“A must-see film.”
In his sophomore feature, and drawing on perfectly cinematic shades of grey, German-Iranian filmmaker Faraz Shariat puts together a tale of good vs. evil, and how each of those qualities can often exist side by side in human beings. After some years spent directing television series, he returns to cinema with Prosecution, a must-see film that screens as part of the Berlinale Panorama this year.
The story kicks off when we meet German-Korean state prosecutor Seyo Kim (played by Chen Emilie Yan), a self-assured, well-spoken legal mind, telling a defendant to wear his jacket so as to cover his t-shirt displaying the inflammatory letters “HKN KRZ.” For those of us who don’t know (I had to look it up, I’ll admit) those letters stand for “Hakenkreuz,” the German word for “swastika,” and the defendant’s t-shirt leaves little to the imagination with its red-and-white lettering on black background, meant to evoke the colors of the Nazi flag.
From the very first image in the film, and the ominous sounds of thunder and rain before those images even appear on the screen, Shariat has set the tone for a captivating, tense movie to come. He also creates a film that feels a bit like a Hitchcock thriller and featuring the claustrophobic style of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men. And without giving away any spoilers, Prosecution quickly turns into a quiet masterpiece, albeit one where noises sometimes have cameos.
Soon after the above-mentioned trial scene, Kim goes riding on her bicycle through a park near her home. We assume this is Bavaria, where the weather is mild and the buildings quite stark from the outside — yet Kim’s home is cool, spacious, and sophisticated on the inside, even though she’s recently moved there. Chalk it up to a woman’s touch. While riding in the park, the petite brunette is attacked. First, she is thrown from her bike by a male rider who purposely crashes into her, and then two Molotov cocktails — bottles containing acid and some kind of flammable liquid — are hurled at her from an overpass, setting her jacket on fire. In a knuckle-biting moment she manages to get the burning jacket off and when the police arrive, she immediately switches from shocked victim to investigator, donning a hazmat suit and asking those around her to “secure the scene.”
It is in that scene that Kim’s resolve first becomes visible. Her ability to ignore the pain — she is partly charred, and I use that word purposely, on her neck — and immediately kick into prosecutor mode is remarkable, and it is there we find our admiration for her character. But she’s also someone who will stop at nothing to get what she needs, even stealing a colleague’s key, with disastrous consequences, and issuing a subpoena to make sure an unwilling witness shows up in court. She is a strong woman, in all her contradictions and nuances, and while we may not always like her, we need to reckon with her resolve and her female intuition.
On the other side of the story are Kim’s “enemies,” the right-wing supremacists who believe that Germany is for Germans and haven’t taken kindly to the “Wilkommenskultur” (Welcome Culture) of Angela Merkel’s 2015 policies. These men (and also women) are everyday people, not particularly scary in appearance, and in some ways could even be considered decent-looking businessmen — or fellow law-abiding, and administering, citizens. And therein, in this subtlety, lies Shariat’s brilliance, which doesn’t always cut a straight line through good and bad and allows us, the audience, to shift and cringe along with the story and the imperfections of all its protagonists.
At times Kim almost turns into a Ninja-like heroine, with her loud-motored, bulletproof, armored Dodge car, her black leather jacket, newly cropped homemade haircut and personal resolve. She stops at nothing and faces down her adversaries with a coolness that is enviable, especially for a woman in today’s often predatory society. Yet, when she does stop and finds her fear, her humanity is palpable and we understand her deeply. She is a fully fledged female character, down to her alternative sexual orientation – the result of Shariat’s collaboration with screenwriter Claudia Schaefer and the input of Sun-Ju Choi and Jee-Un Kim, as the filmmaker admits in his director’s notes.
The supporting cast includes Julia Jentsch as Alexandra Tiedemann, the attorney who helps her fight her case in court; Arnd Klawitter as her boss who may or may not be who he appears to be; and Sebastian Urzendowsky as Kim’s unlikely ally OStA Quant. Prosecution was shot by cinematographer Lotta Kilian, who brings a ‘woman-on-the-inside of an intimate story’ feel to the film. The sound design by Henning Hein is also noteworthy because it keeps us constantly on the edge. Together, they create a tense and beautiful story that stays with the viewer long after the film has finished screening.
(c) Image copyright – Lotta Kilian / Jünglinge Film