At a certain point in the documentary ‘The Song of Others’ (2024), directed by Vadim Jendreyko, one of the featured archeologists mentions one of the central scientific maxims of his work: everything that is buried will, sooner or later, be pushed back to the surface by the earth. It is a matter of days – or, sometimes, of millennia. This unrelenting logic can also be applied beyond archeology. About 80 years ago, Europe tried to bury some of its worst ghosts – authoritarianism, totalitarian and supremacist intolerance, fascism – and behold, in the 21stcentury, they have resurfaced with a vengeance in many of its countries.
Contrary to this extremist rise, Europe does not exist, I’ve been there, Porto/Post/Doc 2024’s thematic program, intends to excavate and bring back to the surface a counterpoint to this Old World in moral and political decay. In order to do this, it takes its inspiration from George Steiner’s essay ‘An Idea of Europe’, which argues that Europe’s DNA is constituted around a “linguistic, cultural and social diversity, of a prodigal mosaic that often makes a trivial distance, 20 kilometers apart, a division between worlds”. And, in a provocative stance, it states that – in a continent plagued by intolerance towards immigrants and refugees, as well as by the proliferation of far-right autocratic regimes – this romantic ideal no longer exists.
What we see today is not the utopia envisioned in the early days of an ‘European Union’. The festival therefore proposes to set out in search of a new Europe, trying to excavate within this program of seven features – originating from different countries on the continent, in different historical contexts, from 1928 to 2024 – the humanist values that allow us to dream of a new utopia, a new ideal, in the ceaseless attempt to look for better ways to rewrite a less unfair history.
And the idea of search is a recurring one in all these films. In ‘The Song of Others’, Jendreyko retraces the continent’s history all the way back to its origins in Greek mythology, in which Europe is a woman that springs a matriarchal society. Millennia later, within a patriarchal and warmongering continent, the movie perhaps finds Europe’s poetics, or maybe a poetic Europe, in the figure a former Serbian soldier, who defended Bosnia during the bloody conflict in the 1990s and, decades later, talks to the German filmmaker, in French, about love.
This invitation to hear ‘the song of the other’ made by Jendreyko is taken literally by Tony Gatlif in ‘Latcho Drom’ (1993). In the film, the director travels the globe in search of gypsy communities and gives voice to what is perhaps the most ‘othered’ group among those born in Europe, in a narrative entirely driven by the music sung by its characters.
In ‘Father and Master’ (1977), by the Taviani brothers, the paternal figure is present, but that does not mean much. In the movie, Gavino, the protagonist, looks for an education that will serve as a way out of the cycle of misery, exploration and violence embodied precisely by this father, symbol of a rural Europe abandoned in the past by the relentless pursuit of an urban, progressive and industrial ideal.
The disenchantment with this project a modern Europe underlines the aimless journey of Valton and Reino in Aki Kaurismaki’s ‘Take Care of your Scarf, Tatiana’ (1994) – a road movie that begins in search of vodka and ends in an encounter with two immigrant women, an Estonian and a Russian, and in the possible dialogue and affection, despite the language barrier. Russia returns in ‘The Ascent’ (1977), by Larisa Shepitko, in which two soldiers go looking for food for their battalion in the midst of the brutal Soviet cold and come face to face with the (a)moral winter of the horrors of the Second World War, the great founding milestone of contemporary Europe.
Finally, the program goes back to the beginning: Carl Dreyer’s ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ (1928), one of the main precursors of what we now call ‘cinema’, in which an inquisitorial court mercilessly pursues the confession of a sin but discovers, instead, the myth that will give rise to France and to one of the Old Continent’s preeminent democracies.
By looking at these works of yesterday and today, from a geographical extreme to the other, Porto/Post/Doc invokes these filmmakers’ thoughts on how cinema has portrayed, and often anticipated, Europe’s solutions and overcomings of its worst humanitarian crises. More than a collection of films, Europe does not exist, I’ve been there is a program that urges us to think of film with a political and ethical conscience, as a thesis in defense of multiculturalism, able to contribute to the collective discussion on how to build a possible society based on differences. We invite you to envision with us the next idea of Europe.
Father and Master, Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani
Italy, 1977, FIC, 113'
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Latcho Drom, Tony Gatlif
France, 1993, DOC, 103'
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The Ascent, Larisa Shepitko
Russia, 1977, FIC, 102'
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The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Theodor Dreyer *
France, 1928, FIC, 81'
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*Special screening as a film-concert with original music created by Alex FX.
The Song of Others - A Search for Europe, Vadim Jendreyko
Switzerland, 2024, DOC, 137'
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Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana, Aki Kaurismäki
Finland, Germany, 1994, FIC, 64'
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