At The Berlin Film Festival Bansky’s Spray Cinema By Rita Di Santo

Bansky & Noah Baumabach

A spray can and a good wall is all Bansky needs to express his artistic vision of life. After the walls of London, New York, L.A. and Beijing, he has chosen the poetically apt Berlin for his first feature. “Exit Trough The Gift Shop” has Thierry; a French filmmaker as the protagonist. He is obsessed with filming, going everywhere with his camera.

This obsession to filming reality is born out of his mother’s death. Thierry uses film as a technique to keep people alive. Moreover, Thierry seeks to discover and capture the truth of the street artists’ world on film. He passionately attaches his electronic eyes to the streets artists one by one for eight years. This disorder extends to his secret dream to film the most powerful contemporary street artist –Bansky! In the end, Thierry’s obsession wins and he becomes Bansky best friend, thought it becomes clear that Thierry’s documentary will never end. Bansky turns the camera on the owner. Thierry’s obsession is confronted. Bansky encourages his friend to stop filming and to try to be a street artist. Without much experience, Thierry starts to produce and promote his work becoming so successful that he designs the lates album cover of Madonna. This appears the realization of suppressed artistic expression.
The movie is a mosaic of compiled material that is funny, insightful, fast and tight, that tells of the crazy world of streets art and how it has developed from being illegal, non profit, to one of the art world’s richest businesses. Bansky´s documentary shows his talent in cinema is right at the top with a refreshing sense of freedom and originality.

Secondly, the US academy award-nominated screenwriter/director Noah Baumbach brings a peak at the droll lives of the family “Greenberg”.

Roger Greenberg is a former LA musician and New Yorker carpenter looking for a meaning to life. He is house minding his brother’s (Phillip) L.A. house while Phillip, with his family, are in Vietnam on business. Roger has the telephone number of Florence, the Greenberg family’s a personal assistant. Roger is a man in a mid-life crises in the tradition of the American novels by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike. It is a different different look at L.A. as a remarkable and, unique place where people do actually live and raise families. Additionally, this movie is infused with a sense of melancholic Robert Altman and John Cassavetes in the loneliness of Roger and Florence though redeemed in their later burgeoning relationship.
by Rita Di Santo