Today I saw two highlights of the festival, one documentary and one fiction, both about institutional ideology, lessons taught and learnt, the power of rhetoric, and the way in which this plays out on a micro and macro level.
Fiction first: Police, Adjective is a sustained examination of the minutiae of a police procedural concerning three pot-smoking schoolchildren and the cop, Cristi, who has been assigned to investigate. Appalled at the attention he’s expending on a low level crime that could see one of the kids jailed for years, his repetitive movements from school to police station to family home (each equally banal, spending long stretches ‘investigating’, writing reports, or eating) highlight the absurdity of living a life mired in petty bureaucracy, enforcing an outdated law he expects will soon to
disappear.
This dryly humorous, biting satire of the Romanian legal system is a bildungsroman tracking Cristi’s indoctrination into the autocratic language of the law and the home. Childlike, he receives lessons about grammar, symbols and images from his partner after questioning the meaning of lyrics in a pop song, forced into accepting the song’s cliched metaphors about love. The private then shifts to the public in the penultimate scene, where Cristi meets with ‘the boss’ he’s expended so much effort avoiding, forced to have his definition of ‘conscience’ written on a blackboard and compared to that in the dictionary. Given an ultimatum of either quitting the police department or following the law (an aleatory language where seven years means three-and-a-half and ’squealing’ must be referred to as ‘denouncing’), the final shot shows him detailing on a blackboard the sting operation he’d attempted to refuse, his own morality subsumed into an inflexible code, his schooling complete.
Russian Lessons is the sort of major documentary that would have been snapped up by the BBC in times gone by, but the broadcaster is now the subject of the film’s ire in this sustained attack on Russia’s involvement in the 2008 war against Georgia, as well as the misinformation spread in the media about its origins and consequences. Filmmaker’s Andrei Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya enter South Ossetia from separate sides, documenting the devastation caused, recording testimonies, and tearing into the lies propagated by Putin’s government and their subsequent acceptance by the West.
They detail a catalogue of falsities, from skeptical claims of “up to 2000 dead” to the blame being directed towards Georgia for bombs dropped by Russian forces. A contextual section is spent documentating Russian war crimes committed in Abkhazia in 1992 and this history’s erasure, before a final call states the necessity for a move from cynicism to conscientiousness. The filmmakers’ journey towards each other and the manner in which their investigations combine is a striking metaphor for the movement from ignorance into the awareness that the film inspires and demands. This only gives extra heft to an urgent film that demands to be released far and wide.
