#which is why nobody's gone to europe or crossed the sea or anything. its bad luck and also you'll die

[newstfionline]

The World Is Even Less Stable Than It Looks

By Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, June 26, 2017

I’m normally leery of the pervasive threat inflation that tends to dominate discussions of foreign policy. Because the United States is so strong and in such a favorable geopolitical location, pundits and policymakers have to pretend the sky is falling to justify bigger military budgets and convince the public to keep meddling in distant lands. And whether the threat is falling dominos, “creeping Sharia,” the “axis of evil,” or even “violent extremism,” the actual threat these faraway dangers pose is usually exaggerated.

Right now, however, we’re at a moment when I think genuine concern is warranted. This is not to say that we’re on the brink of a major war, let alone a global clash of great powers. But flammable material is accumulating and it is hard to have high confidence in the political leadership in several key countries (including here in the United States). We would all do well to take stock of the global order: Is the world more secure than it was a year ago? Specifically, is the risk of war increasing or decreasing? Is the danger of a serious economic crisis higher or lower? Are the institutional arrangements and norms that help smooth and resolve conflicts of interest and enhance the prospects for international cooperation more or less robust than they were in June 2016?

With apologies to the late Sergio Leone, I’d group recent global developments under three headings: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good. Before descending into fatalistic depression--we’ll get to that soon enough--let’s start with the upside. Despite all the worrisome headlines and a recent slight uptick, the level of conflict between human beings is still at historic lows, and the likelihood that you will die a violent death is vastly lower than it was at nearly all other moments in human history. Nor have the number of low-level conflicts increased significantly over the past year or so, even if one takes the deteriorating situation in the Middle East into account. Although the Islamic State and other terrorist groups have been able to direct or inspire terrorist attacks in more places, the actual risk from terrorism remain relatively low outside active conflict zones such as Syria or Iraq, especially when compared with more prosaic and familiar hazards. Even now, the odds that a European or American will be harmed in a terrorist attack are vanishingly small.

Such encouraging trends are no guarantee of continued tranquility, of course, and one could even argue that complacency could make a spiral into war more likely. But we should still be grateful the world is more peaceful than it was in earlier eras and try to draw the right lessons from that observation. At a minimum, the major powers haven’t fought each other directly for over 70 years, and making sure that continues to be the case remains a critical task.

There are other encouraging straws in the wind as well. For the moment, voters in France, the Netherlands, and Austria have rejected the xenophobic nationalism of politicians like Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, and instead embraced the more inclusive and forward-looking visions of leaders like Emmanuel Macron. The Islamic State’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” is now headed for the dustbin of history, and while this won’t eliminate the problem of violent extremism, it is a useful step forward. The peace agreement ending Colombia’s long civil war is holding--at least so far--and the war in Ukraine has settled down into a mostly frozen conflict that seems unlikely to escalate. The EU is in its fifth straight year of economic recovery, despite of the uncertainties surrounding the Brexit process, and European, American, and Japanese publics are increasingly upbeat about economic issues. And (fingers crossed), so far U.S. President Donald Trump hasn’t done much to trigger a trade war (though he still might). I wouldn’t say the glass is half-full, but at least it’s not completely empty.

The Bad. That’s the good news. If you’re looking for things to worry about, alas, one doesn’t have to look far.

In Asia, North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities in defiance of global opinion (surprise, surprise), and Trump’s naive hope that China would ignore its own interests and somehow persuade Pyongyang to do what Trump wanted has been exposed as the pipe dream it always was. But this leaves the United States and its Asian allies with no attractive options, and only the “least-bad” choice of reengaging with a country that just killed a U.S. citizen over an alleged purloined poster. Islamist movements appear to be gaining strength in Indonesia and threatening that country’s prior atmosphere of tolerance, and the Philippine government’s wars on drugs and terrorism are wreaking a fearsome human cost with little to show for it. And Trump’s bromance with Chinese President Xi Jinping has done nothing to slow Beijing’s efforts to alter the territorial status quo in the South China Sea. All things considered, it’s hard to see conditions in Asia as safer now than they were a year ago.

