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Given the incendiary news from this year’s edition, it may surprise you to learn that the Berlinale is among the more logistically easygoing of the major international film festivals. Part of this is the city itself; each far-flung theatre is well-connected by Berlin’s public transit, making even the sleepy, snowy February event a relative breeze where you can watch great cinema without a care. Then again, burying your head in the sand and ignoring the headlines goes against the nature of a cinematic melting-pot, so it’s worth recounting some of the controversies surrounding the event’s political ties, in addition to how the movies themselves stood out while making implicit (and at times, very explicit) political statements.
The 76th Berlin Film Festival got off to a rocky start when Competition Jury president Wim Wenders—a filmmaker practically synonymous with the city—responded clumsily to questions about the place of politics in cinema, as well as the genocide in Gaza. The latter has been a major topic of conversation at the Berlinale since the events of October 7th, 2023, given the German government’s military support in the region and its allegedly increased influence over the fest itself. Wenders, therefore, set an awkward tone when he said filmmakers “have to stay out of politics” while calling cinema “the counterweight of politics… the opposite of politics.”
Things only escalated from there. Indian author Arundhati Roy called Wenders’ words “unconscionable” before withdrawing from the festival. Berlinale Director Tricia Tuttle responded with a statement affirming free speech at the event, after which 100 major film personalities signed an open letter condemning the fest for its perceived silence on Gaza and alleged muzzling of artists. Tuttle responded again, leaving her between a rock and a hard place with these accusations on one side, and the German government calling for her ousting on the other—partially for posing with a Palestinian flag.
It was all very messy, but amidst all the talk of alleged censorship, little light was shed on the films themselves, especially those whose politics flew in the face of some of these allegations. Chief among them was the lo-fi war thriller “Chronicles from the Siege,” which won the festival’s Perspectives prize for first-time features. It tells several interconnected stories—some harrowing, some even raunchy—about young Palestinian men and women adjusting to life under constant bombings. (The film’s director, Abdallah Al-Khatib, would go on to make an impassioned acceptance speech that ruffled feathers at the German government).
The festival’s sidebar programs featured other notable films about Palestinians, too, including a couple by Israeli filmmakers that explored the limits of their own cinema. In the moving documentary “Collapse,” director Anat Even trains her lens on the destruction in Gaza from a safe distance but confronts the shortcomings of her visual and moral perspectives by augmenting them with those of Palestinian poets and more radical Israeli activists abroad, whose voices fill the soundscape with firm convictions about decolonization and Palestinian history.
A similar introspection, albeit with a markedly different approach, came courtesy of Assaf Machnes, whose drama “Where To?” finds a young queer Israeli student and a middle-aged Palestinian Uber driver forming an unlikely friendship across several rides through Berlin, on either side of October 7th—an apt geographical, cultural, and temporal dynamic for this year’s festival. It’s a tale of feeling adrift that applies to both characters, but the film seldom equivocates or tries to make symmetrical the escalating conflict. If anything, it’s one of the rare Israeli dramas that fully empathizes with the Palestinian perspective on displacement. It’s also one of the very few to be outright hilarious in its depiction of Palestinian characters responding to prejudice through humor.
For all the chatter about staying apolitical, the Berlinale’s Competition featured Berlin itself as a very intentional political backdrop. The city is, after all, a place where history and politics are visible on every street corner. For instance, the festival’s hub at Potsdamer Platz is mere steps from Checkpoint Charlie, the former Berlin Wall crossing, which is now adorned with a McDonald’s on the former West Berlin side and a KFC on the former East Berlin side, which feels like some kind of cosmic joke.
However, the city’s architecture and municipal buildings form a vital backdrop in surprise Golden Bear winner “Yellow Letters,” an oddly daring domestic drama about a couple’s gradual implosion, in which German-Turkish director İlker Çatak draws attention to Berlin standing in for Ankara. It follows the Turkish government’s ousting of various artists and academics from positions of influence—including a playwright and his more famous actress wife—a story drawn directly from contemporary Turkish politics, but one whose transposed setting speaks not only to recent concerns in Germany, but to a more universal rightward shift as well.
Turkish cinema had a particularly stellar showing, with the festival’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize (ostensibly second place) being awarded to Emin Alper’s “Salvation,” a chilling rural tale of mysticism and tribal animosity that, through its tale of fictitious Kurdish clans told in dreams and premonitions, carefully traces the genesis of real ethnic hatred and religious fanaticism.
