FOREST REBELS
My first festival film in the pandemic was a film about filming in the pandemic. If this sounds over self-referential, blame ‘Forest Rebels’l. The plot is very much in the Covid-world: a young Berlin theatre company comes to a grandiose state theatre in Brandenburg to rehearse for a play about the history of the forests in Germany and how this is tied to culture and identity. In well-trodden mockumentary fashion, a film team is onsite to capture the rehearsals. Sadly for the cast and production team, the impact of the pandemic causes the whole shindig to lockdown in the building to complete the play. With the exception of a brief excursion to local woods (where an earnest lecture on sylvan ornithology turns into a naked group romp in the copse), the bulk of the action takes place on the stage and auditorium of the august theatre. The cast of theatre-trained actors are joined by Ari, an unwelcome interloper from the silver screen. Her celeb status causes all manner of inner tensions though one chap insists on demanding multiple autographs. The ever-present threat of the deadly virus is, of course, enough to raise the tension bar not least with one of the more nervous performers who punctuates her rehearsal lines with squirts of anti-bacterial aerosol.
The troupe has come together to rehearse and devise a bewilderingly avant garde piece that is frankly too daft and wackily way out to describe. Picture a giant one-eyed Micky Mouse (capitalism?) and a chorus line of dancing garden gnomes in Nazi-style uniform. The sheer banality of the theatre piece is of course part of the film’s core. Though there was a touch too much of this performance weirdness, the best bits of the movie were the personal talks to camera and the rising animosities within the creative group. There was also a very funny set of cutaways to the two stolid canteen workers who pricked the pretentious bubble of the play in progress with a litany of the week’s menus including pig’s liver and mash.
The stylised Spinal Tap format brought nothing new to the mock documentary format –the furtive backstage kisses and po-faced to camera confessions. There were cultural elements that were lost in translation – an extended metaphor about Germanic tribes and the roots of Nazi race theory – but at best, this was a warm-hearted, good-humoured, pandemical panorama of life in Europe at the height of our present fears. Setting aside the rather repetitive (if visually boisterous) depictions of theatrical silliness, there were many nuggets of laugh-out loud hilarity and an array of satisfying performances not least from both the fictional theatre director played by real-life film director Gordon Kammerer.. It’s that self referential thing again.
The Cambridge Film Festival runs live until the 25th November and in streaming format until 5th December
https://www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk/
s
