Irish famine tale, Huppert, M.I.A. shine in Berlin spotlight
BERLIN — The first film to ever detail the Great Irish Famine and two very different women, France’s iconic Isabelle Huppert and the Sri Lankan/London rapper activist M.I.A., took center stage at the Berlinale over the weekend.
“Essentially the most important story in Irish history is the famine of 18451852 and no one ever made a film that explored that world or told any part of that story before,” said director and cowriter Lance Daly of his “Black 47,” which had its world premiere out of competition.
“Everyone has heard of the famine,” Daly added, “but it’s hard to find the story you can tell that an audience can bear sitting through that also addresses the horrors of that time.”
Because no one wants to see, much less finance, a movie in which everyone starves to death, Daly created a revenge story that’s been compared to Rambo or Clint Eastwood movies.
“The action and revenge elements open it to an audience, but it’s very hard to do that story justice. That was what I was most nervous about. How do you portray that world of suffering and desperation, things that are beyond our comprehension?”
Huppert, a best actress Oscar nominee last year for “Elle,” is again a woman who refuses to be a victim as the titular “Eva,” a prostitute who becomes a client’s deadly obsession.
The French thriller is based on a James Hadley Chase novel.
“She isn’t the typical femme fatale,” Huppert said of her Eva. “I was surprised after reading the James Hadley Chase novel, the way he described her is very modern, more subtle, complex.”
Complex doesn’t begin to describe the documentary profile “Matangi/Maya/ M.I.A.” of the Sri Lankan/ London rapper, political provocateur and pop star. The film is a collage that covers Matangi Arulpragasam’s life from her childhood, when her absent father led the Tamil independence movement, to her London celebrity, Oscar nomination for the song “Paper Planes” and controversies.
Her film had been in the works for six years, compressed to 95 minutes from more than 1,000 hours of material, before she saw it first in Sundance and now Berlin.
“For me, the initial shock of having so much personal stuff in the film was very difficult,” she said. “I have to treat it like therapy, free therapy, and let it go.”