REVIEWS
Polluting Paradise Reviewed by Dan Fainaru
This is a labour of love, if a portrait of an ecological disaster can be called that. Fatih Akin may be based in Hamburg but his grandfather lived on the Turk- ish shores of the Black Sea in a village called Cam- burnu, and when Akin heard the natural splendour of the place was about to be destroyed by a waste landfill being built next door, he decided to rise to the challenge by making a documentary about it. Originally he believed his threat to do so would
block the initiative, but that hope soon disinte- grated. Today, after going back and forth to the vil- lage countless times, the foretold catastrophe has arrived — though the dump is supposedly to be closed down in two or three years (no-one seems to believe it). All that Akin’s documentary, shot over a period of five years, actually manages to do is to serve as yet another testimony to mankind’s sys- tematic folly of self-destruction. As so often happens with a labour of love, the
author, being personally and emotionally involved, tends to lose sight of the goal and is insufficiently ruthless when putting together his material. A tighter cut, focusing more on the issues at hand and a little less on local colour, would deliver a more meaningful punch, possibly shaking some officials out of their complacency. Given Akin’s considerable personal reputation, the film is bound to have a solid festival career and
SPECIALSCREENING
Ger. 2012. 98mins Director/screenplay Fatih Akin Production company Corazon International GmbH Producers Fatih Akin, Klaus Maeck, Alberto Fanni, Flaminio Zadra, Paolo Colombo InternationalSales The Match Factory,
www.the-
match-factory.com Cinematography Bünyamin Seyrekbasan, Hervé Dieu Editor Andrew Bird Music Alexander Hacke
being dumped into the abandoned open-air copper mine, it does seem like Hell is engulfing Paradise. Not to mention, of course, political corruption and shortsightedness to boot. The problem of city dumps is not restricted to
Turkey but in this particular case every health and environmental pledge made to the locals was bro- ken, and every attempt to fix one mishap generated an even bigger one, with the damage reaching monumental proportions. Also, according to Turk- ish law, court orders cannot postpone work on a government project such as this. By the time a ver- dict is reached, seven years or more later, even if it is favourable to the plaintiff — which was not the case here — the damage is already done. A stubborn mayor who refuses to give up and
continues protesting against government policy; outspoken villagers and eloquent womenfolk; a local photographer (Bunyamin Seyrekbasan) trained by Akin and his team to take the pulse of the place in his absence; embarrassed engineers who fall back on excuses they cannot sustain and black-tie politicians whose smiles are as fake as their promises, are the stars of Akin’s picture. Sadly, the real decision-makers refused to talk,
fit into the classic ecological niche, before moving to its natural destination, TV (two German broad- casters, WDR and NDR commissioned the film). Shot mostly in Camburnu and its surrounding
hills, the first images provide all the necessary legitimacy to the film’s title. The area indeed looks a paradise but by the end of the film, after witness- ing hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage
and even if the villagers look adequately angry and despondent the ultimate feeling is that deep down, all of them, including the film-makers, are part of a reality show that will have no impact on the course of the events. The best case is made by the images themselves: the mammoth garbage truck disgorg- ing its malodorous load is more convincing than any spoken argument.
n 38 Screen International at Cannes May 19, 2012
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