BORDER (Gräns)
Sweden, Denmark, 2018 - 108'
Director: Ali Abbasi / Screenplay: Ali Abbasi, Isabella Eklöf, John Ajvide Lindqvist / Cast: Eva Melander, Eero Milonoff, Jörgen Thorsson Ann Petrén / Cinematography: Nadim Carlsen
Awards and nominations: Border won Best Film award at 2018 Festival de Cannes's Un Certain Regard section. The film received 1 Oscar nomination and 4 European Film Awards nominations.
Tina is a custom agent equipped with an exceptional nose for people emotions. Traveler after traveler, she feels their fear, shame, guilt. Tina senses everything and is never wrong. At least until the day Vore crosses the border and eludes her nose, exercising on her an attractiveness that she doesn’t understand. With a criminal investigation going on in the background, Tina lets all restraints go and indulges in a wild relationship that soon reveals her true nature. An existential choc that will force her to choose between integration or exclusion.
Adaptation of the homonymous novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, that already inspired Let the right one in by Tomas Alfredson, where vampirism was assuming everyday shapes, Border is measured with another legendary creature which are found in fairy tales and imaginary of Scandinavian mythology. Neanderthal face in a world full of ferocious Sapiens, Tina is characterised by a primitive difference that catches the viewers’s eye and progressively reveals to be ontological. A difference that the protagonist becomes aware of during the intrigue.
Ali Abbasi realises a surprising and visionary film that troubles and fascinates at the same time, mixing social chronicle and fantastic atmosphere. Twists and turns are never purposeless in Border, interrogating the notion of humanity, animal and their boundaries. If human nature is monstrous, all we got are monsters to lecture us, just like Guillermo del Toro’s gothic fairy tales.
The border issue, raised from the title and concretely assumed with the port custom, resolves itself in Tina’s attempt to break down mental barriers towards other people. Strong and unexpected as its protagonist - a powerful Eva Melander disguised by the facial protheses - Border shocks and destabilises the spectator, renewing the appeal to tolerance. While Europe is fencing itself behind its borders, Abbasi’s film encourages the opening of all borders with a delirious effectiveness.
Ali Abbasi. After spending the first 20 years of his life in Iran, he studied architecture in Sweden before moving to his current home in Copenhagen, where he studied at National Film School of Denmark. He directed the short film M for Markus and two feature films Shelley and Border, of which he signed also the screenplay.
"I come from literature, I learned how to write stories before getting interested in cinema. When I was young I even used to think that watching a movie was a loss of time. Then I understood that cinema is the perfect medium to observe society through a parallel universe because I'm interested in all that goes beyond appearence and facades" (Ali Abbasi).