The title that placed third, with the Silver Bear Jury Prize—UK-US co-production “Queen At Sea,” director Lance Hammer’s comeback after nearly twenty years—turned out to be a double winner (or triple, depending on how you slice it), since it also won the Silver Bear for Supporting Performance for not one, but two of its central roles, which the jury voted on unanimously. The harrowing morality play features honorees Anna Calder-Marshall and Tom Courtenay as an elderly woman in the throes of dementia and her caring husband, whose love is thrown into question by an ethical dilemma surrounding the fraught dynamic between Alzheimer’s and sexual consent. At the center of this emotional whirlwind is their conscientious daughter, played with pained exhaustion by the enigmatic Juliette Binoche, rounding out a trio of devastating must-see performances.
A film that many presumed would be in the running for a top prize was Markus Schleinzer’s black-and-white 90-minute period drama “Rose,” though it walked away with a Silver Bear for Sandra Hüller’s lead performance, as a woman pretending to be a male soldier in 17th-century Germany. It’s both intense and compact—a delightful combination!—and its transgender themes, which frequently bubble to the surface, imbue it with vital contemporary echoes.
Just as riveting, however, is a movie twice as long that few thought would walk away empty-handed until it did: “Dao” by French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis, an enormous yet intimate three-hour tale, bifurcated between a family’s wedding in France and the funeral ceremony for their patriarch in Guinea-Bissau the year prior. With documentarian flair, Gomis crafts a sprawling postcolonial work split between Europe and West Africa that’s as anthropological as it is deeply personal, often blurring the line between fiction and reality. It also features a sloppy, drunken fight scene that’s more enrapturing than anything you’re likely to see at the multiplex this year.
You could throw a dart at this year’s Competition while blindfolded and have it land on something interesting. The robust lineup saw major arthouse titles like Anthony Chen’s vast, decade-plus-in-the-making generational drama “We Are All Strangers,” which caps off his loose Singaporean coming-of-age trilogy—a gentle film in the vein of Edward Yang. The roster also featured idiosyncratic oddities like the documentary “Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird),” in which a pair of directors mourns their elderly artist friend by keeping her alive through puppets, stop-motion miniatures, and various arts-and-crafts projects. This made it a worthy recipient for the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution, and a firm reminder of the kind of offbeat, soothing cinema seldom elevated at other major European festivals.
The Berlinale is one of those fests, like Cannes, where there are a lot of prizes to go around, ensuring that even a minor miracle like “Nina Roza,” about a cynical Quebecois art dealer returning to his Bulgarian roots to verify the paintings of a feisty eight-year-old, left with the well-deserved recognition of Best Screenplay. While some of the more star-studded films were poorly received—like Larim Aïnouz’s largely panned “Rosebush Pruning,” about a rich hedonistic family, and the scattered Amy Adams rehab drama “At the Sea”—I wouldn’t hesitate to call this year’s Competition an embarrassment of riches.
It was filled with surprises from the top down, films you’d do well to keep an eye out for upon eventual release. These include the quietly triumphant, Vienna-set Blues portrait “The Loneliest Man in Town,” about an aged musician (who plays himself) being forced from his home, and parted from his memories. In keeping with this year’s broader themes, the competitions also saw the sardonic relationship drama “My Wife Cries,” which deploys Berlin as a backdrop for its tale of loneliness and introspection into marriage and gendered norms.
Some of the festival’s finest works could be found far outside the Competition, too. American coming-of-age indie “Mouse” is a stunning effort by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, a story steeped in the grief of losing a best friend at a pivotal point in life. Led by a powerhouse performance from Sophie Okonedo as a mother in mourning, it’s as gentle as it is heartrending. Meanwhile, Faraz Shariat’s tightly-controlled Panorama audience award winner “Prosecution” fashions a pulpy vigilante tale out of a meek Korean-German lawyer investigating her own hate crime, a transformative thriller about the biases quietly governing German institutions.
“Prosecution” was the last film I watched this year, late on the 12th and final day, but it proved an especially fitting capstone for an iteration of the festival where conversations were dominated by questions of whether the Berlinale ought to be political. The proof is in the pudding: it very much is already. Granted, no one in its upper ranks is likely to come out and condemn the Gaza genocide in so many words (despite reporters repeatedly posing the question), but as a festival under an increasingly hostile German government, it’s hard to imagine the Berlinale coming out unscathed, or existing at all, if its leadership were to grab a megaphone at the risk of censure, especially following recent budget cuts. So, for better or worse, perhaps the movies being platformed ought to speak for themselves. And this year, they did so loudly and proudly.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/CMWEc4S
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