The same gloomy conclusion applies to the Middle East, only more so. The Islamic State may soon be a thing of the past--at least in terms of holding territory--but the exceedingly complex, multifaceted, and interrelated conflicts in Yemen, Syria/Iraq, and between Qatar and Saudi Arabia create much more potential for trouble than was present back in 2016. The impending defeat of the Islamic State has intensified its opponents’ efforts to control its former territory, with outside powers ramping up their involvement while diplomatic efforts languish. U.S. military involvement has risen steadily--with scant input from Congress or the American public--and U.S. aircraft recently shot down Iranian drones and a Syrian fighter plane. The latter act prompted Moscow to issue a direct warning against further U.S. attacks and to suspend the communications channel created to minimize the risk of an inadvertent clash between U.S. and Russian forces. And to make matters worse, an emboldened Saudi Arabia is continuing its brutal military campaign in Yemen while simultaneously trying to force neighboring Qatar to silence Al Jazeera, sever its contacts with Iran, and basically accept Saudi predominance. Maybe you can see a silver lining in all these developments, but I can’t. The worst case for the United States would be involvement in another big Middle East war arising “from sheer incompetence and incoherence rather than by design,” as Jim Lobe and Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio put it.

Meanwhile, it’s “déjà vu all over again” in Afghanistan, with the United States about to reverse Barack Obama’s drawdown and send more troops back into an unwinnable war. Exactly why this step is in America’s national interest remains unclear, and at least nobody is trying to pretend that this decision (which Trump has delegated to Secretary of Defense James Mattis) is going to produce anything that might be termed “victory.” Instead, in a disturbing echo of the Indochina war, the United States is operating a new version of the “stalemate machine,” doing just enough to not lose. We know we can’t win; at this point we can’t break even, yet neither Democrats nor Republicans will let us out of the game.

Last but not least, the institutional underpinnings of the present international system continue to fray. The importance of such institutions is sometimes exaggerated, but even hard-nosed realists understand that strong institutions can facilitate cooperation among like-minded states and lend greater predictability to important international relationships. NATO is intact but weaker than it was a year ago, and doubts about the U.S. role in Asia have been rising following Trump’s renunciation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and his erratic responses to events in Korea and the Philippines. Instead of being able to count on help from close allies in most circumstances, today the United States faces a Germany whose leader wants Europe to “chart its own course,” and a Canada whose foreign minister says “International relationships that had seemed immutable for 70 years are being called into question,” adding that America’s decisions are forcing Canada “to set our own clear and sovereign course.” Such sentiments are not a sign of the apocalypse, but they do not herald easier ties between the United States and its most important neighbors and allies.

The Ugly. These developments would be worrisome enough if we had a surplus of gifted and farsighted strategists at the helm of the world’s major powers, the modern-day equivalents of Franklin Roosevelt, George Marshall, Konrad Adenauer, or Charles de Gaulle. Heck, at this point I’d take Maggie Thatcher, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Baker, Jacques Chirac, and any number of past leaders who made some big mistakes but also got a number of big things right and did not enter public service largely either to fleece the public or to gratify their own egos.

What do we see instead? In the United Kingdom, two successive prime ministers have inexplicably committed remarkably maladroit acts of self-defenestration. The first was David Cameron, who ended his political career by pledging to hold a referendum on leaving the European Union (which he opposed) and then losing. The second is Theresa May, who called a snap election earlier this month that cost her party its Parliamentary majority. France has gone from the “bling-bling” of Nicolas Sarkozy to the hapless Francois Hollande and is now betting on the as-yet untried Macron. Italy hasn’t had effective political leadership since--oh, I don’t know, Garibaldi? Recep Erdogan in Turkey has proven to be extremely adept at consolidating power and extremely bad at actually running the country, and there are equally depressing examples of incompetent leadership in Brazil, Afghanistan, Poland, and throughout the Middle East.

