December 2011. Once again the feeling of being trapped in a city as stiff as a dirty puddle in a winter prairie night. We get venomously resentful, curse, snarl, spit and humiliate it with cruelty whenever the boredom creeps in, so we need to find stuff to do fast. The EU consulates, as glad to exhibit their cultural standing as ever, organize every year a free 'film festival'. Das Pill is too cool to get there way in advance - only provincials are that eager and she is not to be mistaken for a local - but we do try and make it 30 minutes early. We jump out of the tram that moves on Queen West with the speed of a senile, pregnant caterpillar and start walking fast towards the massive queue outside the cinema alongside other punters, some of which abandon all pretence at dignified artiness and start running for a better position. There are in fact not one but two queues, one to get the free ticket handed in by competently firm volunteers (ours), the other one to get into the cinema once you've got it, policed by the same. There must be around 400 people waiting in the drizzle. Why? Are they terrified of boredom as well? Is it the collective neurosis generated by placing the signifiers 'Europe' and 'for free' side by side? When in the world did they get here, two hours in advance?
A Spanish-accented man and a sturdy Mitteleuropean mittel-aged lady exchange opinions behind us, what chances we still have of getting in and how poorly organized the event is, in half-resigned half-bitter tones. After the 'ticketed' queue is all in ours starts moving sequentially, like a clay snake being chopped in small pieces in stop-motion animation. The conversation stops, replaced by feverish exclamations 'oh my!', 'will we...?', 'almost there...'. And then it's over: just in front of us, admission stops. And then it starts again: inexplicably, we are waved in. 'Oh no, oh no!' the sturdy lady laments, afraid she will be the first one refused entrance. But no, she makes it and we all start running around for seats - there are two in the front row, in a corner, ridiculously unsuited for watching a screen. I am ready to leave when the Pill darts out of her chair, the thrill of the hunt in the eyes; a few moments later she is back, waving me with urgency while trying not to be too obvious in case others realize there is bounty to be had, like the von Trapp family trying to make it illegally into the last train to Switzerland under the suspicious gaze of German soldiers (in fact the adorable über-patriarchal militaristic family eloped by car). I rush upwards behind her - two reserved seats have been freed, last row, left of centre... Some consulate employee got diarrhoea? Well, we thank fate for it.
So, what have we been fighting for here? "Almanya: Welcome to Germany" it's called and it's supposed to be about the condition of the German-Turks. The German cultural attaché - another sturdy lady and true in the most minute detail to the cliché of the German cultural attaché - gives a staccato-accented speech. In a condescendingly agreeable tone she reminds us that it was the Goethe Institut that started this whole festival thing, that she met the two young Turkish German sisters that wrote and directed the film at the Berlin festival and how really happy and excited they were to have been selected and stutters three times before managing to utter a malformed version of the director's name, grinning with complicity at the audience ("he, he, you know how it is with these people's names..."). She also mentions the film is a comedy which makes me and the Pill exchange panicked glances - contemporary Euro-immigrant comedies are a recipe for sentimental, ersatz-intellectual disaster. We are right, the film is naive, clumsy, soppy, sloppy, soggy and Orientalist, a misguided attempt at analyzing the experience of immigration that hides under the carpet everything problematic and ends up kissing gratefully the hand of the German government for allowing these archaic but good-hearted paupers into their civilized world. The farcical stabs at Euro-racism are too simplistic and heavy-handed to be mordant - half-baked reversals of the colonial discourse, where Turkish people exchange stereotypes about Germany: "they eat people there, because they eat Jesus at every mass"; "the Germans are very dirty"; "they only eat potatoes", etc. Such reversals do not work for the simple reason that the colonial relationship is not symmetrical: the colonized desires to become like the colonizer, not the other way around. But the Toronto public laughs hysterically anyway, grinding its own immigrant axe. The film is generously peppered with - maybe unconscious? - aversion towards primitive, frightening Turkey, wholehearted glorification of patriarchal familial arrangements, rejection of abortion on religious grounds and a lachrymose ending where the contribution of the immigrants to the German nation is recognized by a dignified, benevolent Angela Merkel, yes, the very same right-winger who recently affirmed officially - and quite lucidly, I might add - that "Multiculturalism has failed in Germany". In short: cannon-fodder for the Western propaganda machine. Little wonder Germany selected this film to be shown to Canadian audiences in a year of global capitalist crisis, anti-capitalist wriggling and race riots. It grins: "All in all we are still the greatest! Look at these immigrants, how much they want to be like us, how desperate they are to come here, so humble, so grateful".
Once the film is over, the consulate employees of the richest country in Europe line up in the lobby holding little coloured plastic buckets from Dollarama, while one lady, a higher-rank bureaucrat one presumes, enthusiastically shouts in the usual staccato: "Any contribution greatly appreciated, thank you!" It wraps up the evening quite nicely.
P.S. - In the meantime I have found out that "Almanya" has won the public's vote as the best film of the 'festival'. The "self-debasing immigrant neurosis" diagnostic is confirmed.
La Mordue
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