The Jihlava Festival Thinking of the Current Crisis of Capitalism through Film

Those who are persuaded that the documentary should depict reality in a neutral way should give Jihlava a wide berth the next week. The organizers of the Jihlava festival have managed to put together an attractive collection of films commenting on the challenges and problems of the globalized world. They are activist, alarming, polemical and often very amusing.

The Twelve Billion Hoax

Several of these are based on harsh criticism of the free market ideology, the behavior of supranational corporations and world financial institutions. Such critique does not appear in our mainstream media in such striking form often. The author of these lines did not have the opportunity to watch two of the programming hits: the ironic declaration of love of the most famous American fatty with a baseball hat Michael Moore Capitalism: A Love Story and the adaptation of the bestseller by renowned journalist and activist Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine, with Michael Winterbottom (A Mighty Heart, 24 Hour Party People) tearing into the global strategies of the financiers. However, he has watched the 150-minute "presentation" by the Quebec director Richard Brouillette with a not very attractive, however telling title Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy.

By means of interviews with historians, economists and intellectual icons like Noam Chomsky or Ignacio Ramonet, the authors present a relatively non-dogmatic accusation (also giving space to the followers of an opposing world view) of the economic system which has escaped control, thus contributing to the growing differences between the rich North and the developing South. On the other hand, the media guerrilla agitprop group Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) approaches the paradoxes of globalization with wit. In their second feature length film The Yes Men Fix the World, too, they commit practical jokes in the form of sabotages to bring attention to the superiority of supranational corporations. Their method reminds of that of Sacha Baron Cohen: by means of fake websites, they hack their way to the media as press agents or invade the conferences of big companies. Their greatest notch in film is represented by breaking through to the live broadcast of BBC. Disguised as the spokesman of Dow Chemical, a company responsible for an accident in Bhópál, India twenty years ago, Bichlbaum announced an instant reimbursement of twelve billion dollars to those whose health was affected. After the mystification was revealed, a journalist asked the participants whether they worried about a possible prosecution on the side of the chemical concern. It never came.

J.R. vs Brezhnev

It is the stirring up of negative publicity that the corporation fear like hell. This was also confirmed by Robert Kenner, director of the film Food, Inc. much discussed in the United States. None of the representatives of the few big companies that have parceled out American food industry were willing to speak with the filmmaker in front of the camera. The film approaches a whole range of relatively known problems, from the contents of food to the growing number of contaminated products in supermarkets to the treatment of killed animals. Concentrated in its ninety minute form, the film does not really make one feel good.

On the other hand, gourmet associations are evoked by the title of a great Polish film Rabbit a la Berlin. The film by Polish filmmaker Bartek Konopka tells the story of various forms of freedom and bondage on the example of a colony of rabbits that have bread excessively in the zone of no man's land between West and East Berlin. The iron curtain also plays an essential role in the Estonian documentary Disco and Atomic War. Director Jaak Kilmi grew up in Tallin reached by the signal of the Finnish television. He gives a hyperbolic depiction of how series like Dallas or the erotic series about Emanuela totally undermined the effect of Soviet propaganda in the eyes of the teenagers.

Thus the imperialism of pop-culture bore fruit at least, one could say with exaggeration, when the economic and military imperialism of the west gets it from the documentarists on all fronts. Like in the unbearably irritating, adoring portrait of the godly Diego called Maradona by Kusturica, which is not about football but about the egos of two narcists and about politics. The Serbian director is striding in front of the camera almost in each scene, bootlicking Castro's bloated friend who presents his famous goal to the English net in the quarter-final of the world championship in 1986 as revenge for the Falkland war. The reason is simple: one of the chief members of NATO, Great Britain is a thorn in Kusturica's flesh since the bombing of his homeland during the Kosovo war.

Fortunately, the rest of the films from the Jihlava programme that are critical towards the politics of the West do not need to air their personal hates and peeves to the world.

26.10.2009 // Respekt - Kultura: dokument // p.55