But the United States is determined not to be beaten in this competition of political incompetence. If the consequences were not potentially so dire, the Trump administration’s collective ineptitude would be a great source of comic relief. I’m not talking about controversial policy decisions about which reasonable people might disagree (such as the pros and cons of giving regional military commanders greater authority over operations in their respective areas), I’m talking about foreign-policy actions that seem inspired more by the Keystone Cops or Three Stooges than by Clausewitz, Kennan, or Sun Tzu.

Indeed, only six months into Trump’s presidency, it’s becoming hard to keep track of all the squirm-inducing moments. There was the brief sage of Trump’s initial national security advisor, Mike Flynn, who lasted in his job a mere 25 days, or the appointment of self-styled “terrorism expert” Sebastian Gorka. There was Trump’s bizarre speech at CIA headquarters the day after he was inaugurated, in which he rambled on about the crowd size at his inauguration ceremony and complained about media coverage. There was the “armada” he said was heading toward North Korea when it was actually steaming in the opposite direction, and his on-again, off-again, on-again attitude toward NATO and Article 5. There were the press releases, tweets, and announcements that misspelled the names of foreign leaders and the mini-crisis that erupted when Trump announced South Korea should pay for the THAAD missile-defense system that the U.S. had insisted be deployed there. And then there’s Trump’s weird decision to gut the State Department (apparently with the full support of his secretary of state) and to assign sensitive diplomatic tasks to his son-in-law, despite the latter’s complete lack of foreign-policy experience and checkered business career. And don’t even get me started about Trump & Co.’s handling of relations with Russia and Kushner’s amateurish attempts to create some sort of backchannel to Moscow. With a record like this to defend, it’s no wonder the White House is trying to keep the press and the public in the dark about what it’s doing.

Why does any of this matter? Because the greatest achievements of U.S. foreign policy since World War II has been its ability, when it chose, to keep wars from breaking out or to end them quickly when they did occur. As I’ve explained before, a peaceful world is very much in the U.S. national interest, given how secure and well-off the United States already is. The combination of military strength and skilled diplomacy helped keep the peace in Europe and in much of Asia throughout the Cold War, and often (but not always) played a stabilizing role in the Middle East. It required not just credible military power, but also politicians who understood how the world worked and what the interests of others were, had a clear sense of America’s own interests, and were sufficiently consistent that others could count on them to do what they had promised.

By contrast, America’s biggest foreign-policy failures occurred when U.S. leaders started wars on our own (Iraq, 2003), escalated them for no good reason (Vietnam, 1965), or turned a blind eye to simmering conflicts and missed opportunities for peace (Korea in 1950 and the Middle East in 1966-67, 1971-72, and 1982). And many of these errors arose from impulsive and ignorant leaders who knew relatively little about the situations they were trying to manage.

Today, the United States isn’t disengaging from world affairs or adopting a new and well-thought out grand strategy, such as offshore balancing, but it is hardly acting as a clear or consistent defender of peace and the status quo. On the contrary, Washington is still trying to determine the future fate of Afghanistan, still hoping for regime change in several countries it doesn’t like, encouraging its proxies in the Middle East to escalate their local quarrels, and using increasing levels of military power to try to solve problems--such as terrorism and insurgency--whose roots are essentially political. The United States has pretty much abandoned its role as a potential mediator in lots of potential hotspots, and it would be naive to expect all of these conflicts will to simmer down on their own.

If the past 25 years have taught us anything, it is that few foreign-policy problems can be solved simply by blowing things up. The United States is still unsurpassed at that sort of thing, but the real challenge is devising political solutions to conflicts once the guns have fallen silent. We’ve been singularly bad at this in recent decades, and Trump’s disdain for diplomacy will just impair us even more.

The result is looking like the worst of both worlds: The United States is still engaged in most of the world’s trouble spots, but the ship of state is now being steered by an inexperienced skipper lacking accurate charts, an able crew, or even a clear destination. I don’t know about you, but that situation doesn’t make me feel safer, either.

