FILM REVIEW: Francesco und der Papst (2011)

On Easter Monday I said goodbye to my Berlin ASF friends and was left to my own devices. Wandering by Rosenheimer Platz, I spotted a new film title in one of Munich's many independent cinemas - even though you rarely get a film ticket for less than €6.50, there's a great range of films to see. Francesco und der Papst (Francesco and the Pope) looked, from the posters, like a glorified "Let's look around the Vatican" documentary turned into a feature film, and in some ways it turned out as such. The flyer was full of quotes from German Bishops, one from Peter Seewald, whose interview with the Pope last year caused controversy, and the film seemed to be supported by the Vatican. From what I gathered it was a film about a choir boy who meets the Pope, so with the buzz of Easter still about me I decided to give it a go.

In one sense, I was right. To most people it will look like an attempt to show a few bits of private footage of the Pope with his faithful secretary Msgr "Gorgeous" Georg Gänswein. Theres a shot of him watching what appears to be an HDTV demo screensaver, then eating with a Dominican, walking through the Vatican Gardens with a body warmer and slippers among other clips of the Pope's official visits, yet this isn't enough to make a film. This is where the story of Francesco comes in.

Francesco is a boy chorister with the Sistine Chapel Choir. He loves to sing, and has a profound grasp of the responsibility he has as a member of the choir that sings for papal liturgies. His home life can be as stressful as his life at the Choir's school; his brothers subject him to the usual rough play, he has little time for homework and, hardest of all, he lives in a single parent family. His father arrives at the end, but it is clear this is a broken home and his mother finds it hard to cope.

We are treated to his own observations on the Vatican and its seemingly timeless world, and his childlike views are a real treat, as well as being extremely timely. For example, we see the opening of the Synod of African Bishops with an African choir and band, to which Francesco says, "I wish they were here every week; then at least we would have more fun at Mass!". Given the fact that this film must have been shown to (and approved by) the Holy Father at some point means this irreverent take on the modern church is actually far more daring than you might think a Vatican film possible.

Finally Francesco's moment comes and he is asked to sing for the Pope. The moment comes, he sings beautifully and clearly and the two finally meet, Francesco and Benedict in a moment that seems to last an age. The final note is sung, Benedict raises a warm smile and is the first to clap the boy's performance and gets up to greet him.

In any other film it would be horrible that I gave away the last moments then, but that's not what this film is about. Besides, it's all in the trailer below. It is, similar I suppose to Into Great Silence, a meditative film, but about the Church in the world rather than the microcosm of the monastery. You watch it knowing that all will turn out OK, but you see how these two lives affect each other, not only on Francesco's side but on Pope Benedict's responsibility as head of a changing Church. The plot begins to lose its importance as you are gripped by this childlike look at a Church structure that has to many people lost its innocence. That, and how much the Pope smiles. He smiles a lot.

In typical Vatican style (Yesterday's technology, tomorrow!), this excellent film is only on limited release in Germany, and it doesn't look like there's been much press coverage about it at all beyond the usual diocesan newspapers. What a shame. If you do have the chance to see it, go, if only to see something completely different.

Easter, or "How to combine the Regina Coeli and 'Sweet Transvestite' in the same blog post"

First of all, I hope you all had a good Easter. Mine was spent in the company of some ASF volunteers currently working in Berlin based projects, who had decided to use the four day weekend to break out of their Berlin bubble!

I attended the Triduum, the three part Easter liturgy which begins on Thursday evening and concludes with the Saturday night/Sunday morning Easter Vigil Mass, in two locations for the first time. On Good Friday I attended the Good Friday service at the Carmelite Convent on the KZ Dachau Memorial Site grounds. I had been looking forward to this for a while (if such a thing is possible!) as I felt there was something quite difficult about commemorating, even celebrating the Passion of Christ in a Concentration Camp Memorial Site. In a place where senseless violence irrevocably altered the lives of over two hundred thousand people, even more if you include their families, the commemoration of what was (to Christians) a necessary act of violence for salvation took place is quite hard to take.

However the liturgy was led superbly by Pastoral Chaplain Mr. Ludwig Schmidinger and Fr. Klaus Spiegel, O.S.B. It was kept simple, using only a few chants sung by the Carmelite nuns, and did not shy away from the contemporary context in which they celebrated the liturgy.

