Fury is a Feeling Too

Cynthia Beatt raises questions and provokes reflection on a range of issues to do with language and culture, politics and history. Her film is a personal and cathartic confrontation with being a foreigner in Berlin, burdened by the weight of its history, during the 1970s and ‘80s. Filmed in the area around Potsdamer Platz, the torn-up area right next to the Wall where post-war buildings grew out of the bomb craters, the film paints the picture of the loss of an architectural text whose destruction also meant the disappearance of a cultural context. Shrapnel-pitted facades alternate with rooms where social altercations about Germans scarred by their history are staged. The somber elegiac music of Maurice Weddington underscores the discordant character of this unsentimental, accusing film. (Berlinale)