Czech & Slovak Film Festival - Barrie Pattison dips a toe into FREIHEIT (FREEDOM, Jan Speckenbach)

As if a month of the French Film Festival weren't enough, Dendy competes with a half-hearted Czech and Slovak event - four days, eleven films. If they were cheaper and better documented I would have been tempted to get stuck into this. It's a source from which we see little.

Testing the water with Jan Speckenbach's new Freiheit/Freedom, it was odd to front up to a film made in Vienna with a German star who speaks her own language, and English, for most of the picture.

Confusingly we get severe featured Johanna Wokalek (Gudrun Ensslin in Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) motionless in an art gallery before a bus trip filmed so that the camera on the reflective side of the vehicle creates an almost abstract image converging with the scenery passing. Our heroine has slept past her stop and is still in the bus when bike hoons lure away the driver and empty the takings. 

An Australian hitch hiker she planned on hooking up with passes her in the street next day without recognition. It’s not long before she’s bare assed (nice) in the sack with pick-ups and hocking her no receipt jewellery to get by. About this time in Berlin bearded public defender Hans-Jochen Wagner is trying to get through to his German kid client whose attack put a black refugee into a coma. The boy’s parents can’t see that he did anything wrong. Wagner offers to bribe one of his co-workers to take over the case. 

After his teenage daughter has found him in the sack with one of mummy’s friends, he’s having single parent problems with the girl who he catches smoking (what?) in the family home. His solution of going on a reality TV program to ask for information on his missing wife reveals that it’s Wokalek.

It turns out, through conversations with her new sex worker friends (their explicit show is seen), she left home for a lover and that didn’t work out. She settles into being a hotel maid, getting a buzz out of having to dress a bed that Vladimir Putin once slept in but a dinner with aggro black visitor Ricky Watson triggers a nervous attack and we get a flash back to her earlier home life with then clean shaven Wagner suggesting why she’s off seeking freiheit.

There’s half a dozen story leads set up but none are worked out during the piece’s hundred minutes. It’s not exactly thrilling. Performances and diffused ‘Scope film making are good and the unfamiliar Berlin, Vienna and Bratislava settings are occasionally attention getting but the overall inconclusiveness contributes to a feeling of time wasted.

The diffusion may be in the transfer incidentally. All the trailers in the festival reel looked like this.