[clusterassets]

New world news from Time: How One Migrant Ship Became a Symptom of a Sick Europe

A 253-feet long, 2,000-ton boat makes for an ungainly political football, especially when it is carrying some 629 desperate migrants and is staffed by a crew of angry humanitarian workers. But since Saturday, when the MV Aquarius, a search-and-rescue vessel operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and European NGO SOS Méditerranée, came to the aid of several dinghy-loads of imperiled migrants who had set off from the Libyan coast for Europe, the boat has become a symbol of the continent’s most intractable crisis. That wouldn’t be the plight of the migrants, which is indeed dire, but rather the inability of the European Union to tackle an issue that threatens to tear the bloc apart: what to do about the migrants and refugees who are willing to risk everything, even their lives, to reach European shores.

Read more: Inside a week on a refugee recovery ship

As the Aquarius approached Italian waters on June 10 to offload its human cargo, as it has done hundreds of times since commencing search and rescue operations two years ago, newly appointed Italian deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini decided that it was time to take a stand. Using the hashtag #closethedoors, Salvini tweeted that Italy would not be turned into a refugee camp. “Italy is done bending over backwards and obeying, this time THERE IS SOMEONE WHO SAYS NO.”

For Salvini, it did not matter that the Italian Coast Guard, which had overseen the rescue operations, directed the Aquarius to Italian ports, nor that there were seven pregnant women, 123 unaccompanied minors and hundreds more in desperate need of food, warmth and shelter on board. Rather, he felt that it was time for Malta, which was closer to the Aquarius by just 8 nautical miles to take over. Malta refused, arguing that the boat fell under Italy’s jurisdiction, since its Coast Guard was running the rescue operation in the first place.

Even though the mayor of Sicily’s major port city of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, said he would accept the Aquarius and her passengers, Salvini overrode the offer, launching a Mediterranean standoff. “Malta takes in nobody. France pushes people back at the border, Spain defends its frontier with weapons,” Salvini wrote on Facebook. “From today, Italy will also start to say no to human trafficking, no to the business of illegal immigration.”

As UNHCR’s Special Envoy for the Central Mediterranean, Vincent Cochetel, pleaded for sanity, calling for the issue of responsibility to be resolved after the migrants were safely offloaded, Spain finally stepped forward, offering its port of Valencia to the Aquarius. Salvini immediately tweeted “VICTORY.” But for the passengers, who have already spent the past three nights in discomfort upon the Aquarius’ steel decks, it is anything but. Valencia is at least another three days journey away, according to MSF, and bad weather is complicating matters with high winds and waves. The boat also doesn’t have enough supplies to cater for the long journey. And so now the Italian Coast Guard is stepping back in, to resupply the Aquarius, take some of the overload, and escort it out of Italian waters and over to Spain.

To a certain extent, Salvini has a point about the unfair burden on his country. Through an accident of geography, Italy has received a significant share of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Libya—nearly 640,000 since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration. In the same period Greece received more than 1.1 million asylum-seekers making the crossing from Turkey. But unlike Greece’s migrants, who are by and large fleeing war in Syria and thus qualify more easily for refugee status, Italy’s migrants mostly come from Africa, where, a few exceptions aside, they are not eligible for the same protections.

Italy feels it has largely been left on its own to deal with the migrant flow—a task it has mismanaged spectacularly. And over the past several years, popular sentiment has been growing against the illegal—and highly visible—migrants. Salvini’s anti-immigration League party came first in Italy’s March elections, largely based on his pledge to do something about the migrant issue. Now, the time has come for him to show he is taking a stance.

Just as E.U. members Hungary and Austria have shut their borders to migrants crossing over from Italy, Salvini holds that Italy should be able to do the same—by closing its sea borders to migrants coming across from Libya via rescue boats. He has gone so far as to accuse groups like MSF and SOS Méditerranée of colluding with the people smugglers on Libyan shores who put the migrants on the flimsy dinghies in the first place.

Salvini’s attempt to blame the humanitarian rescue organizations for encouraging migration has become a favorite trope of the anti-migrant right. The truth is, desperate migrants will attempt any route if there is even the slightest glimmer of hope for success. After Italy’s ill-conceived 2017 deal with the Libyan coast guard, as well as the Libyan militias that reportedly moonlit as people smugglers to stop the departures, migration from Libyan ports did decline. But at what cost? These days, African migrants crossing the central Mediterranean route aren’t as desperate to reach Europe as they are to get out of Libya, where rape, torture-for-ransom, forced labor and even slave auctions are rife. Stopping the migrants at the Libyan coast isn’t a solution as much as it is a way of hiding the problem from the European conscience.

