A lot of things happen every day at Orly airport in Paris. Somebody loses his coat due to carelessness, a chance encounter in the departure hall changes into a candid talk, someone is enchanted by a person met by chance, a mother and her son exchange their love stories and a 9-day-old new born child is going to make his first flight ever. However, in times of terrorist attacks, all flights can be suspended and passengers can be forced to go home with their luggage.

In her 6^th film, Angela Schanelec- the representative of the New Berlin School, presents a usual day at one of the European airports. She doesn’t give us sensation after sensation, nor does she create most incredible situations that could happen in such a place. With the use of a few conversations that could be carried by any of us, and with the use of some situations that could also happen to us, the director shows the quality and abundance of relations between people waiting for their flights. She attains the objective through stark, often not very dynamic, but clear-cut scenes. The way the film was made is worth mentioning. Depending on what we observe at a given moment, the camera operator increases the depth of field and framing scale in order to give the full airport atmosphere of the film. ‘The New Berlin School’ films are often compared with the French New Wave, not without a reason. Angela Schanelec’s film could be compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s first works.

Oskar Roehler once said that films made by the representatives of the Berlin School are stark, slow and not showing anything interesting. If this is the case with ‘Orly’, which is a copy of only a part of the whole human relations that could take place among 30 millions of passengers of the Orly airport, then by no means it could be a drawback.

Kamil Stopnicki – a spectator at TWO RIVERSIDES Festival