Berlin Review: Michael Koch’s ‘A Piece Of Sky’
14.02.2022 - 19:57
/ deadline.com
“Do you believe in God?,” Julia asks her stepfather on his sickbed. He looks down at her little face. Not much captures his interest these days. “I think so,” he mumbles. Julia continues, undeterred. “I believe in something else,” she says firmly. “The sun, mountains, animals, trees. And snow.” Marco says nothing — he never said much, even at his most hale and hearty — but his big body seems to soften in acceptance. She’s talking his language.
She is also speaking the language of this film. Michael Koch’s Berlin Film Festival competition entry A Piece Of Sky (Drii Winter) is both beautifully made and a thing of beauty in itself. Every lovely thing you have ever seen on a box of Lindt is here: old chalets and timber barns, snow-capped Alps, grizzled Swiss farmers in jerkins embroidered with edelweiss. The clouds that mass in the sky over the green crags. And, just as you might have imagined as you went for the hazelnut praline, the sound of music. Cowbells tinkle. There is even a neatly choir that pops up to sing folk songs that comment on the story, like a Greek chorus raised on cheese and chocolate.
And yet — and yet! — there is not a second of schmaltz here. We see beauty, but it is never romanticized. The choir’s songs reflect a tough, grinding life: there is the story deluge that washes a man away, a lament for the loss of love “as painful as death” and then the relief of death itself, the “blessed rest,” when the body wears out. Mountain farming is hard and relentless. Of course there are machines to help these days, but the hay on these steep slopes must still be cut by hand with scythes. The cows are loved, but if they stop giving milk they go to the knacker’s yard. That is the reality. Everything, man or beast,
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