The subjective side of the story is not a privilege of cinema.

Novels and paintings unfold the individual's view of the drama of the world more precisely and in more detail than the apparatus that throws images.

But in the film, what words and painted colors claim only more or less believably becomes evident and therefore inescapable.

The world really looks like the heroine or hero sees it.

Subjectivity acquires the semblance of the objective.

Deception takes on the luster of truth.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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The film "Un año, una noche" by Catalan director Isaki Lacuesta depicts the attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in November 2015 through the eyes of a couple who survived the night of blood.

Céline and Ramón were able to hide in the cloakroom while Islamist assassins shot ninety people.

But the two are not happy that they got away.

Ramón suffers from panic attacks and Céline, trying to forget what happened, loses her joy in life, in her job, in drinking and partying, in sex, even in Ramón.

The images of the Bataclan keep popping up in their minds, the escape from the hall, the panic in hiding, the endless wait for liberation.

The moment of crisis comes when Céline, in the facility for socially disadvantaged young people,

where she works, gets into a fight with a young Arab.

He provokes her, she hits him, then collapses.

It turns out that seeing Ramón lying on the ground that night, she thought he was dead.

That's why she can no longer continue the life she previously led with him.

Only after a separation does she find her way back to him.

The story gets stuck in the one-dimensional

The film's problem lies in the fact that it cannot find a visual equivalent for this inner shock, this delayed collapse of the ego.

Although he returns to the scene of the slaughter many times in fuzzy re-enacted shots, his images do not connect with everyday life into which the survivors of the catastrophe try to immerse themselves.

Once you see Ramón going to a museum after the attack.

But the art doesn't speak to him, the statues leave him cold, instead he stuffs his stomach full in the café.

In a film that would have been more aware of its aesthetic devices, this could have been a big scene.

With Isaki Lacuesta, on the other hand, the camera always stays on the surface of what is happening, watching the characters talking, drinking, arguing, sobbing and reconciling,

without really taking their perspective.

Even the great Noémie Merlant (who played the painter in "Portrait of a Young Woman on Fire") and her partner Nahuel Biscayart can't help that "Un año, una noche" gets stuck in a one-dimensionality that just doesn't do justice to this topic at all will.

Maggie Peren's The Passport Forger, which is being screened in Berlin as part of the Berlinale Special Gala series, tells the story of Holocaust survivor Cioma Schönhaus.

Twenty-year-old Schönhaus was left alone in Berlin when his parents were deported to the Majdanek extermination camp in the summer of 1942.

First he worked in an armaments factory, then he forged identity cards in his own workshop, which he distributed through a network of resistance fighters and members of the Confessing Church.

In 1943, Schönhaus, who was already on the Gestapo wanted list, managed to escape to Switzerland with a forged service card.

Life in Nazi Berlin is almost normal

Maggie Peren's film has a clear concept.

It consists in the fact that he consistently develops the drama from the point of view of his protagonist.

This means that in "The Passport Forger" there are no seas of flags, no rolling tanks, no SS roars and (with one exception) no Allied bombings, but people in apartments and buses, dancing evenings, neighbors with wavering loyalties, police officers without zeal.

Life is almost normal, and Cioma (Louis Hofmann) clings to that normality.

The food stamps he gets for forging his documents ensure him a comfortable living, and when he meets Gerda (Luna Wedler), something like a snapshot of a future without swastikas flashes for a moment.

But the two don't get together

because Gerda is also Jewish and relies on patrons in uniform.

Love, friendship, the good life, they are all overtaken by the fury of disappearance.

"The Passport Forger" doesn't look like the usual German war panorama from the Nazi era.

That is why one follows the story with surprised curiosity.

It may be that there is also a bit of self-deception in this, because we will never be able to relive what Cioma Schönhaus really felt at the time.

But for now, it's enough that we see the world through his eyes.