Panorama: Three Times Four

The Daily—

Feb 15, 2022

Nestor Ngbandi Ngouyou and Aaron Koyasoukpengo in Rafiki Fariala’s *We, Students!* (2022)

Four young male friends help each other discover and fully realize their true selves in three otherwise quite disparate films premiering in the Berlinale’s Panorama program. We, Students!, the first film from the Central African Republic to screen at the festival, is twenty-four-year-old Rafiki Fariala’s well-shaped video diary of barely scraping by as an economics student at the University of Bangui. Writer, director, and cinematographer Nicolò Bassetti’s beautifully crafted Into My Name tracks four stories of F to M gender transition over the course of two and a half years. And in Beautiful Beings, Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson (Heartstone) depicts the brutality of growing up in broken homes teetering along the poverty line in Iceland.

Coproductions aside, a handful of documentaries and a single fictional feature, Bassek Ba Kobhio and Didier Ouenangare’s Le silence de la forêt (2003), make up the entire cinematic output of the Central African Republic, a country only just now beginning to find its footing after decades of internal warfare. In 2017, Rafiki Fariala was the youngest of the few candidates selected—around 150 had applied—to take part in a documentary workshop run at the Alliance française in Bangui by Ateliers Varan, an association of filmmakers based in Paris founded with the support of Jean Rouch.

After his first short, You and Me (2017), screened at festivals in Europe and Canada, Fariala spent three years filming his friends and fellow students Aaron, Benjamin, and Nestor as they shared a single dilapidated room and studied for their final exams. Fariala, a musician who scored something of a hit with his 2013 single “Why War?,” frames We, Students! with his a cappella renditions of new songs of struggle and determination. Together, the four tight friends sing joyfully of their faith in God and in each other.

In an overcrowded classroom, a lecturer declares that as capitalism has proven to be a failed system, young Africans have only one thing to call on if they are to survive: “Initiative!” All four friends have plenty, but Nestor is the only one to fail his exam. He’s not wrong to blame rampant corruption at the university, where the black market seems to be the only market, but his friends have to fight to keep him from slipping into bitter despair.

Aaron, in the meantime, is hauled into court by the mother of his pregnant fifteen-year-old girlfriend. The charge is rape, but the young woman insists that her relationship with Aaron is mutually and fully consensual. It’s only after they marry that the mother eventually agrees to settle for a chicken, a goat, and a few household items. Aaron becomes the father of twin girls, and at their baptism, the charismatic pastor seems determined to yell the Holy Spirit into their tiny bodies. We, Students! is a long overdue look at life as it’s lived on the ground in one of the world’s poorest countries.

The strength of Into My Name derives from Nicolò Bassetti’s eagerness to have his four subjects tell their own stories. As Jay Weissberg points out at Film Verdict, Bassetti worked with Gianfranco Rosi on Sacro GRA (2013), the winner of the Golden Lion in Venice, but “has none of that director’s disengaged, othering eye.” Bassetti’s investment here is personal. Into My Name, he says, “sprang from an idea I had with Matteo, one of my three children, a twenty-six-year-old F to M transgender.”

All four men are around the same age as Matteo. When Nico gets off work, he helps his wife run a stunningly picturesque B&B in the hills just outside of Bologna. Andrea experiments more than the others with an array of looks and outfits and types poetry on an Olivetti Valentine. Raff repairs bikes in a shop he co-owns and goes swing dancing with his best friend, Dario. Leo, who, like his girlfriend, studied philology, hosts a podcast and serves as something like the film’s MC. He insightfully narrates moments from the four men’s childhoods and recounts various legal, social, and medical challenges they’ve faced. Ultimately, he looks back on an informal celebration of their transitions at a swimming hole where sunlight dances down a waterfall.

In its opening passages, Beautiful Beings suggests that it will tell the story of Balli (Áskell Einar Pálmason), an outcast relentlessly bullied at school, but it shifts soon enough to Addi (Birgir Dagur Bjarkason), who hangs in the schoolyard with Konni (Viktor Benóný Benediktsson), a bulky fighter who acts before he thinks, and Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frímannsson), a tagalong with the best hair of any of these fourteen-year-olds. Driven by curiosity if not by sympathy, Addi convinces his two friends that their little gang needs to take Balli under its wing.

Careening with nearly unchecked energy from one unexpected turn to the next, Beautiful Beings does not paint a pretty picture of contemporary Iceland. Balli’s home is practically a literal dump, Konni is at war with his father, and Addi’s mother struggles to make ends meet. She’s also deeply into what Addi calls “New Age bullshit”—until he begins having visions that eat away at the thin veil between dreams and reality. And that’s before he and the gang trip out on mushrooms in an inspired and utterly convincing sequence.

Once Guðmundsson has lined up all his pieces, he gives the gang an antagonist in the form of Balli’s returning stepfather, a man as big and nasty as two bears. The inevitable face-off will reveal which friendships last—and which don’t.

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