The 5th European John Templeton Film Award 2001 was presented to the film “Chico” (Hungary, Croatia, Germany, Chile 2001) by Hungarian director Ibolya Fekete. The award ceremony took place during the 2002 Berlinale on February 10 as part of a church service at the Matthäuskirche on the Kulturforum. The prize is endowed with 7,000 CHF, donated by the John Templeton Foundation. The jury for the prize consisted of Robin Gurney, Hans Hodel, and Karsten Visarius.
Eulogy
CHICO won the Ecumenical Prize at the Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, film festival in July last year. The Ecumenical Jury commended the film „for showing the spiritual dimension of human existence that lasts, while ideologies come and go“.
The film mixes one man’s search for meaning in his own life with documentary news material going back to the 1970s. In a world of changing ideologies he moves from a communist commitment, inherited from his father, to fighting on the Croatian side in the Balkan Wars of the nineties. Adopting in turn adopts the life of a revolutionary, then secret agent, press man and eventually soldier, Ricardo, the central character, is constantly at odds with authority while trying to maintain his own honest conviction. The political irony of the last 30 years, the demise of communism and the rise of nationalism, is all contained in a complex yet entertaining film.
Religion threads its way through the whole film yet never dominates. One notable scene sees Ricardo, praying a Christian prayer at the Jewish Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Ibolya Fekete in the end presents an „ideological adventure film“ which leaves behind many questions requiring discussion but does not attempt to provide answers.
Sermon
held on the occasion of the awarding of the 5th Templeton Film Award to CHICO by Ibolya Fekete
by Hans Werner Dannowski
Service on the 10th February 2002, St. Matthäuskirche, Berlin
„Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;
perseverance, character; and character, hope.
And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured his love in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
Romans 5, 3-5
Dear congregation!
Consider the end of the film we are awarding the Templeton Film Award 2001 to: In the end, Ricardo – named “Chico” after a comic character by his comrades - is sitting next to the altar of a destroyed church in a Hungarian village on Croatian territory that he and his troop had tried to defend in vain. He was in a coma for six days. He returns to the village. The houses are shot to pieces and empty; Nature conquers back the remains of the earlier culture. He cannot find the corpses of his comrades killed in action. The church has burned, its interior is a mere heap of rubble. And here we find Ricardo sitting next to the altar with a cross in front of it: contemplating, meditating, helpless. The song, sung in a man’s voice to piano accompaniment, that sings of the battlefields where the dead lie sounds softly through the high open room. The meditation and the helplessness have long taken possession of me, the audience of the film. The hopelessness touches my heart.
Before that, there was a wild and exciting life. Ricardo is a globetrotter of the revolution – one could say. He is the son of a Hungarian Jew and a Bolivian. He has absorbed the ideas of the revolution through his father’s historical digressions ever since he was a child: Bolivia, Che Guevara, Allende’s and Pinochet’s Chile, the fugitives from Chile who sing the Internationale on the plane, Kadar’s Hungary, Enver Hodscha’s Albania that – in its poverty especially – reminds him so much of Latin America. The war in Croatia turns everything upside down. Experiencing violence for himself, he turns into a militant nationalist, having been a reporter for a Spanish newspaper before. Then, there is the end: the disaster of his unit and himself in the village that they have to defend to the last man. Shot to pieces, they leave the place with the injured during the night. Ricardo and his companion hit a mine. And then, after his recovery, he is sitting next to the altar in a destroyed church. In the meantime, Croatia was born; he did not win anything. The camera shows the collapsed stones of the church and the empty walls of the high altar. And the man’s voice sings of the soldiers’ graves from which the wind blows the earth away and nobody is there to mourn, nobody cries. Far, far away. And still very close.
I prefaced this address with a passage from the Bible, a passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans. It seems to come from a different world. Yet the experience of suffering, the Thlipsis (as it is called in Greek), the experience of lethal danger and the narrow-mindedness of life is inherent in both texts, in the current film and in the passage from the Bible. The latter is not from the sunny sides of life either. But here, similarities are already at an end. The suffering and hopelessness are used in an almost paradoxical and hardly understandable way as an opportunity for human rejoicing. “Not only so” (meaning the hope for a future glory), “but we also rejoice in our sufferings”. Is it not so that you can only rejoice in the hopelessness, the dangers, the narrow-mindedness that takes away the air you breathe if you have happily overcome them? Usually, one would think and experience it so! And Paul links to this basic experience of distressed life a chain of experience that leads via perseverance and character to hope. Yes, it leads to God’s love that has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. “Because we know”, says Paul as if it was an ABC, “that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us.” Is this an art of living that precedes the experiences that the film describes and we ourselves experience in one way or another as a kind of personal hopelessness: that everything slips from our hands or is taken away from it? Or is it an experience of living that only just begins where the film ends? Up to then, a negative chain concerning the development of Paul’s faith can be constructed from the film without difficulties; a chain of experience that we know very well. Narrow-mindedness, distress, suffering do not turn into hope, but to hopelessness. In other words and considered as a collective experience: suffering, and social, national, and religious disdain and degradation are the breeding ground of concepts of the enemy. And hate rages blindly and destroys everything, in the end often itself, too.
