Given the incendiary information from this 12 months’s version, it could shock you to be taught that the Berlinale is among the many extra logistically easygoing of the main worldwide movie festivals. A part of that is town itself; every far-flung theatre is well-connected by Berlin’s public transit, making even the sleepy, snowy February occasion a relative breeze the place you possibly can watch nice cinema with no care. Then once more, burying your head within the sand and ignoring the headlines goes in opposition to the character of a cinematic melting-pot, so it’s price recounting a few of the controversies surrounding the occasion’s political ties, along with how the films themselves stood out whereas making implicit (and at instances, very express) political statements.
The 76th Berlin Movie Competition obtained off to a rocky begin when Competitors Jury president Wim Wenders—a filmmaker virtually synonymous with town—responded clumsily to questions in regards to the place of politics in cinema, in addition to the genocide in Gaza. The latter has been a serious subject of dialog on the Berlinale because the occasions of October 7th2023, given the German authorities’s army assist within the area and its allegedly elevated affect over the fest itself. Wenders, due to this fact, set an ungainly tone when he stated filmmakers “have to remain out of politics” whereas calling cinema “the counterweight of politics… the other of politics.”
Issues solely escalated from there. Indian writer Arundhati Roy referred to as Wenders’ phrases “unconscionable” earlier than withdrawing from the pageant. Berlinale Director Tricia Tuttle responded with a press release affirming free speech on the occasion, after which 100 main movie personalities signed an open letter condemning the fest for its perceived silence on Gaza and alleged muzzling of artists. Tuttle responded once moreleaving her between a rock and a tough place with these accusations on one aspect, and the German authorities calling for her ousting on the opposite—partially for posing with a Palestinian flag.
It was all very messy, however amidst all of the discuss of alleged censorship, little gentle was shed on the movies themselves, particularly these whose politics flew within the face of a few of these allegations. Chief amongst them was the lo-fi battle thriller “Chronicles from the Siege,” which gained the pageant’s Views prize for first-time options. It tells a number of interconnected tales—some harrowing, some even raunchy—about younger Palestinian women and men adjusting to life underneath fixed bombings. (The movie’s director, Abdallah Al-Khatib, would go on to make an impassioned acceptance speech that ruffled feathers on the German authorities).
The pageant’s sidebar packages featured different notable movies about Palestinians, too, together with a pair by Israeli filmmakers that explored the bounds of their very own cinema. Within the transferring documentary “Collapse,” director Anat Even trains her lens on the destruction in Gaza from a secure distance however confronts the shortcomings of her visible and ethical views by augmenting them with these of Palestinian poets and extra radical Israeli activists overseas, whose voices fill the soundscape with agency convictions about decolonization and Palestinian historical past.
An analogous introspection, albeit with a markedly totally different method, got here courtesy of Assaf Machnes, whose drama “The place To?” finds a younger queer Israeli scholar and a middle-aged Palestinian Uber driver forming an unlikely friendship throughout a number of rides by Berlin, on both aspect of October seventh—an apt geographical, cultural, and temporal dynamic for this 12 months’s pageant. It’s a story of feeling adrift that applies to each characters, however the movie seldom equivocates or tries to make symmetrical the escalating battle. If something, it’s one of many uncommon Israeli dramas that totally empathizes with the Palestinian perspective on displacement. It’s additionally one of many only a few to be outright hilarious in its depiction of Palestinian characters responding to prejudice by humor.
For all of the chatter about staying apolitical, the Berlinale’s Competitors featured Berlin itself as a really intentional political backdrop. Town is, in spite of everything, a spot the place historical past and politics are seen on each avenue nook. For example, the pageant’s hub at Potsdamer Platz is mere steps from Checkpoint Charlie, the previous Berlin Wall crossing, which is now adorned with a McDonald’s on the previous West Berlin aspect and a KFC on the previous East Berlin aspect, which seems like some type of cosmic joke.
Nonetheless, town’s structure and municipal buildings type an important backdrop in shock Golden Bear winner “Yellow Letters,” an oddly daring home drama a couple of couple’s gradual implosion, by which German-Turkish director İlker Çatak attracts consideration to Berlin standing in for Ankara. It follows the Turkish authorities’s ousting of varied artists and teachers from positions of affect—together with a playwright and his extra well-known actress spouse—a narrative drawn instantly from modern Turkish politics, however one whose transposed setting speaks not solely to latest issues in Germany, however to a extra common rightward shift as effectively.
Turkish cinema had a very stellar exhibiting, with the pageant’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize (ostensibly second place) being awarded to Emin Alper’s “Salvation,” a chilling rural story of mysticism and tribal animosity that, by its story of fictitious Kurdish clans informed in desires and premonitions, rigorously traces the genesis of actual ethnic hatred and spiritual fanaticism.