Which is why Spain’s offer, though deeply political in its own way, comes at a key time. By taking in migrants that had been refused by both Italy and Malta, Spain is trying to make a point in advance of a E.U. summit scheduled later this month to address the bloc’s migration policies. “Spain has made a gesture that aims to trigger a European dynamic to stop looking away, allowing one [E.U. member] to cope with the problem while the rest of us pass the buck,” Josep Borrell, Spain’s new Foreign Minister told a local radio station after he made the offer. He might want to start taking a closer look at home—Spain has largely failed to take in its share of Syrian asylum seekers from Greece despite agreeing to a Europe-wide relocation program in 2015.

France, too, is trying to score political points with its stance on the Aquarius. “If any ship was closer to France’s shores, it could obviously dock on the French coast,” French President Emmanuel Macron told his cabinet meeting on June 12, after, of course, Spain already offered to take in the migrants.

Ironically, the solution to Italy’s problem with migration lies in the very thing Italy’s new populist government most despises—a stronger European Union. A bloc that can more equally share the burden of caring for, placing, and, when necessary, deporting the migrants that have no legal justification for staying.

At the same time the E.U. and its member countries have a role to play at the point of origin. Currently, there are very few legal avenues for African migrants to come to Europe. If European nations provided more safe opportunities for migration, through temporary labor visas for example, migrants might be less willing to chance a sea crossing.

For now, though, politicians across Europe seem more likely to use the plight of the MV Aquarius to their advantage than to think of reforming their migration policies. And that means more migrants will continue to board rubber dinghies in the hopes of being picked up by a humanitarian vessel destined for Europe.

June 12, 2018 at 11:26PM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

[festivalists]

In the mood for Transylvania

With the Romanian TIFF slowly but surely emerging as a must stop for every film professional, not just for the ones curious about local cinema, we are happy to offer you Patrick Holzapfel's notes on the contemplative week he spent in Transylvania. Just like last year, he shares his experience entering the cinephilia space-time continuum, only this time peeking far beyond the snows of Sieranevada.

It is odd to be writing again. I wonder how one can come back to a place one has been before, as the same or a different person, watching the same or different films. How often do we have to come to a place until the memories connected with it become real again? Festivals in general give the impression of being always changing, while they seem to be the same from year to year. Cluj-Napoca, it was again. The huge Transylvania International Film Festival which would once again prove that you do not need many cinemas to project films.

I have seen it, and like last year it greeted me with rain and sticky weather. Like with so many festivals, the trip is part of the experience. Especially when being able to do it by car. Why? Well, because you might win a spring screen wash for your car at a Romanian gas station (I asked “Why did I win?” and the answer “Because you tank!”), or you can witness a dog not only running on the street in front of cars but doing it in circles in a roundabout. Moreover, for the first time in my life I had to pass through a mudslide while a policeman was observing it and shrugging his shoulders. In my imagination, I was swept away from the mud. Then I arrived in Cluj-Napoca with my muddy car. I was very happy to own a spring screen wash. From my hotel room I could see the whole town. Traces of the sun behind the clouds.

Why do I write about these matters that do not seem to be related to cinema? It is because I think they are related to cinema. Traveling to a foreign country is always about comparing it to images one has of it. In terms of cinema, this means you can see who is a “documentary filmmaker” and who does not care about the real world. Documentary filmmakers, like Christian Petzold, Thomas Heise, or Angela Schanelec in Germany, give an image of a country that holds true when you travel there. There is something you know about a country without ever having been there. Something cinema knows. It is not facts but sensibilities, and it is memories becoming material. In the case of Romania, it seemed to me again, the absurdities are very well depicted by cinema, the beauty and poetry are not.