On Saturday I attended the Vigil Mass in the Jesuit run Michaelskirche, where I attend Sunday Mass more regularly than anywhere else. It is the closest thing I have to a parish here. At 8.50pm, ten minutes before the start, the place was packed with people, many bringing with them stools and baskets of food to be blessed. Clocking in at 2 hours and 35 minutes, it was an experience I will likely never forget, especially celebrating the liturgy in another language and culture. Afterwards my Polish friend and I were on a religious high. She sang a traditional ending hymn in Polish, and I asked what it was. She replied "Himmelskoenigin", or "Queen of Heaven" in English. In response I sang the Latin Regina Coeli, the traditional closing Marian antiphon for Carmelites during Eastertide. If you're interested, it goes like so:

Regina caeli, laetare, alleluia:
Quia quem meruisti portare. alleluia,
Resurrexit, sicut dixit, alleluia,
Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia.

(Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia.
For He whom you did merit to bear, alleluia.
Has risen, as He said, alleluia.
Pray for us to God, alleluia.)

It must be said nobody even batted an eyelid. The streets were full of people holding half burnt-out candles and blessed baskets of bread for the Easter feast the next day, so our actions were clearly the norm. Such is life in Munich!

We joined our group in a Thai restaurant just round the back of Odeonsplatz, where I had discovered there is a thriving Karaoke community. We went in to find half the clientele looking at us, and one of the singers in the middle of a Thai pop song. My friend had been there an hour and still not had a single request played, though the place began to empty by 1am as the time for the last S-Bahn drew ever nearer. The group considered their position, and decided that they would commit to the night. What followed was the best Easter ever.

The set list was as follows: Bohemian Rhapsody, Flashdance, Rocket Man (in the style of William Shatner), Sweet Transvestite, Time Warp, I Wanna Dance With Somebody and to conclude, I Had The Time of My Life. It really was a glorious evening, and though many of our group were not convinced it was worth getting back to Dachau at 6.20am for, I am very grateful to them for giving me the chance to do so. We even got to see the sunrise on Easter morning from Petershausen station, as we waited for the first S-Bahn of the day. I have some wonderful friends, I really do...

Europe’s Last Dictatorship

On Monday evening, the BBC News Website announced that there had been an explosion in the capital of Belarus, Minsk, on the Metro at Oktyabrskaya Station. As the week progressed, we found out that twelve people were killed, hundreds injured and that it was a terrorist attack. President Alexander Lukashenko promised to leave 'no stone unturned' in finding the terrorists who carried the attack out. Two days later, the KGB (Yes, they still exist) arrested two men, an electrician and a lathe operator, who 'admitted' to the bombing eight hours later. They also admitted to responsibility for a bombing in Minsk in 2008, as well as a previous attack in the eastern Belarusian town of Vitebsk in 2005. There was a day of mourning on Wednesday. Case closed.

You most likely didn't read this story, as it was at first one of the minor stories on the page. Then it was the third most important story in the 'Europe' sub-category. Now it's hidden among the other stories in the Europe category, the graveyard slot on the website. I understand that events in Libya and Syria fit the popular news narrative of the 'Arab Spring' right now, but still this is surely highly offensive to those from Belarus, whose suffering goes unnoticed in much of the world’s media.

Admittedly, I wouldn't have noticed it if it wasn't for the fact I live with a Belarusian. The project likes to have English and Russian mother-tongue volunteers, and we have worked together in the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site for almost eight months now. Her view of history is very different to mine. A third of the population of Belarus, which lies between Poland and Russia, was wiped out during World War II, and this war on the Eastern Front from 1941-1945 is still known by the title 'The Great Patriotic War'. She concerns herself not only with this history, but the history of what we call 'the former East', all that lies beyond Germany.

On Monday night she returned home from work, where she had been helping co-ordinate the visit of a number of survivors from Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine for the Liberation Day memorial ceremonies. I asked her how she was, and whether she had seen the news. She said she was fine, and no, what was up? I picked up my laptop and showed her the screen, the BBC News report on the explosion in Minsk. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her. What followed were an evening's nervous Skype chats and phone calls to check that friends and family were not affected. Minsk is her home. Oktyabrskaya Station is one of the most central, where the two lines cross over (like Termini in Rome), and thousands of people must pass through during the rush hour every day.

However unlike the news, her mind saw the bombing in perspective.

On December 19th 2010 President Lukashenko was re-elected in a landslide victory, in a election that regulators say had ‘serious irregularities’. There were a number of opposition candidates, seven of whom are now in prison along with over six hundred protestors. Many of them are still waiting to be charged. President since 1994, some support Lukashenko for giving the country stability. Others echo Condaleeza Rice's sentiments and have named him 'Europe's last dictator'.

