Northern Outskirts (Nordrand) by Barbara Albert (Austria, Germany, Switzerland, 1999) has won the 4th European John Templeton Film Award. The award ceremony took place on 11 February 2001 during the Berlinale at the Matthäuskirche on the Kulturforum as part of a church service. The prize is worth CHF 7,000 and is funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The members of the jury for the prize were Robin Gurney, Hans Hodel and Karsten Visarius.
Eulogy
The search for lasting relationships in spite of all the humiliations endured, and the longing to find a human place of safety, out of reach of cultural and political barriers, are the central themes of the film which has been chosen to receive the Templeton European Film prize for the year 2000.
”Northern Outskirts” tells the story of two young women in Vienna, who have lost track of one another after leaving school and meet again by chance in an abortion clinic. Jasmin, who lives with her parents in wretched circumstances, is naïve and allows herself to be exploited by men. Tamara, a nurse, is of Serbian origin and is worried about her family who have returned to Sarajevo. Jasmin’s encounter with Senad, a war refugee from Croatia, who at one point saves her from freezing to death, fails to lead to a lasting relationship, as does the night of tenderness which Tamara spends with the adventurous Valentin from Romania. Only on New Year’s Eve 1995, in St. Stephen’s Cathedral square, do the two couples share a moment of utopian euphoria together.
Amidst the fragility of the individual life stories, the breakdown of the social environment, moral indifference and psychic impairment, the film follows the search of human beings for caring and trust, understanding and closeness. Through its open dramatisation of these experiences, the audience shares in them without being led to believe in the illusion of a political solution or of an individual happy ending.
Sermon for the Award Ceremony in the hORA Service
by Hans Werner Dannowski, Hannover
on Sunday Septuagesimae, 11th February 2001
in the St. Matthew Church Berlin-Tiergarten
during the 51st International Film Festival Berlin
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and “sinners” came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and “sinners”?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners.”
Matthew 9, 9-13
Dear congregation,
Jesus’ whole life - his urgent message in the name of God - , his life and death and his resurrection is an unanimous testimony against forgetting. “For I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners”. You should say goodbye to the one sided moral understanding of the term “sin” – considering Jesus and our understanding of Christian faith. Of course, violations of God’s law, of what is good for the human being, always play an important role But if the pride and the self-righteousness of the so called strong are the lesser sin than the deceits of the tax collectors and the pocket thieves: that is the question. No, Jesus’ affection, his offer of a community, his address goes out – in the name of God - to those who might get lost. Jesus’ life and actions are a message against forgetting. And his calling of disciples, as this calling of Matthew, the tax collector, the sinner, especially, turns them from forgotten and despised persons into searchers looking for the forgotten and lost.
A “forgotten one” is somewhere where nobody expects him, where nobody sees him. A forgotten one is for example someone who is not missed when he dies. A forgotten one is someone whose fate doesn’t feature in the guidelines of offices. A lost and forgotten one is someone who cannot explain what is wrong with him or her, and why he or she cannot cope with his or her life anymore. Thus, no one can help him or her. You leave him to justice or his or her own fate – which is the same thing. A lost and forgotten one is someone who has to conceal his or her guilt. Someone nobody listens to when he or she wants to get something of his or her chest: this wordlessness killing each other. A human being is fighting against him- or herself and against his or her fate somewhere where no one sees him or helps him.
That was the way it was back then in Jesus’ times, dear congregation, and nothing has changed since then: society is still split up into the strong and the weak. “And you only see those in the light – those in the shadow cannot be seen.” The majority of a society, or just the minority that sets the tone, agrees quickly that the weak are to blame themselves for their condition. It is maybe just because they have come from a foreign country or a foreign culture, out of a situation with no chances for the future. The right to overlook or forget those – if not something worse - becomes the driving force of a society that attaches great importance to itself. And suddenly, there is this man, Jesus, who thoroughly upsets these standards of a seemingly well-ordered because seemingly moral society. “it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Where are the good and the bad; who belongs to whom? “I have not come to call the righteous, but the sinners.” The precedence of the forgotten and lost over all others: that is his programme. And he left us - who call ourselves Christians, maybe in a very hesitating or hidden way – with this uncertainty in a question that cannot be ignored: What about ourselves? What do we overlook, repress or forget?
