Film reviews: Buladó takes viewers into the mystical countryside of Curaçao at 2021 R2R Fest
Elsewhere, animated Fritzi: A revolutionary tale tells the story of the wall coming down between East and West Germany from kids’ point of view
Reel 2 Real Film Festival streams Buladó and Fritzi: A Revolutionary Tale until April 23.
WHEN WAS THE last time you saw a film from Curaçao?
If the answer is precisely never, Reel 2 Real International Film Festival for Youth’s haunting and poetic new Buladó will be a bit of a revelation. So will the fact that it’s performed not just in Dutch, but the Papiamento creole spoken by descendants of its first slaves.
Still, the Netherlands Oscar entry’s strengths go beyond the unique island setting and its culture.
Eché Janga’s meditative second film has a striking visual assurance, with a story told as much through imagery as its sparse dialogue.
It follows a refreshingly nontraditional heroine, the unsmiling, tough, and stubborn 11-year-old girl Kenza (Tiara Richards), who gets in trouble at school and doesn’t seem to have friends. She struggles with her widower father Ouira (Everon Jackson Hooi), a local policeman who wants her to follow the rules, and finds herself drawn into the spiritual world of her grandfather, Weljo (Felix de Rooy), who still practises the rites passed down from the island’s slave ancestors.
What’s key is that her father dismisses any suggestion she’s acting out because she misses her mother; how can you miss someone you never knew? But her grandfather knows she needs to connect with the spirit of her mother to move on.
Janga’s camera takes us into the junkyard where the family lives, set amid the low scrub and dusty island earth. It also ventures behind the doors of their modest home—with its pink-walled bedroom, turquoise living room, and bright gauzy curtains fluttering in the island’s every-blowing breeze. These are intimate looks at a world we’d never otherwise see, a side to the Dutch Caribbean that shows the reality beyond luxe seaside resorts.
Weljo builds an “ancestor tree” out of rusty exhaust pipes and other metal junk from the yard, and as its crooked arms reach out to the vast Caribbean sky, it becomes a wildly visual metaphor for building connections with our forebearers. Janga, a Dutch director who was inspired by his own Curaçao roots, works in judicious moments of magic realism.
Buladó ends up being surprisingly moving, touching on loss, but also aging, and the need to maintain connections with our cultural and familial roots. It’s a different kind of “family” film that would appeal to older kids who can handle quieter, more contemplative subject matter.
Elsewhere at this year’s fest, Fritzi: A Revolutionary Tale tells a story from a different time, on a different continent. Set in 1989 Leipzig, the animated film follows Fritzi, a young girl whose summer fun is interrupted when her best friend Sophie is whisked away “on vacation” to Hungary. Fritzi will take care of her pal’s dog Sputnik, but when the school year begins, and Sophie still hasn’t returned, it becomes apparent that her family has resettled in West Germany and is now cut off by the Berlin Wall.
Fritzi: A Revolutionary Tale tells the story of a girl and her friend’s dog in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic.
The film tackles surprisingly complex subject matter, despite the quaintly gentle tone, and the naive and upbeat demeanour of its cartoon characters—set as they are against rich and painterly scenery in historic German towns. Kids around nine to 11 may enjoy the film best—and covet Fritzi and her friend’s treehouse, decorated with glowing patio lights and easily reached from a plank from a heritage-apartment window.
On one level Fritzi is a stealth history lesson, told from a child’s eye view, of the waning days of the German Democratic Republic; it even touches on the fears and propaganda that affected day-to-day life, whether it’s Fritzi’s parents warning her to stay out of the eye of the Stasi or the comically strict schoolteacher who spouts socialist jargon. But it’s careful to show resilience, too: there were happy, loving families and kids going about their lives east of Checkpoint Charlie, as much as west.
At times the references are a bit geo-specific, as is the German pop. (Although I did love the era-perfect mullet and tinted glasses on the school bully.) But what Fritzi is perhaps best at showing is how a nonviolent protest can cause massive social and political change, and that even small acts of bravery, by people of all ages, can make a difference. As for the wall that came tumbling down three decades ago? It's hard not to think of a certain other wall, under construction for the last four years down south.
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