The Beijing International Film Festival opened ticket sales yesterday, last year's documentary "Water Moon in Hand" sold out 5 seconds after the ticket was issued, and this year, the documentary "Imatoshi, Dream Machine" also ranked second in the "fastest sold out 10 films", and the Concave mirror DOC will recommend documentary works that appear at this year's Beijing Film Festival in the next few days.
Recommended today is the German documentary "Mr. Bachmann and His Students" selected for the "Truth First" section.
Stills from "Mr. Bachmann and His Students"
Documentary "Monsieur Bachmann and His Students": The German Classroom Storm
Wen | Muyan
"Remember this, my friends, there are no bad weeds or people born evil, only bad breeders", Ladj Ly's Les Misérables (2019) ends with this quote from Victor Hugo's original book, which can also be fully regarded as Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse (Bachmann and his students). A piece of the best annotation. Although the 217-minute film did not receive much attention during the Berlin Film Festival because of its length and lack of "sexy" themes, it was undoubtedly one of the most moving works in the main competition and even all the units, and finally won the Silver Bear Jury Prize in the first stage of the online judging, becoming a "warm current" in the winter of the epidemic and the refugee crisis in Europe.
Maria Speight
Born in 1967, Bachmann is the fifth feature film and second documentary by German director Maria Speth, who was also seen as a member of the "Berliner Schule": German cinema was aesthetically unique in world cinema during the Weimarer Republik period, and then fell silent for a long time after the Nazis came to power and after World War II, until the 1970s and 1980s, when it became known as "The Berliner Schule". The director of the "Four Masters of German Cinema" regained its attention, and then the ebb and flow, the entire nineties almost faded out of the territory of world cinema again. The "New Wave", which was re-conceived by this group of directors born in the sixties and seventies in the early 2000s, was quickly and loosely dubbed the "Berlin School" (the term "School" seems to have a unified and consistent aesthetic than the "wave", but like all label terms, it is highly debatable). Maria Speight's film style is portraitic, inheriting the urgency and delicacy of frères Dardenne's aesthetic, but also a bit of German coldness, and the objects are mostly women: from the girlish affair in In den Tag hinein (2001) to the young mother in Madonnen (2007) and to the daughters (Töchter, The "adventures" of Agnes searching for his daughter's body in 2014; the last rather mannerist (so-called "style") documentary", 9 Leben (2011), can also be seen as a group portrait of the "wandering/hippie" youth of Berlin today.
Poster of "Mr. Bachmann and His Students"
And this new work is not the "figure painting" of the teacher Bachmann and his students: the industrial town of Stadtallendorf in Hessen, an ordinary middle school class, less than twenty students from nine different countries between the ages of 12 and 14— a few who don't even speak much German; a Bachmann who may be a martial arts enthusiast, who may be like a foundry worker but not like a teacher, a former dropout. Singer and sculptor. There is no rhetoric or success theory, only the temptation and the temptation of goodness, and the everyday, which can encompass the "everyday" of all the "issues" for people and the attentive viewers and fill the newspapers of European countries: the migration and refugee crisis, racial and social integration, religious and Islamic extremism, or identity and class cognition. In this small town of just over 20,000 people, a quarter of the population does not have German citizenship, seventy percent of the inhabitants have an immigrant background, and it is strange or not surprising that it was once even the largest arms producer in Nazi Europe. There is no need to celebrate Mr. Bachmann, he is just an ordinary teacher who has successfully established personal emotional connections with his students, but he is not outstanding and should not be an individual teacher, or a good "nurturer"; but in this time of disorder and chaos, he is quite precious, even something great: he helps students to overcome social, cultural and linguistic barriers. The term "education", which is excessively banal and routine, is also re-respectful. Using Bachmann and his class as "epitomes" and "examples" is naturally the smartest and even overly clever choice for documentaries, but the film does get rid of some of the trappings of different genres but the same genre, and it even feels that Entre les murs (2008) is quite calculated. This seems to prove that the properly captured "truth" can immediately be more powerful than the mediocre or even quite excellent "fiction". Excellent "casting" and proper handling also make the film go beyond the framework of "showing" the German education system.
These students from Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria or Germany are naturally the protagonists and "stars" of this film, their families are extremely ordinary and even quite poor, their possibility of continuing higher education, the degree of social development may be limited, but the competent "nurturers" have successfully made them a group of "dreamers", and it is for this reason that Mr. Bachmann is the most moving protagonist of this movie, especially when we know that his ambition is far from becoming a teacher, and even forced to "make a living". He was only a "nurturer" when he became a "nurturer". The most moving moment in the film is when Bachmann explains to the students the origin of his "family name": the grandmother's family, as the first generation of Polish/Prussian immigrants to the Ruhr industrial area of Germany, was casually "thrown" into Bachmann by the Nazi registrar at the renaming registry. The most vivid and vivid lesson in immigration history and ethnic integration!
If Bachmann continues to tell his students history, then he and his students are not a spiritual "portrait" and historical abbreviation of the current Germany, and from this point of view, it is a "Merkelien" film, or the larger background of the film is actually The Germany of Merkel's era: in 2015, the Wave of Refugees in Europe, Merck was criticized by all (including in his own party) but decided to open the border to take in millions of refugees. This led directly to the massive loss of seats in the local elections two years later, and the anti-immigrant far-right alternative party entered parliament for the first time, and it took more than half a year to re-establish a difficult cabinet. What happened five or six years later? Syrian refugees have already paid more taxes than they did at the time, manufacturing labor has been replenished at the same time, and Germany has been given a new business card: it is no longer a "synonym" for Nazis, but a "synonym" for humanitarianism... In this current global political arena where politicians are mostly rats, political "foresight" can only continue to yield under the so-called public opinion oppression that is getting closer and closer to populism, and as Bachmann has shown, the usual and even should-be quality has become a virtue.
Mr. Bachmann and His Students is a simple, sincere film full of the light of human nature, with effective and precise editing so that the construction of the entire narrative does not seem too lengthy, thus successfully creating an immersive "temporality", lyrical and not childish sensationalism, perhaps a little too neat and "beautiful" (as opposed to documentaries in the context of "direct film" or "real film"), but again completing an effective balance between objectivity and objectivity. It is particularly suitable for the empty talkers and frivolous "inquirers" who pretend to be idealistic but in fact are far-sighted, and Mr. Bachmann for them is like "What can you do for this era?" / Does this era make you uncomfortable? The stylistic question offers perhaps the most basic but effective answer: Don't do the thirteen things of this age.
This article is the author of bump mirror DOC sharing, film and television industry network encourages practitioners to share original content, film and television industry network will not make any edits to the original article! If the author has a special note, please reprint according to the author's instructions, if there is no explanation, then the reprint of this article must be approved by the author, and please attach the source (Film and Television Industry Network) and the link to this page. Original link https://107cine.com/stream/139393