First-look reviews from the Berlin film festival

Perhaps the human link is missing, but Werner Herzog's 3D documentary about prehistoric cave art asks new things of film Andrew Pulver guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 February 2011 17.57 GMT Frames of mind ... Werner Herzog, here on location in the Ardèche, has returned to introspective documentaries with Cave of Forgotten Dreams

A few hours after Wim Wenders's somewhat unforgiving film about Pina Bausch unspooled in Berlin, so too did another 3D documentary – this one directed by Wenders's contemporary and sometime rival in the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s, Werner Herzog. Though all his work tends to blur the line between fiction and reality, Herzog has been focusing on making documentaries for the last two decades – roughly parallelling the collapse in quality of his "acted" films (though the recent Bad Lieutenant and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done may have arrested the decline). Cave of Forgotten Dreams is fully worthy to stand alongside Herzog's non-fiction masterworks, such as Grizzly Man, My Best Fiend and Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

Its ostensible subject is the recently discovered Chauvet cave paintings, located in an underground chamber in the Ardèche in southern France. Hermetically sealed for millennia after a landslide buried the entrance, they are in preternaturally perfect condition, and all the more spectacular for being encased in staggeringly beautiful rock formations.

Herzog and his crew have a strictly limited time-frame to get their footage, are heavily restricted in terms of lighting, and are in any case confined to a narrow metal walkway constructed to link the numerous cave chambers. But Herzog is nothing if not used to adversity, and makes something of a virtue of all this in his gravelly voiceover, pointing up the difficulty with which the footage is obtained. Moreover, the bobbing torch-beams and minimal battery-lights are in fact perfect for illuminating the underground images, giving some sense of how the originals would have been seen when they were first made and helping the horses, lions and rhinoceroses almost surge off the cave wall.

But more than anything else, the restrictive conditions have a most unexpected result: they energise the 3D photography far beyond anything I've seen before. So far, film-makers have tended to go deep-focus and widescreen, packing the frame with oddities and angles or popping things into the viewers' eyeline. By necessity Herzog has to take the opposite position, and the effect is simply stunning. Rock deposits jump out as if they are filmed in extreme close-up, details of paintings are almost tangible as they trace the lines of jagged stones, and the labyrinthine caves stretch away from the camera with dizzying depth.

All that's missing from Cave of Forgotten Dreams is what you might call the human dimension. Herzog likes to grapple with the extremes of consciousness and experience and, despite that fantastic title, he fails to make much headway here. Not that he doesn't try: in his voiceover he offers some wonderfully Teutonic observations about the 30,000-year-old paintings – "Are we crocodiles who look back into an abyss of time?" – but perhaps the living material, the scientists and archaeologists, aren't as responsive as he'd like. His pitch is to infer that dreams infect us all, and are the link that spans the 30,000 years to the original cave-painters. Only one paleontologist, swathed in reindeer hide, seems to take it on board – but then you realise he's simply modelling how ice-agers would have dressed, nothing that Tony Robinson wouldn't have done.

Be that as it may, Herzog has conjured up something magical here, perhaps able to speak for itself in a way that makes his customary philosophising unnecessary. It's almost like watching the reinvention of the cinematic medium. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Wednesday 12 September 2012 The Independent Film Review

There were sandstorms. The budget was stretched. The child actress lost a tooth during shooting, wreaking havoc with the continuity. Haifaa Al Mansour's tales from the battlefield of her debut feature film sound familiar. No one said making movies was easy. Then, there was the small matter that she was the first female director making the first ever feature film in Saudi Arabia, a country where cinemas are still illegal.

"It's such a segregated country. People don't like to see women out there, working with men," the diminutive director observes. "It was difficult because you really want to be with your actors. This relationship between a director and an actor is something mystic. You don't want something to interrupt you. I have to tell you, I jumped a lot out of that van!"

In Saudi Arabia itself, Wadjda has an ambivalent status. On the one hand, it's a forbidden movie. On the other, it was made with the blessing (and financial backing) of Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. The film wasn't strictly illegal; this wasn't guerrilla film-making. However, the director makes it very clear that it simply wouldn't have been tolerated for a woman to be seen in a busy public place, controlling a film crew and calling the shots.

