Unpacking inaccurate notions of Europe

When South Africans talk about Europe, we tend to do so in unhelpfully sweeping terms.

Some of us denigrate it as the colonising continent, the source of all the world’s woes and those of Africa in particular; this is not an entirely inaccurate generalisation, but it needs some finessing.

Others idealise it as a place where everything works, where life is easy in culturally and linguistically homogeneous nation states that have decided to club together for the sake of economic security. This, too, is patently inadequate.

I love the European Film Festival in SA for many reasons, but perhaps chief among them is that the programme each year presents an opportunity to unpick these false assumptions and to complicate the idea of Europe in our collective imagination. It does this subtly, in films of astonishing richness and variety that tell the stories of individuals and communities rather than countries, even as they connect Europe’s vexed history to the present moment.

There are 18 films being screened (or, rather, streamed) this year, the eighth edition of the festival. They can all be watched online for free within

/Madonnen Film

SA, although a limited number of bookings are available and three of the films have already been sold out.

I started with My Father is an Airplane, a Dutch drama starring Elise Schaap as Eva: a woman whose 40th birthday coincides with a series of crises that disrupt the malaise into which she has fallen — watching her life as if from the outside rather than being able to participate fully in it. The death of Eva’s mother reintroduces the mystery of her father’s disappearance 30 years ago; as she seeks to understand why he was institutionalised, she must reckon with her past and unearth its trauma.

This narrative resonates with the festival’s 2021 theme, “Healing Journeys”, and can be placed in relation to other films that explore parent-child dynamics in very different contexts: from Parents vs Influencers (Italy), a comedic take on the anxieties faced by anyone raising a child in the age of smartphones, to Save Sandra (Belgium), in which a mother and father fight for their daughter’s right to be treated for a rare medical condition.

Life-threatening illness is also the premise and the dramatic engine in My Little Sister (Switzerland), Risks and Side Effects (Austria) and The Bright Side (Ireland), each of which tells a quirky but poignant tale about how a direct confrontation with mortality exposes the fault lines that can otherwise remain suppressed or unacknowledged in families and friendships.

In Charlatan (Czech

Republic) and Never Gonna Snow Again (Poland), we are teased with a character’s apparent supernatural ability to heal others. In Run Uje Run (Spring Uje Spring, Sweden), Rosa’s Wedding (Spain) and Stop Zemlia (Ukraine), it is more a case of “patient, heal thyself”.

Then there is the figure of the educator as healer. In the German documentary Mr Bachmann and his Class ,a committed and compassionate teacher — the opposite of the drunken teachers in Oscarwinning Danish film Another Round — helps immigrant children who have come to a nondescript industrial town gain a sense of belonging.

Like After Love (UK) and Robust (France), the story of Mr Bachmann and his pupils troubles the reductive notions of “home” and “origin” that skew so much of the discourse around immigration. “Where do you come from?” can be both an empathetic and an aggressive question.

Like Eva in My Father is an Airplane, questioning her own “origin story”, Europe itself —

rather than those who are its more recent arrivants — benefits from a difficult but urgent and continuing process of critical reflection. In this year’s festival, three films take us back to the often repressed traumas of 20th century Europe. In The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

(Portugal), the spectre of midcentury fascism is made more explicit than in José Saramago’s novel; in The Jump

(Lithuania), we are immersed in the climate of fear and tension that characterised the Cold War; and in Quo Vadis, Aida? which bravely engages with the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian war, we are reminded that Europe has witnessed genocide in living memory.

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