas Strittmatter Prize for the best screenplay (2022). ) and the Hamburg Production Prize for German Cinema Productions. The birth shown in the film is a re-enactment of a real birth.

In any case, the film festival’s program includes some films with a strong female perspective. Carly May Borgstrom’s “Spirit in the Blood” is a film about female empowerment from the perspective of a group of girls. With “The Assessment,” Fleur Fortuné developed a dystopian parable about all the torment that couples who desperately want to have children subject themselves to. Last Thursday, both spoke together with Katrin Gebbe (“Pelikanblut”) on a panel about female perspectives in international genre films. They discussed why a film like Jonathan Glazer’s “Birth” with Nicole Kidman flopped. Maybe that would have destroyed Nicole Kidman’s perfect image, says Fortuné. All three called for more openness to new roles, material and genre crossings.

Déa Kulumbegashvili shows courage with the drama “April” about a gynecologist who secretly performs abortions. She works with sound artist Matthew Herbert, who translates discomfort into sound. David Cronenberg’s body horror thriller “The Shrouds” is particularly polarizing, in which the main character Karsh (Vincent Cassel) allows people to follow the decomposition process of the deceased on the screen. Karsh takes advantage of the offer herself. Diane Kruger plays the deceased wife, her sister and an avatar. In an interview with the audience, she described her work on “The Shrouds” as the highlight of her career. Cronenberg dealt with the death of his wife with the film.

A highlight of the film festival was the German premiere of the German Oscar entry “The Seed of the Sacred Fig Tree” by the Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, in which a judge plagued by paranoia suspects his daughters of having stolen his service weapon. Ali Samadi’s drama “Seven Days” about the Tehran resistance fighter Maryam (Vishka Asayesh), who wants to see her children one last time before returning to prison, was also written by Rasoulof. A powerful scene: If she were a man, she would be celebrated as a hero, but as a woman she would be a bad mother. The audience spontaneously applauds. Some think of the human rights activist Narges Mohammadi. Women, Life, Freedom.

Rich Peppiatt’s fast-paced drama “Kneecap” shows that political films can also be fun, about a music school teacher in Belfast who, together with party-loving Irish, forms a Gaelic rapping hip-hop band. Meanwhile, his girlfriend is fighting to preserve the Irish language. The director only learned Gaelic while working on the film, the band is real.

Michel Hazanavicius and Thomas Vinterberg broke new ground. The Danish filmmaker presented his first series with the family saga “Families Like Ours”, in which Denmark is evacuated due to an impending flood. Property and money suddenly have a different value. When Vinterberg wrote the script seven years ago, there was no corona pandemic and no lockdown plans.

Michel Hazanavicius puts all his heart and soul into his first animated film “The Most Precious of All Goods” about a childless couple who finds the baby of a couple deported to Auschwitz. Jean-Claude Grumberg, the author of the young adult book of the same name, is a family friend. Hazanavicius never actually wanted to make a film about the Holocaust.

You could breathe a sigh of relief with Alice Lowe’s darkly humorous comedy “Timestalker,” in which a woman is reborn over the centuries because she falls in love with the wrong man. Particularly noteworthy is Luis Ortega’s “Kill the Jockey,” which incidentally crosses gender boundaries with its magical-realistic images. Sean Baker’s tragicomedy “Anora”, on the other hand, dispels the Cinderella myth: a stripper hurriedly marries a Russian oligarch’s son, then his minders come into play.

The film festival closed on Saturday with Pedro Almodovar’s “The Room Next Door” with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. The three didn’t show up, but a total of 312 guests from 29 countries came in ten days. In the end, the films were also big stars – and Malika Rabahallah, who had shown a very good knack for people, situations and films in her first festival edition.