AT LAST YEAR’S BERLINALE, the surprise recipient of the coveted Golden Bear went to Nicolas Philibert for his film Sur l’Adamant (2023). It’s rare that a documentary snags the top prize, but the film—which is centered on a barge docked on the Seine in Paris that serves as a community center for those suffering from mental illness—won over the jury and large swaths of its audience for its moving depiction of characters on the extreme margins of society. Many of these same individuals feature in Averroès & Rosa Parks (2024), which screened this year in the noncompeting special section of the festival. This time set in a more traditional care facility, Philibert’s follow-up documentary continues to challenge dominant notions, prejudices, and fears surrounding mental illness by simply allowing the patients to speak (the 143-minute film consists largely of recordings of individual, and a few group, therapeutic sessions). Those we are all too eager to dismiss as “sick” turn out to suffer from heightened affects that we all contend with in our psychological and emotional lives, to greater or lesser degrees: There are those who are incredibly sensitive; there are others whose suffering is rooted in an excess of self-awareness. Many of the patients discourse eloquently on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kant, rooting their afflictions in a centuries-old philosophical discourse. This ability to engage in such heightened rational dialogue seems remarkable coming from those deemed mad—even startling—until one recalls that philosophy classes are a mandatory component of high school education in France, unlike in America, where one can live one’s entire life without ever confronting a philosophical idea—and most, in fact, do.
I sought, but was unable to find on this year’s program, any notable documentary inquiries into the maladies afflicting my own native US—twenty-plus years of expat estrangement have left me yearning, of late, to understand a place that has in many ways become a foreign country to me. Instead, visions of a different kind of madness, one closer to my adopted European home—the madness of war, to be precise—were served up, most movingly in Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted (2024). As the film’s title suggests, its soundtrack consists of phone calls, intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence, made by Russian soldiers to family members in their homeland, where one of the most brazen disinformation campaigns known to humankind has produced a civilian populace with no means of understanding the military campaign in which their loved ones are fighting and dying. The soldiers try in vain to correct their loved ones’ misperceptions; or propagate further confusion; report mournfully on being forced by their superiors to kill innocent civilians; or revel sadistically in the atrocities they are permitted to commit on the battlefield—and beyond, upon the populace. These phone calls—alternately disturbing, heart-wrenching, and enraging—are played over landscape shots of destroyed cities and countryside throughout Ukraine. It is a propaganda film, to be sure—albeit one that attains a certain authenticity in displaying the veritable diversity of opinion of those fighting on the other side.
Over in Russia’s neighbor and comrade China, Jin Jiang’s Republic (2023) furnished yet another radical meditation on the notion of home. It depicts the life of twentysomething hippie Eryang, who strives to create his own version of a microcosmic communist society in a sixty-four-square-foot crash pad somewhere in Beijing, with the aid of copious amounts of weed, psychedelics, sex, and music. In the past few years, a movement known as “lying flat” has emerged, a dropout culture adopted by young mainland Chinese urbanites in reaction to the increasing political repression and economic decline that have become a hallmark of Xi Jinping’s rule. While Eryang never claims to align himself with “lying flat”—in fact, he oddly retains some allegiance to Xi’s ultra-nationalistic ideals—the essential illegality of his entire existence makes him an emblem of those youth who have chosen a life of idleness and passive resistance against the status quo. Eryang’s plight manages to come off as both depressing, in its implications for a country that only recently held so much promise for its youngest and most vulnerable citizens, and hopeful, especially when the film captures the impassioned debates among Eryang and his crew on ideology, politics, music, philosophy, and culture—suggesting that withdrawal from a social realm that impedes such exchanges need not engender disengagement.
As I was finishing writing this piece, it was announced that this year’s Golden Bear had also gone to a documentary—alas, one that I was sadly unable to watch, Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024), about the return of twenty-six royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey from France to Benin—implying that a yearning for truth and engagement with the real overrides the seduction of escapist fantasy, at least for the jury of this year’s Berlinale.