"You're not allowed to mix in the streets," she declares. "In some neighbourhoods, there was no question – I couldn't get out of the van. It is so conservative." There is one sequence set in a shopping centre. Yes, Mansour had permission to shoot there but she also knew not to press her luck by staying too long. "We had to be careful and finish very quickly before people got annoyed. If a conservative person gets annoyed, he might cause problems."

The film tells the story of a 10-year-old girl desperate to buy a shiny new bicycle. That may sound whimsical and maudlin but to get hold of the bike, Wadjda must defy the religious authorities and her school teachers. In a deeply patriarchal society like Saudi Arabia where women (as Mansour pointedly puts it) don't have an identity, young girls aren't expected to be seen riding bikes. Wadjda's struggle mirrors that of Mansour herself to get her movie made.

Mansour is the eighth of 12 children ("seven girls and five boys") and grew up in a small town near Riyadh. Her parents were liberal and encouraged her film-making aspirations. "They are very traditional small-town people but they believed in giving their daughters the space to be what they wanted to be. They believed in the power of education and training. They taught us how to work hard."

Before she became a film-maker, Mansour worked in an oil company. No, it wasn't fulfilling. "In the meetings, they would never listen to me. I felt I didn't have a voice. It is such a male-dominated culture. It's not like they were bad or anything. It is just that I was young – and I am little! Nobody would listen."

Desperate to express herself and passionate about film, Mansour took the leap and made a short film. "It was really for me. I just wanted to have a voice." To her amazement, her film, which she shot on a small digital camera, was picked up by several film festivals. "It was called Who? It is about a serial killer who dresses exactly like a woman and kills women. It was a little bit about how half the (Saudi) society is absent because they have no identity."

Early in Mansour's media career, her father received "a lot of emails and letters telling him 'how dare you let your daughter appear on TV and direct films and do unhonourable stuff'! He never listened to the social pressure. Social pressure is very difficult in Saudi Arabia, especially on men. They are supposed to be the guardians, and they are the protectors and have to control their women."

For British viewers, Wadjda, for all its charm and its eventually upbeat ending, can't help but seem like a piece of dystopian sci-fi. Mansour is depicting a society that we can't even begin to understand: a place where women don't drive and aren't even allowed to eat with their menfolk. In one striking scene, the young girls learning sacred texts are told that "during their time of the month" they aren't permitted to touch the Koran.

Mansour's affection for her homeland is self-evident. She is at pains to point out that her film isn't intended as a polemical assault on patriarchy in Saudi Arabia. Rather, it was crafted to be both enjoyable and uplifting. "I want to do stories that are touching and inspiring. I really want to work within the system in Saudi Arabia. I don't want to be an outcast. Saudi Arabia is a very conservative place. I want to do films that make them (the authorities) more relaxed, more tolerant and make them respect women more."

Another point she is keen to stress is that men are victims of the patriarchal system as well as women. They are locked into a pattern of thought and behaviour that leads to the kind of domestic dysfunction that Wadjda depicts.

Like the presence of the Saudi female athletes at the London Olympics, Mansour's film is surely a harbinger of social change. A crowdpleaser, lyrical, tender and funny by turns, Wadjda won over audiences in Venice and looks bound to do the same in Saudi Arabia, too. Even if the film can't be shown in Saudi cinemas, Mansour is confident it will eventually be seen on DVD and TV.

"It is a great moment," the director reflects. "It's very conservative still; it's very difficult. I am not saying that Saudi Arabia is heaven for a woman but I am saying now that people want to hear from Saudi women. So Saudi women need to believe in themselves and break the tradition."

It is one of the most seismic changes the world has ever seen. Across the globe there is an unstoppable march to the cities, powered by new economic realities. But what kind of lives are we creating? And will citizens - and cities - cope with the fierce pressures of this new urban age? Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum and author of a major new report, asks if the city of the future will be a vision of hell or a force for civilised living?