Tough Experience for the Viewers

THE HALFMOON FILES (Germany) is the kind of documentary that demands concentration and attention from its viewers; we may even say a full dedication all its viewing time. At the end of the film, the story becomes kind of clear but until the end the spectator must try really hard to solve the puzzle of the story.

Eventually, film’s director Philip Scheffner is chasing a ghost from a recording. The recording is a part of the German archives and of an Indian who was a prisoner at a camp near Berlin during World War I. He and his friends were at war for the English and were capured by the Germans. This summarises the story but it is not so easy to figure out since the structure of the film is really complex and this chaos is created probably parallel to the director’s research process.

In the first scene, we hear a man trying to get permission to shoot in India and he says it’s a ghost movie. We figure out that this man we heard is the director. Afterwards, we hear the voiceover of an Indian man talking with the leaves on the background. It is followed by the image of an empty room with shelves. This image and monologue make no sense at all and the spectator is confused like the filmmaker chasing a ghost by researching a story. The confusion grows since the director made the choice of giving more importance to sound than images. Some scenes in the film is just black screen and these parts add up to nearly thirty minutes and a voice over accompanies the black screen. This makes sense if we consider that Scheffner’s starting point was a recording so he gives his audience just sound to find their way. If you protest by saying cinema is a visual art form, tough luck so you better forget about images when you see this film. Also, many different languages are spoken in the film: Hindi, German and English. Also, at some points, voices of narrators speaking different languages, overlap. So this makes the viewing experience ever harder.

At the end of the film, if you find the strength to complete the story in your head, you have an interesting experience. Because the film invites you to get completely lost and find your way out by listening, not seeing, carefully. So we were inside the head of a documentary maker researching a story for one and a half hour. Is this film a political documentary? Yes, you may even add that it is making connections with the politics of today and clearly showing the background of Germany before World War II. But it is hard to find the energy to think about the political points of the film while you are watching it and afterwards you really do not want to. The film belongs to the group of new documentaries becoming so complicated in form and narration that the story they are telling loses its importance, experimental documentary we may say.

Nil Kural

© Berlinale Talent Campus 2007