Film festival in Graz
Diagonale opening with celebrities and primary school pupils
The Diagonale opened on Thursday evening in the Helmut-List-Halle in Graz with an enchanting and positive documentary, an award ceremony and a keynote speech by the new directors Claudia Slanar and Dominik Kamalzadeh.
You can see and feel in the city that Graz is currently hosting the Diagonale. Everything is a bit more colorful and friendly. This impression is also reinforced by the festival's opening film: Ruth Beckermann's enchanting documentary "Favorites". For this film, the filmmaker spent three years following teacher Ilkay Idiskut and her primary school class in Vienna's Favoriten district, where none of the children speak German as their mother tongue.
It is incredibly touching to be there when this dedicated teacher forms her colourful group into a community, when problems of all kinds are discussed, when the boys realize that girls have the same rights and girls realize that they have the same opportunities.
A calm contribution to the hysterical debate
Almost incidentally, the film makes it clear that the problems of so-called "hotspot schools" are not due to the children, but to a school system that cuts corners in the wrong places. And that in times in which there is a desperate search for a guiding culture, the very concept of culture can hardly be defined - incidentally one of the many great scenes in this documentary.
Big and small tragedies are just as much a part of the timetable in this class as the joy of good grades, dancing together and dreaming of a good future. With this documentary, in which she does not conceal any of the many problems, Beckermann succeeds in making an unagitated and therefore all the more powerful contribution to the often hysterical debate on integration, a positive outlook not only on the future of these children. And a movie well worth seeing.
Acting award for Miko
There was a festive atmosphere and a lot of emotion even before the film screening in the List Hall: for example, when Lukas Miko was awarded the Grand Acting Prize - this time presented by Wiener Times - and the two jury members Goran Rebić and Zeynep Buyraç gave a wonderful laudatory speech.
The evening was hosted by Hilde Dalik, and in this election year there was a particularly large number of political celebrities in the audience, led by State Secretary for the Arts Andrea Mayer and Governor Christopher Drexler. It was great that many filmmakers, from the two former directors Peter Schernhuber and Sebastian Höglinger to Michael Ostrowski, Philipp Hochmair, Pia Hierzegger and Margarethe Tiesel to Dieter Pochlatko, Ulrich Seidl, Lisl Ponger and, of course, Ruth Beckermann, provided a strong counterweight.
Opening speech by two cinema lovers
The extent to which the opening film reflects our times can also be seen in the opening speech by the two directors Claudia Slanar and Dominik Kamalzadeh, who refer to it time and again. In addition, they build a bridge from "The Sound of Music" to the new graphic self-image of the Diagonale.
Slanar and Kamalzadeh see the cinema as a place of collective experience. "The cinema is a place where time can be taken for this," the two agree, but also demand active participation from the visitor: "Not by sitting in the movie theater as passive consumers, standing still, as theory once postulated. But by consciously deciding to watch the movie in the cinema and to engage in the activity of present listening and watching, which can lead to a new beginning in thinking."
Cinema is a medium that allows you to leave your comfort zone.
Claudia Slanar und Dominik Kamalzadeh
"The Diagonale must include as many voices as possible - and in this respect also has growth potential and a need for action," it continues. In the coming days, many of these voices can be experienced in the cinemas. In any case, the two directors wish: "exhilarating discoveries and unexpected encounters".
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