The international film festival on ecology held each year on the Greek island of Rhodes has just changed its name from Ecocinema to Ecofilms International Film and Visual Arts Festival. The plural certainly better reflects the diversity of the lights cast on ecology at this annual event (June 21-26, 2005) which in more than 100 feature films and shorts from around the world covers a broad range of issues related to how we protect and nurture human life. In fact, its rich programming tackles this year classical environmental subjects, like the management of water resources in The Dream of Water by Albert Solé from Spain, but also spirituality like in Monte Grande by Franz Reichle from Switzerland, or corporate responsibility in A decent Factory by Thomas Balmès from France, just to mention a few topics and films.
It was then a clever and bold choice not to open the festival with a film too explicitly about the environment, stressing in this manner the plurality of ways we can talk about ecology and more broadly about the frailty of life.

This film is Stroke by Katarina Peters, a personal and extremely moving story, narrated with a dignity that forces respect. The German director filmed in DV over 5 years how her husband, the young and exuberant musician Boris Baberkoff, fought to recover from a stroke that changed their lives as it caused severe damage to his brain, impairing his speech, vision and movements. Their intimacy totally excludes any form of voyeurism or obscenity that we may have feared if a stranger had filmed the opus. On the contrary, nothing is dramatized and neither Boris nor Katarina expresses desperation at any moment, at least in front of the camera. The filmmaker finds in this feature something to hold onto when everything seems to fall apart around her. Somehow, the metaphors she uses suggest she tries to get as much control as she can over a scenario really in the crippled hands of her slowly recovering husband. So she crochets something that turns out to look like a brain with the threads forming synapses, as if she was trying to rebuild his mind with her fingers, maybe refering to the Fates of Greek mythology who would keep him alive as long as some silk is left. This fallacious sense of control borders on superstition, as she refuses to film the board at the entrance of the hospital where Boris is treated because physicians wipe off the names of their patients as they die. As she actually cannot control what happens, she ends up reading in her environment signs of what could happen next. So she observes every day the frenzied walk of pigeons on the ledge of a church window, fearing that if one of them fell it would announce Boris' death, suggesting that she feels some guilt. Although Boris is the center of the film, the director definitely ends up as much exposed as him, as he himself tells her. She is even somehow as much locked in in her own body as he is. In the end, all the built up tensions overwhelm her in oniric sequences where water floods out of a cello she carved for her husband over to a room full of guests she seems to ignore. With these tensions released and the recovery becoming gradually more complete, the couple finally gets a fresh start again, as if it all had just been a film.

The audience of the magnificent Rodon open air theater where the feature was screened definitely strongly connected with this very personal story as it offered a very long and exceptional standing ovation to the director and her husband present on the scene. An affection that grew even more with a cello recital performed live by a recovering and obviously talented Boris Baberkoff.


Olivier Delesse

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