Ole Schulz

If you are running out of money, don´t have an accreditation and losing your Berlinale tickets, which you have bought – that´s… Berlin.

Different as our mayor said: Poor, but not sexy anymore (nowadays a visitor like the Australian musician Robert F. Coleman is claiming in a big „New York Times”-article that the slovenly life at so cheap Berlin has ruined his band – too many drugs and parties. But I don´t think you can blame the city when you and your band mates got in trouble while searching for what to do in their young life’s). In those moments (before a crash) it´s good to remember under what different and often difficult circumstances the majority of people in the world are living. And there is no better place to experience this again than to watch foreign films from Berlinale´s Forum or Panorama section.

Take, for example, „Burn it up Djassa” from Ivory Coast, directed by Lonesome Solo. The raw, documentary style movie tells the story of some youth´s in Wassakara, a slum in Abidjan and focuses on three siblings: Tony, a hustler like street vendor, his sister Ange´s, who prefers to work secretly as a prostitute than continuing her job as a hairdressing trainee, and at last elder brother Mike, who has a relatively well-paid job in the police force. You follow them in their daily life and see how they are hanging around on the streets playing cards while drinking and singing.

Shaky pictures of the characters faces shot almost without light and out of the hand (by French Delphine Jaquet) make you feel seasick sometimes, but on the long run „Burn it up Djassa” develops an own rhythm. Music plays an important part in it: Percussion with bottles to call-and-response chants. All this in a special ghetto youth´ dialect from Abidjan called „Nouchi”. Sometimes a Master of Ceremony, a local hero from the Wassakara ghetto, reflects in rhythmical „Noushi”-rhymes on what´s going on in the story. And hard to believe: The film was shot in just eleven days with only € 15.000 budget – that´s just about one sixth what you pay getting executives to Berlin for promoting a Blockbuster at Berlinale (but I only can think what I could do with such a grant…).

At the sudden end of the film two people are dead. You may think it´s a sad story, but Philippe Lacôte, the producer of the film (the director Lonesome Solo couldn´t come to Berlin because of visa problems – welcome to hospitable Germany!), says it´s not - quite the contrary. He gets some applause for the answer to the question from the audience, where there is „hope” in the film: „The people are fighting for their lifes.” Philippe Lacôte is proud that they made a film about the youth at Ivory Coast, a country where no cinema industry exists. For him „Burn it up Djassa” is a mixture between neorealism and urban mythology in a popular Abidjan ghetto, a film „full of energy, hope and music”.

Afterwards I feel again more energetically, too. Riding back home on my bike through the clammy cloudy night in the absurd empty streets of Berlin´s center, I have to think about my journalist colleague Detlef Kuhlbrodt, who has written for „-taz-, die tageszeitung” about cinema and economy at Berlinale. Kuhlbrodts bank account is blocked and he has not even a bicycle anymore ´cause it´s broke. But fortunately some cigarettes are left, and he still is happy as he can see a lot of beautiful and fiery independent films at the festival.