Paul’s world and the world of the Balkan war as the film rightly shows it, seem to be two incompatible treatments of reality. But the distressing effect that the film has on me and – as the award shows – on others, goes beyond these conclusions. What makes the film a moving master piece that goes beyond the description of reality is the transportation of one experience of reality into an other. First, I would like to underline this idea with one catchword: the film succeeds in marking a transition from a closed to an open system. And thus helps me and surely many of you as well, I think, to resist the temptations of resignation and to dare to take the further step that turns suffering into perseverance and character, and all this into hope.
Yes, dear congregation, the closed system. Ricardo has spent all his life – up to now - within the closed system. Within a closed system, everyone knows what the crucial point of the story is and what everything will lead to in the end. The power of the state is different from that of the revolution: in one case, it is just, in the other, it is not. Ricardo grew up with this attitude. The film keeps consequently to this basic position as well, and is therefore treated with hostility because the film seems to totally back up the Croats’ point of view. As if they were not responsible for terrible orgies of annihilation. This is true, but not according to Ricardo’s point of view. The closed system is an economy programme of life designed to reach the maximum effect with a minimum of requirements. Authoritarian structures are taken for granted. And war is of course the war of men; women are only those who suffer and are driven away and represent a short passion, desire. Women could confuse the closed system of men entirely. Because of the lack of communication abilities, closed systems are tuned to end in victory and superiority. If this does not happen, men are doomed to be destroyed. Except if…someone starts to let the shock have its effects on him, the shock that the end of a whole world leaves behind in his soul. Except if…someone starts to search a context in which new horizons are perceptible. Except if someone allows memories and the notion of a closeness of another world.
Even if, dear congregation, it may sound strange considering the nearly hermeneutically closed chain of experience: Paul’s words, the Christian faith and the deepest core of the church tend to the open system – according to my firmest belief. It is true: the church permanently runs the risk of turning into a closed system. Not only the sins in the past; also the dictatorship of orthodoxy, the oppression of doubt, and the disrespect for the dignity of human beings and even for one’s very own dignity represent permanent dangers. But in this film CHICO, this is not the case. In this film, faith and church stand for the open system. For example, there is the Albanian priest who living in a prison camp for 25 years has not yet learnt how to disdain a human being. “God has created us with a mouth, to bring human beings tidings of the beauty of love and freedom”, he says. Chico can once again stand by his side as a server during mass. Also, there is Ricardo’s journey to Jerusalem, his Lord’s Prayer, this prayer in all its Jewish origin, with one hand held to the Wailing Wall. The bishop’s words on the beauty of Jerusalem that is also a city of death, linger on for a long time. And there is Ricardo’s confession behind a young priest’s back in a church bench: “Croatia has mixed everything up. When I was a child, everything was so simple: do good and you will be saved. I cannot put my life in order any longer.” And then, Ricardo is sitting in the destroyed church that does not represent the destroyed life in the villages and towns of this country alone. But this church – especially in its shattered form – refers to the God who through Christ stepped down into the depths of our sufferings. Those to whom death has been a bitter experience, but not the end of God’s way with human beings can join him. And there is Paul’s chain of experience again: sufferings produce perseverance; perseverance, character, and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us.
To put it in other words, less biblically shaped: the open system begins with the perception of our own pain. In this reality, physicality and touches are crucial. A sensitive woman was the director of CHICO; you notice this especially in regard to the small things. Among them: Ricardo’s reason why he likes the Croats: because they touch each other, which is unique in Europe. Such an observation is just beautiful. The open system begins with the lamentation and grief about human beings who have been butchered senselessly in merciless wars. What moves Ricardo to the core is – I think – the horror about the traceless disappearance of his friends at whose graves he cannot even wail and cry. The man’s voice and the song of the soldiers’ graves sing of this sensation.
Pains and defeats can when really perceived be the notion of another world. Pain can stem from a positive power within ourselves that wants to stimulate and maybe even force us to better dealings with ourselves and the world. “Can” I say. With Ricardo, I think, this is so. The notion of a world with a human face is inherent in this helplessness and grief. A world for which Jesus has died and risen from the dead. “Scars are eyes”, a Catholic friend said. ”They make us clairvoyant. They can become the wisdom of the soul. They join us to the vision of a future that reaches from the prophets of the Old Testament with their motto “swords to ploughshares” to Jesus’ blessings, considering the human beings with a pure heart and the peacemakers. That culminates in God’s love that the Holy Spirit poured into our hearts.
But it is still a long way. Our world that once again seeks its well-being in a reinforced arming is different. And thus, there is for us but one thing left to do: keep to it. Keep to the difficult knowledge of how closely pain, wisdom, and hope are often related to one another. Sit down next to Ricardo, next to the altar and listen to the voice that sings of the lamentation at the nameless graves. And feel how the energy of hope is growing from the lamentations. Truly: Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope and maybe that also strengthens the love that excludes nobody and overlooks nobody.
Amen.