Joy is sitting at the table with ten men.

Her life is at stake, but she is not allowed to have a say.

The board of directors of the hospital decides whether she can have an abortion to terminate her second pregnancy, from which she could die due to heart failure.

Joy's chances of survival are fifty percent.

That's enough for the men at the table.

One by one votes no.

Before the session ends, Joy wears her shirt, grabs her homemade cookies, and slams the door out of the room.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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In 1968, abortion without a strict medical indication was still illegal in the United States.

The American director Phyllis Nagy shows what that meant in her film “Call Jane”.

When Joy (Elizabeth Banks), the housewife from suburban Chicago, gets stuck, she calls a number she saw on a street billboard.

The emergency helper Jane, who is advertised on the note, is not a real person, Joy notes, but a code name for a group of women around the activist Virginia (Sigourney Weaver), who organize abortions with the help of a fake doctor.

With the Janes, as they call themselves, Joy not only gets her abortion, but also a motivation for her life.

From now on, she decides, she wants to help other women who are like her or much worse.

Ice-cold euphoria

It's a good thing that "Call Jane" and Andreas Dresen's film "Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush" were screened close together at the Berlinale.

Because that's how one film could criticize the other, without any intention, just because it existed.

A festival is more than a bunch of films, it's a mosaic, a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces come together in the eye of the beholder.

And so it happened that Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush looked bad in comparison to Call Jane — not because its subject, Murat Kurnaz's mother's years-long legal battle to free her son, wrongfully held in Guantanamo, might have been less important.

It's because Dresen and his screenwriter Laila Stieler didn't manage to turn the chronology of events into something like a story.

That chronology, it is true, is long - 1786 days in total, many of which the film faithfully enumerates.

But "Rabiye Kurnaz" seems long-winded because its heroine, played by the German-Turkish entertainer Meltem Kaptan, does not change over the course of the story, unlike the housewife Joy in "Call Jane".

She remains the same warm-hearted and unflappable mother she was in the beginning, and Alexander Scheer as lawyer Docke assists her with the ice-cold euphoria of the textbook Hanseatic.