However, I know of someone who would have jumped right into the mudslide: Buster Keaton. I decided to open my personal festival with him as the war – a so-called cine-concert with Diallèle accompanying THE GENERAL (1926). The musical trio with its wreaking sounds focussed on the idea of movement in the film as opposed to the idea of gags. It is an approach that works particularly well with THE GENERAL, because the speed of the film is its oxygen. Oh, this cross-cutting splendor. The music was taking the side of the machines, not of Keaton. Due to that, the actor seemed even more out of place than he is anyway. It was a rather nice way to start the festival even if the digital copy seemed to be a Blu-Ray (maybe it was that was just the bad quality of projection in the Student's Culture House, but it certainly was not projected from film).

Some thoughts on silence. There was very little of it in the theatres here in Cluj-Napoca. It was a cell phone paradise. Nobody seemed to bother. Sounds and lights everywhere. Is it too much for a festival to ask people to shut down their mobiles during screenings?

Another silence gone – Šarūnas Bartas. His cinema tells the story of a frustration, the frustration with words. Whereas in his first works he stunningly avoided them, now he has become some sort of prophet of the non-speaking. It is a paradox, though, as his characters talk a lot about not-talking. But his latest film FROST (2017) is much more than that. It is a journey into questions about the inability of touching and the impossibility of truth. Nevertheless, what remains is the absence of silence. Yet, silence is resistance as it is shown in Jean-Pierre Melville’s beautiful and cruel THE SILENCE OF THE SEA / LE SILENCE DE LA MER (1949), part of the director's retrospective at the festival. In the first row a young lady was sitting with a laptop as a live-subtitling device. The light of that screen (why does she have to sit there?) were louder than the words of the film.

I had to face it: Cluj was loud and joyous again. It was not a cathedral of cinema, nothing holy here, just people enjoying cinema. In the festival trailer, a guy eats cabbage and afterwards an alien-like creature bursts out of his stomach.

So, in the morning I sat down in a park close to my hotel. There were some ducks here, an old lady was picking leaves from the trees, many lovers here, they did what lovers do. It was almost silent. I tried to think about what I had been seeing so far: a lot of noise, some silence.

Interlude. What it takes to show films in Cluj-Napoca, present them as a big event, and pay for hotel rooms for people like me:

Drink some Staropramen or Sâmburești wine, pay for it with your Mastercard, or get some money at Raiffeisen Bank. That is how your day should start. While you are at it, go to McDonald's, they even have a parking spot where you can put your Mercedes, baby. At McDonald's they show HBO, or TV5Monde should you prefer French. After eating a cheeseburger and having beautiful talks about the arts with representatives of the Ministry of Culture as well as some big shots from Creative Europe, you can fill in some gas at a MOL. It is easy, and you are also doing something for the culture, as they faithfully tell you in their commercial. Maybe some Nespresso for take-away. However, please be careful and wash your clothes only with Persil. I can not bare any other detergent.

And don’t forget to write to me. You can use DHL. You can also add the beautiful images you made with your Nikon. I could digitize them and watch them on my brand new BenQ LCD monitor. You could also send them digitally. Don’t you own a Samsung mobile phone that makes even better images? You could also call me with it. Internet should not be a problem with UPC. Neither is light with E.ON, neither is water supply with Water Coman SOMEŞ S.A. I guess you have everything you need? If there is anything you miss, you can also go to M@dd Electronics.

On Romanian TV they said “I love Cluj!” The ambassadors and other inspiring people from the world of institutes are also there. I could see them walk on television. Don’t hesitate to drink some Jameson Irish Whiskey with them. They are nice. Don’t drink too much. I heard AQUA Carpatica is better for your health. Maybe when you become friends with them you can also buy a Tenaris pipeline together. There was a James Bond film with Pierce Brosnan where they had lots of fun in such a pipeline. If you want to feel more beautiful, I recommend Avon, it is “the company for women.” Should anthing happen in the pipeline, or anywhere else, Aegon will be there for you.

Cinema, I’m lovin’ it.