Today, in this service in the St. Matthäuskirche, we award this year’s Templeton Film award to “Northern Outskirts” by Barbara Albert. According to my impression and obviously also according to the impression of the jury who selected this film out of last year’s European production, this film is an impressive and vivid evidence against forgetting. Maybe making films itself – as long as it is based on such premises as it is here- is an exhausting as well as exciting work against forgetting, suppressing and overlooking. In the “Northern Outskirts” of Vienna, there are no people you can read about in the newspaper. Occasionally, you can read about the one or the other because he or she has committed a crime. It’s the normality of ordinary people. You will meet pretty, black-haired Tamara whose family has returned to Sarajevo and who finds a hold in her life in her telephone calls – often interrupted ones - to her family and her brother. Her brother’s death in Serbia affects her deeply. And you will meet blond, chubby Jasmin who still lives at home with a large family: with her mother who suffers silently, with her father who sexually abuses the youngest daughter and hits the eldest (Jasmin) which is something that does not prevent her from dreaming of an own family with just as many children as she has got brothers and sisters. She sleeps with every man who is a little nice to her. And there are the pictures of a war that has quickly fallen into oblivion, of bombs on Sarajevo; pictures of the executions and the destroyed town. Pictures that cannot be forgotten that easily because they are part of the reality of the people, at least some of them, who live at the northern outskirts of this big city.
Jasmin and Tamara meet again in a hospital for abortions. They went to school together and, as children, they saw their kites rising in the winds of their future. And now, there are slow approaches, repulsions and a growing understanding of the differences between the two young women. Jasmin will bear her next child, as Tamara has promised to support her. And, nearly at the end of the film, Valentin, Tamara’s new boyfriend who is Romanian and who dreams of going to America, asks: “Will you forget me?” And Tamara answers without thinking: ”I don’t think so. And you?” “I don’t think so either,” Valentin simply answers. And then they leave in opposite directions. Tamara goes to see her parents in a destroyed town and Valentin is on his way to America. There are thoughtful and remembering faces everywhere. In spite of the movement, calm seems to have returned. The future is not certain, but open. There are ways that will not lead into total forgetting again.
Dear congregation, here are pictures, words and looks against forgetting. Thus, the stories of the bible and the film approach each other. Let us go a last step further, a step that connects these stories even more closely. How is it possible that a real encounter between people, that the removal of forgetting that Jesus’ story and the film describe, does not bother the future, yet opens it? That the look that falls on the so far forgotten frees not only the overlooked but also myself?
That has certainly got something to do with the power of images and projections. I have spent many years trying to tell someone – with or without words: that is you. I know you. In the worst case: One could forget you! Instead of seeing him or her, we have got an idea of him or her. The power of images turns into the power of projection. But projections are hidden suppression. They do not give the other room to grow, cut him or her off from the world in which we live together. And most of all: projections are a suppression of ourselves. They will not let us grow with the other, they close off the future that the other could open up for us.
And suddenly, the look rests on the other. The discovery of the other breaks the projection: the stories and images snatch the people from forgetting. And I discover, maybe only partly: He or she is like me. No, it’s different, it’s more: He or she strikes a chord within me that has become silent or that has never even been heard. “You are an image of my secret life,” that’s how I feel and that is the original image, the language of the loving encounter. We can, we will grow with each other. That is the experience that people, be it Matthew, Zachäus or all the others, have made in their encounter with Jesus. They have grown in this encounter with him, under his looks and words; they have grown that much that they have outgrown themselves. No, they are no heroes, no supermen. But their sensitiveness for encounters with others, for the overlooked and the forgotten has grown. And that is the experience of every real encounter with God: It does not make them small, but great! They are given a notion of the unlimited dignity and importance of everyone.
“Do you believe in telepathy?” Tamara asks her boyfriend when they part. “I don’t know,” Valentin answers, “but we can try.” And then we see Tamara alone on the train, on the way to Sarajevo: she lets her hair blow about in the wind of an open window. The wires that fly past and make up a vital part of the picture are like messages that will accompany her life from far. Thus, the loving encounter between people turns into a parable and a representation of a reality that opens up the future.
I am not alone in this world – this is what I can read on the faces in the film - and I hear it in the biblical word. And trust returns – a trust in the fact that we can grow with future encounters and experiences however difficult they may be sometimes.
Amen.