Brings back memories doesn't it!

This is the story we know in the West so far. What hasn't been reported are the empty shelves in the shops. The new laws that make it impossible for citizens to change their Belarusian Roubles for Dollars, and harder for overseas money transactions to take place. The ways in which President Lukashenko is, bit by bit, buckling down for a war of attrition against the West, in which it will be the people of Belarus who will suffer the most. Some even wonder whether the terrorist attack on Monday wasn't a little...convenient for the President. Lukashenko has good diplomatic relations with Libya and Cub,a among other similarly authoritarian regimes. As one citizen pointed out, "Who could have carried this out? We are friends with all the regimes that fund the terrorists!"

I cannot claim to know if this is more than suspicion, however it is very challenging to me as a ‘Westerner’ to know that we have already forgotten this story. It might be that Belarus does not fit our idea of how Europe looks, especially given how much money the EU has pumped into programmes on ‘Tolerance’ and ‘Solidarity’ in the past twenty years since the end of the Cold War. Equally it might be that we have forgotten a European neighbour at the expense of the 'Arab Spring' and other nations where the poverty and oppression is admittedly more obvious. I can't see many Beard-and-Sandals PEACE activists leaving the Middle East for a while and making their way to Belarus any time soon, or any Bring-and-Buy sales sending proceeds their way. The word 'Solidarity with the poor' has come to envision helping somewhere far off and exotic, where we can send our money and our middle class Gap Yah students to rebuild a school and take endless photos of gorgeous smiling kids. No Gap Yah student wants to go to Belarus, where it’s both foreign and disconcertingly familiar.

I'm not painting myself any better; I only know more about the situation because I have friends affected. I am as bad as the rest when it comes to political apathy. Yet what is going on is not unconnected to my work here in Dachau. My friend has pointed out how she cannot stop linking the arrest of people in Belarus with the Nazi policy of 'protective custody', a euphemism for those interred in Dachau. This is no longer just about history; for her, and in turn for me as her friend, it is painful reality. Next time you see Libya, Syria, Egypt or any other of the 'Arab Spring' nations on the news, remember Belarus as well. Just because their government isn't weak enough to topple with a few protests and well placed air raids doesn't mean their situation isn't newsworthy. If anything, they are our neighbours and if we truly believe in European solidarity, they deserve more than just the support of EU diplomats.

The sun is shining...

...and temperatures are rarely below 20 degrees at the moment, which means I am not spending as much time indoors as I was. This coupled with a large number of tours and the final preparations for the exhibition's shipment to the United States has meant little time for blogging.

That and I've just been lazy. I'm sure there are thousands of internet URLs out there with blogs that have fizzled out after a few posts, and thousands more with 'sorry for the lack of posting' apologies like this one. That's an interesting point actually; how do you end a blog? I'm not planning on ending this one until September when my project ends and I start a new challenge (more on that in due course), but how does one end it? Goodbye? End of transmission?

*****

Either way, I'll quickly tell you about one of my procrastination tools. I have been watching 'Long Way Down' on YouTube, the series in which Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman travel through Africa on their way from John O'Groats to Cape Town and gawp at tribes in post colonial wonder. It's nice escapist TV, the kind of thing you get on the DAVE channel in the UK (motto: "Home of witty banter") designed especially for 'blokes'. Anyway, alongside their ride they also visit a number of UNICEF projects, which often make for the most moving parts of the journey.

Of interest to me was their stop-off in Kigali, Rwanda, where they had to deal with the consequences of Genocide. The Genocide in Rwanda saw the Hutu majority massacre the Tutsi ethnic minority, who had been most associated with previous colonial governments. It is a very different genocide from the one I work with, for although both the Nazi Holocausts and the Rwandan genocide involved the systematic persecution of a minority, they are shocking in different ways. The Nazi Holocaust shocks us because of its cold blooded calculation, the way in which murder had a price, the cheapest and most efficient ways of exterminating people the better. The Rwandan Genocide shocks us, and I think more so in the west, because of the personal nature of the massacre. People were chopped to pieces with machetes and bludgeoned to death with hammers. This was incredibly warm blooded brutality, entirely irrational and charged with emotion.

Charley and Ewan visit a church in which five thousand people were murdered. Their bones are laid inside, along with their bloody clothes, left hanging from the ceiling. Ewan asks the girl who takes them around the question that is on everybody's mind as they watch, "So are you a Hutu or a Tutsi?"

"Back then I was Tutsi; now I am a Rwandan."