The emptiness of the Ethnographic Museum in Cluj-Napoca reminded me of an absence. It is not an absence that is connected with something or someone in particular, but one of those absences one feels in the soul while looking at things. As I walked through a building that contained the peasant history of the region in instruments, clothes, and decor, everything seemed to be so touchable and so far away. In a brave and weak second, I could not resist – though it was forbidden, I put my finger on one of these dresses, feeling the colors under my fingertips, the material with my skin, yet, the history seemed gone. A peculiar sensation that even got stronger when I felt that looking at huge photographies of people actually wearing those clothes, or working with those instruments, spoke a lot more to me than the touch. Is this, I asked myself, the price you pay for watching too many movies, or just for living in this world? The images showed eyes of people looking into the camera, there was joy and poverty, struggle and beauty. They were stronger, in a way even more present than the objects. I could only understand the weight of these instruments, their function, and beauty while I was looking at the photographs. As if I was blind for the real thing. However, I was wondering, what is real about those instruments and clothes without people?

After a dream, I woke up to a screening of CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ / NESFÂRŞIT (2007) by Cristian Nemescu, a film I had known already and loved. It was presented as a tragic and sad anniversary screening. Sad because director Nemescu died in a car crash while working on the post-production of this film. It tells the story of a meeting between a Romanian village and American soldiers passing through. It is at the same time a political statement, a light and romantic comedy, a coming-of-age film, a drama, a western, and an exploration about different forms of resistance. Due to rain and other issues, the screening started at midnight. So in the middle of the night, all the leaves were brown, and the sky was grey. It was uplifting and deeply touching at the same time. Again, I was wondering what spoke to me so much in this film. Is it finding oneself in those images, narratives? Is it really all about identification? I am not happy with it, I did not want to go to cinema to see myself on the screen.

As it is asked in the Golden Bear winner ON BODY AND SOUL / TESTRŐL ÉS LÉLEKRŐL (2017) by Ildikó Enyedi, what happens if two people see the same image, maybe look into the same mirror in a dream? Do they maybe become blind for the real thing, or do they only project themselves on the dreams of another person?

It was a day without structure. Cinema swallowed memories.

The Romanian Days had started. This line-up is the festival's flagship, because Romanian cinema keeps being exciting. I watched new films by Adrian Sitaru and Călin Peter Netzer, as well as many average to bad shorts. Sitaru’s latest offers a moral dilemma deeply concerned with the ethics of journalism and image-making. When you try to make people who suffered unjustly speak, and you know that the act of speaking makes them suffer, what do you do?

It reminded me of a note in one of my old notebooks: “Is filming stealing (time)?”

The issue of realism in Romanian cinema has been discussed on (too) many occasions. Yet, it catches the eye how certain ways of camera movement, color grading, or sound design are not connected to moral positions anymore. They are mere style. Due to that, every little change from what one seems to know comes like a surprise. There are not many surprises.

In the morning, the cleaning lady of my hotel took away my card, she came back and gave it to me. While arriving at my room late in the evening, the card did not work. I went to the desk, and they gave me another card, telling me the one I had was for a different room. I like the idea of a hotel where people have to find their room, because the cards / keys do not tell. I was sleeping in the wrong bed, maybe, like a baby that was given to another mother.

Flowers in the Japanese Gardens, some ducks searching for cover under a sunlit bridge, children screaming and scaring away the flowers. The flowers can not run. Yet they whisper to each other about hiding. Leaves falling to the ground, searching for a shadow. Someone let a tree die, here. It looks beautiful. The Botanical Garden in Cluj-Napoca is truly magnificent. I went there in order to hide, to look at water lilies reflecting suns.

Later I was going to see one of my favorite flowers in last year’s cinema – the one the protagonist is holding lovingly, moribundly close to his chest in Radu Jude’s SCARRED HEARTS / INIMI CICATRIZATE (2016). He is on his way to his love, he wants to give it to her. He bids farewell to the world and tries to live in it for the last breathe close to the sea. He is blooming but still dying. It is a film that exceeds wrinkles of suffering and instead gives an approach to death that consists of anger, desperation, and beauty. It is also concerned with the gap opening between what is said and seen, what is hidden and embraced by history and those writing it. Since I have seen it, I want to read Max Blecher’s writings. The film is based on his life and takes from his novels. I started reading his novel with a title that seems rather fittingly for my festival endeavors, Adventures in Immediate Irreality.