The title that positioned third, with the Silver Bear Jury Prize—UK-US co-production “Queen At Sea,” director Lance Hammer’s comeback after almost twenty years—turned out to be a double winner (or triple, relying on the way you slice it), because it additionally gained the Silver Bear for Supporting Efficiency for not one, however two of its central roles, which the jury voted on unanimously. The harrowing morality play options honorees Anna Calder-Marshall and Tom Courtenay as an aged girl within the throes of dementia and her caring husband, whose love is thrown into query by an moral dilemma surrounding the fraught dynamic between Alzheimer’s and sexual consent. On the middle of this emotional whirlwind is their conscientious daughter, performed with pained exhaustion by the enigmatic Juliette Binoche, rounding out a trio of devastating must-see performances.
A movie that many presumed can be within the operating for a prime prize was Markus Schleinzer’s black-and-white 90-minute interval drama “Rose,” although it walked away with a Silver Bear for Sandra Hüller’s lead efficiency, as a lady pretending to be a male soldier in Seventeenth-century Germany. It’s each intense and compact—a pleasant mixture!—and its transgender themeswhich often bubble to the floor, imbue it with important modern echoes.
Simply as riveting, nevertheless, is a film twice as lengthy that few thought would stroll away empty-handed till it did: “Dao” by French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis, an unlimited but intimate three-hour story, bifurcated between a household’s marriage ceremony in France and the funeral ceremony for his or her patriarch in Guinea-Bissau the 12 months prior. With documentarian aptitude, Gomis crafts a sprawling postcolonial work cut up between Europe and West Africa that’s as anthropological as it’s deeply private, typically blurring the road between fiction and actuality. It additionally contains a sloppy, drunken combat scene that’s extra enrapturing than something you’re prone to see on the multiplex this 12 months.
You would throw a dart at this 12 months’s Competitors whereas blindfolded and have it land on one thing attention-grabbing. The sturdy lineup noticed main arthouse titles like Anthony Chen’s huge, decade-plus-in-the-making generational drama “We Are All Strangers,” which caps off his unfastened Singaporean coming-of-age trilogy—a delicate movie within the vein of Edward Yang. The roster additionally featured idiosyncratic oddities just like the documentary “Yo (Love is a Rebellious Fowl),” by which a pair of administrators mourns their aged artist buddy by protecting her alive by puppets, stop-motion miniatures, and numerous arts-and-crafts tasks. This made it a worthy recipient for the Silver Bear for Excellent Creative Contribution, and a agency reminder of the type of offbeat, soothing cinema seldom elevated at different main European festivals.
The Berlinale is a kind of fests, like Cannes, the place there are so much of prizes to go round, guaranteeing that even a minor miracle like “Nina Roza,” a couple of cynical Quebecois artwork vendor returning to his Bulgarian roots to confirm the work of a feisty eight-year-old, left with the well-deserved recognition of Greatest Screenplay. Whereas a few of the extra star-studded movies had been poorly obtained—like Larim Aïnouz’s largely panned “Rosebush Pruning,” a couple of wealthy hedonistic household, and the scattered Amy Adams rehab drama “On the Sea”—I wouldn’t hesitate to name this 12 months’s Competitors a humiliation of riches.
It was full of surprises from the highest down, movies you’d do effectively to maintain a watch out for upon eventual launch. These embody the quietly triumphant, Vienna-set Blues portrait “The Loneliest Man in City,” about an aged musician (who performs himself) being compelled from his dwelling, and parted from his recollections. In line with this 12 months’s broader themes, the competitions additionally noticed the sardonic relationship drama “My Spouse Cries,” which deploys Berlin as a backdrop for its story of loneliness and introspection into marriage and gendered norms.
A few of the pageant’s best works could possibly be discovered far outdoors the Competitors, too. American coming-of-age indie “Mouse” is a shocking effort by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, a narrative steeped within the grief of shedding a finest buddy at a pivotal level in life. Led by a powerhouse efficiency from Sophie Okonedo as a mom in mourning, it’s as light as it’s heartrending. In the meantime, Faraz Shariat’s tightly-controlled Panorama viewers award winner “Prosecution” fashions a pulpy vigilante story out of a meek Korean-German lawyer investigating her personal hate crime, a transformative thriller in regards to the biases quietly governing German establishments.
“Prosecution” was the final movie I watched this 12 months, late on the 12th and ultimate day, nevertheless it proved an particularly becoming capstone for an iteration of the pageant the place conversations had been dominated by questions of whether or not the Berlinale should be political. The proof is within the pudding: it very a lot is already. Granted, nobody in its higher ranks is prone to come out and condemn the Gaza genocide in so many phrases (regardless of reporters repeatedly posing the query), however as a pageant underneath an more and more hostile German authorities, it’s laborious to think about the Berlinale popping out unscathed, or current in any respect, if its management had been to seize a megaphone on the danger of censure, particularly following latest finances cuts. So, for higher or worse, maybe the films being platformed ought to talk for themselves. And this 12 months, they did so loudly and proudly.