It's fairly unusual at a film festival with umpteen titles to pick from that one selects three names out of a hat, and all three turn out to be not only winners, back to back, but films of quality ranging from excellent to astounding. Today's triple winning ticket: "ZOZO" from Norway by way of Beirut, "Fratricide" Brudermord) -- astounding turf battle between Turks and Kurds in a German city, and "Bashing", a hypnotic Kafkaesque look at life on Desolation Row in a northern Japanese industrial wasteland.

"Zozo" is the name of a most appealing teenage boy from Beirut who loses his parents in the war-torn city of Beirut in 1989, meets a lovely young girl who escorts him to the airport, and ends up in Sweden as a refugee war orphan, where his racist Swedish schoolmates give him nothing but hassles, grief, and humiliation. His one source of strength is his feisty Lebanese grandfather who encourages him to keep his head up and "rearrange" the facial features of those who plague him. Shot in glowing widescreen and deftly directed by Josef Fares who, like the hero of the picture spent his early life in Lebanon, this is a film that knows where it's coming from and will take you places you never dreamed of before. A talking chicken that is Zozo's "best friend” and confidant back home, reappears as a pigeon in Sweden but doesn't speak Arabic anymore -- and this is not funny, but really touching. The kid is dazzled at night by a spinning wheel of fire in the sky that might just be G-d or the reincarnation of his loving mother -- a special effect that is straight from the heart. The opening sequences are harshly brutal war scenes in which Zozo sees his parents literally torn to bloody pieces by a bomb, while the latter part of the film, set in Sweden, tends to a certain sentimentality, but not of the cloying kind, and the final scene with the grandparents on a Swedish Golden Pond brought a tear to my eye -- a real one, although this is anything but a tear-jerker. The role of "Zozo" played by curly locked Imad Creidi has got to be the best performance by a teenager this year, anywhere, and teenage actress Antoinette Turk is an amazingly beautiful pre-adolescent lass. Two very young actors to watch for in the not-too-distant future. "Zozo" is a magic picture with a heart of gold and a serious statement about the difficulties of assimilation in the theoretically Socialist paradise of Sweden.
"Fratricide" by thickly bearded Kurdish, Turkish and Arabic speaking Yilmaz Arslan, who walks with a limp and was educated in Germany, is the most powerful film I have seen in many a season, in a word -- astounding! The conflict between the Turks and the large Kurdish minority in Turkey, who have long yearned to establish an independent state of their own --(Kurdistan, which would rip off a sizeable portion of eastern Anatolia from Turkish territory) -- is one of the grim geopolitical realities of the region. In Germany, the Kurds who also speak Turkish as a second language tend to settle in the Turkish ghettos of the major cities where many of so-called "Turkish" kebab stands and restaurants are actually run by Turkish Kurds. With little love lost between these immigrant Anatolian rivals, violent confrontations between them are not rare on German streets.
Yilmaz Aslan, an outspoken intellectual with a background in journalism, has always been distressed by the hostility and internecine warfare between Turks and Kurds, both long-term guests from the same country, here in Germany. The director says he had the idea for the film fifteen years ago, and should have made it ten years ago when it was more timely, but the theme was so controversial and touchy for both groups that it took him until now to raise the money. Extremely complex (but not hard to follow) and extremely suspenseful from start to finish, "Fratricide" centres on a blood feud between two families, one Kurdish, the other Turkish, on the streets of a city like Hamburg, although it could be anywhere in Germany. It is basically seen from the Kurdish point of view through the eyes of two young buddies, Ibo, an orphan from a village in Anatolia, and Azad, the younger brother of a Kurdish pimp who is forced to stab a hideous Turkish skinhead in self-defence. The monstrous Turk might not have died from his knife
wound to the belly if his monster killer dog had not gobbled up his hot intestines on the spot. To go into all the details of this feud and the divisive ethnic politics lurking in the background would be the topic of an extended essay and a full length review.
Suffice it to say that there's lots of gore, anal revenge rape, and finally a slit throat with an excised ear for good measure -- but "Reservoir Dogs" this is not, because Yilmaz Arslan has too much intelligence to stoop to the gore-for-gore's sake level of a fad comic book director like Quentin Tarantino. The violence and brutality we see on screen in "Fratricide" is completely motivated by the chosen theme, and I must admit (with a gasp), that I applauded inadvertently when the dog devoured the bloody kishkas of the bad-ass skinhead Turk -- a scene that John Waters will certainly relish. The story ends on a sad note with vague echoes of the close of "Midnight Cowboy" when Azad, the young hero who has just exacted revenge on Turkish child sodomizer but taken a bullet to the kidneys in the ensuing chase, dies in the arms of his protégé, Ibo the rape victim, and his new Albanian girlfriend on the bus heading south to deliverance in Tirana -- but we knew he was doomed from the start in this gigantic ethnic tragedy. There is so much in this picture, including fascinating Kurdish folkloric sequences, that it is impossible to describe it concisely. Let us just say that it packs a wallop the viewer will not soon forget, and is directed, thought out, and acted out, with unerring skill, aplomb, and conviction.
Best foreign film at the next Oscars -- or Alex will be seen eating his hat out in the wings.

The final winner of the day, in a day that left me drained, was Japanese entry, "Bashing", by Masahiro Kobayashi -- category, excellent. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict once described Japan as a "shame society" (as opposed to the "guilt societies" of the West) in which losing face can be cause for suicide while causing others to lose face is an unforgivable social infraction. Causing Japan to lose face amounts to high treason ... Kobayashi's film is based on the actual story of a girl who is back home in Japan after having taken hostage in Iraq, where she had gone as a volunteer aid worker. Back in her home town she is greeted not as a victim or heroine, but as an egotist and a national disgrace for having gotten Japan involved in such a mess, and is constantly "bashed" by friends and neighbours -- fired from her job, threatened by anonymous phone calls, spurned by outraged ex-fiancé, refused service in a fast-food take-out, the lot! When
her pitifully stolid father is also fired from his factory job after thirty years of faithful service -- guilt by association with wayward daughter -- the only recourse left to him is suicide. Yuko, the rebel, is seen as responsible for his death, and, finally, realizing that she is universally despised and that things will never change in this narrow-minded Desolation Row of a northern industrial town by the sea (Tomakomai, Hokkaido), she decides to use her share of father's life insurance redemption to return to Iraq where she will again feel of some use and be appreciated a little.

The director's statement: "One could call Japanese Society provincial -- If someone steps out of line (even for a good purpose!) they'll be branded". From the desolate picture painted here one might also call the country "Kafkaesque" as no one is willing to say what's really going on, except in the most roundabout way via innuendo and oblique accusations. The film is made with great restraint and sobriety with not a single stitch of music on the sound track -- only the ever present sound of the sea in the background -- with a remarkable "Yuko" as played by newcomer Fusako Urabe, and a touching portrayal of her hapless father by Ryuzo Tanaka. "Bashing" was a competition entry at Cannes earlier this year and is a one-off piece of "neo-neo realism" that will give Japanese in particular, and general audiences everywhere, plenty to think about.

Before calling it a day, a word about the Hamburg cinemas -- The most comfortable roomy seats and best projection facilities in captivity on this continent.

Alex Deleon, Hamburg