How an attempt concerned with history and its perception can be done rather clumsily showed CAMERA OBSCURA (2016), a documentary on cine-clubs during Ceaușescu that had above all a terrible soundtrack. It showed people telling redundantly their memories. In the end, it communicated its very clear message in titles – these cine-clubs are looked at as if they were pure propaganda instruments but they were much more and harm was done to their essential documentation of communist life in Romania during and after the Revolution. What is to be done with those films that only consist of what they talk about?

The flowers in the Botanical Garden had no messages. So before the screening of the not quite fantastic but decent A FANTASTIC WOMAN / UNA MUJER FANTÁSTICA (2017), I returned there. But all the flowers were in hiding. They were telling me, like Gustave Courbet, that we can only see what gets lit from the sun. I don't know... a festival can be such a sun, can't it? However, I am wondering, what if a sun chooses where to shine on?

There was more shadow than light on my last day in Cluj-Napoca. Nevertheless, I could see more than in the previous days.

Part of the bright shadows came from the long-buried Romanian classic THE ONE HUNDRED BILL / 100 DE LEI (1973) by Mircea Săucan. The film was shown in a newly restored copy that was so black and so white that Philippe Garrel, wherever he was, must have felt an itching in his left eye while watching it. Fittingly, it tells a rather dark story about two brothers, one a successful actor, the other – a drifter. They fall for the same girl but the film is, again, about more than that. It is about the unreality of dependency. The sound seems to be miles away from the image. People talk, yes, but the post-production voices are not meant to stick to the reality of the image. Instead they project themselves onto something which we know from being too late, a sensation close to an echo or something that resonates in a desire to be somewhere else. It is a bizarre and hypnotic film that must be watched again. It was followed by Radu Jude’s latest documentary THE DEAD NATION / ŢARA MOARTĂ (2017), which consists entirely of photographs and found-footage voice-over, telling or not telling about the history of anti-semitism in Romania during at the time of WWII. So, after all those flowers and doubts, cinema got me back when it started to open gaps between what we can and can’t see.

My week in Transylvania ends here. After a festival there is much to tell. It always struck me as funny to travel in order to sit through something that basically feels the same everywhere yet makes you travel again. It is like a double exposure of traveling. During a festival, we are at many places at the same time. One can keep the city or cinema at a distance. So, the sensation of memories intertwining with visits to places and films will always be distorted. It is highly dependent on the rhythm. TIFF has the rhythm of too much, too fast. Still, sometimes such an overdose allows for sudden freedom. It is like when Bresson wrote that the sound-film invented silence – a festival like this might remind us the true value of a single film and the time we spend with it. Curating at TIFF is looked at from the perspective of offering, bringing something, maybe everything. It is not about taste, morals, or values, it is about the market.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, though, because it might work and be understood like a convention for world cinema in Romania. Rarely have I visited a festival where so much is done to include the town and even its surroundings into the programming and the event as such. It feels like everything breathes TIFF, and the young audience shows that such an attitude can give the impression of cinema being alive. There is no possibility you have not heard of TIFF if you are local. Some beautiful encounters and impressions derive from such a presence.

However, the question remains if it is cinema that is alive or the event it is engraved in. Cluj-Napoca once again proved to be an island where such doubts feel out of place. It quite clearly tells people to have fun, to celebrate, not to repine. Considering developments in the Romanian industry bureaucracy, such a place is clearly needed and embraced by many. The festival is young, it wants to break with certain patterns, it is moving on where others hesitate. It looks bravely and sometimes blindly into the future. The beautiful thing about this is that it creates enthusiasm, the bad thing is that it does not ask you to look, it does not tell you anything about cinema as a festival. With this I mean there is no idea of how to look at films, how to project films, how to discuss films, or how to program films.

But don’t think too much. Take a # and dance me to the future of cinema.

If you are a film industry professional, you can watch films from Transylvania IFF on Festival Scope.