02/09/2006

Selected for the Toronto Film Festival as well, Khadak [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Jessica Woodworth
interview: Jessica Woodworth
film profile], by Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens has just had its world premiere in Venice Days. The Belgian film is competing for the festival's Luigi de Laurentiis prize for debut feature. As recent films have stressed, Mongolia’s destiny is often associated with that of its animals. In Khadak, an invented epidemic infects all cattle, allowing mining companies to sever herders from their traditions and relocate them to mining towns.

All that remains from the past the grandfather describes is its ghost, interiorised by the young main character Bagi through his gift – as if, as the shamanic healing scene reveals, the steppe were now "within" – as well as by the film itself, which is suffused with a fairy tale-like atmosphere from the very start, when the mother's voice says "there was a time" – a sinless time when everybody had apples.

Khadak takes us through the looking-glass, for the ethereal universe in which the shaman evolves seems to be the only escape from this unnatural, modern world where everything and everyone has to be "redressed" – thus, Bagi is taken from institution to institution, from a quarry to prison, via hospital.

Something is wrong, one character shouts repeatedly, hope is gone ('Now has no meaning here') and all that is left to yearn for is death, or epiphany, and that is why Bagi finally resigns completely to his destiny and undergoes, through death, a transsubstantiation that allows him to come back as hope itself.

Thus, as sad as this beautiful film may seem, not only the mischievous grandfather's humour but also the very poetry of the aesthetic treatment of the plot convey the impression that everything is indeed illuminated. And when the film ends, the memory of the outstanding photography continues to haunts us, from the image of the dead horse in the manger to Bagi crying on a heap of coal that represents the rubble of a world now extinct, to the Canaletto-like portraits vivants and the many talismanic Mongolian blue scarves ('khadak') dancing in the wind.

Khadak was produced by Belgium’s Bo Films, the Centre du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel de la Communauté française de Belgique, the Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds (VAF), in co-production with Ma.Ja.De Filmproduktions-GmbH Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg MBB, Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung MDM (Germany), Lemming Film, and Nederlands Fonds voor de Film NFF (the Netherlands).

International sales are being handled by Germany"s Telepool

(Translated from French)