Over the last few years, the <a href="https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2022">Venice International Film Festival</a> has established itself as the launchpad for films which aspire to win an Oscar. This year, the presence of the major US film companies at the Lido seems to have also had a trickle effect: the quality of the line-up for the main competition was consistently high and the minor sections of the programme offered plenty of pleasant surprises. In the last few years, Venice has benefited from a more relaxed stance towards Netflix productions – at least, compared to Cannes. In 2018, this approach was crucial for securing the premiere of Roma, which then went to win the Academy Award for best film. This year, the streaming giant was behind several of the films selected in the main competition including Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde and Alejandro Iñarritu’s Bardo.
In the past, Venice has had some troubles with gender representation. In 2018, while at the Berlinale almost half of the selections were films made by women, Venice had only one film directed by a woman in the main competition (Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale). On that occasion, following much criticism within the industry, the response of the festival director, Alberto Barbera, appeared inadequate. “We look at the quality not at the gender [of the directors]”, he claimed. Ever since that incident, Barbera and his programming team seem to have learned their lesson. This year, incidentally, the two top prizes went to two films made by female filmmakers. The Golden Lion was awarded to Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a documentary on legendary photographer Nan Goldin’s career and her fight against the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharmaceutical, whose shameless promotion of the highly addictive drug OxiContin has been deemed responsible for the worst opioid epidemic in US history.
The Silver Lion went to Saint Omer, the first feature film directed by documentarist Alice Diop. Inspired by the real-life case of a French-Senegalese woman who killed her baby in 2016, Saint Omer was one of the bravest, most uncompromising films seen this year at Venice. A writer, Rama (played by Kayije Kegame), has come to observe the trial of Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), a young African woman who is accused of drowning her one-year-old baby in the sea. Laurence has pleaded guilty. Like almost everyone in the court room, she seems bewildered by what she has done.

The central dilemma that the film explores is why this young woman has committed such a horrific act. Much of the emotional sway of this film comes from the protracted long-takes of Laurence during the trial, which exalt the outstanding performance of Malanda. The conflict between, on one hand, the horror that the monstrous act of this Medea-like figure may generate in us and, on the other hand, our fascination with this highly educated, eloquent philosophy graduate, turns the trial into a compelling prism refracting questions about motherhood and issues around race, postcoloniality and class. As the film explicitly reminds us, a young black woman in 21st century France is not supposed to sound the way Laurence speaks. Interestingly, this defamiliarising narrative device, ingeniously exploiting a collective racist mindset, is precisely the trick that draws us in to listen and pay attention to what this woman is saying, as she tries to make sense of what she has done.
One of the most exquisite findings at Venice for me was Without Her, the debut film by Iranian director Arian Vazirdaftari. Partly psychological thriller and partly absurdist drama, this is a film that challenges our expectations about what an Iranian film reaching the international film market is supposed to look like. There is no apparent gesture toward social realism here. Gifted with a captivating soundtrack that accompanies the maddening journey of its female protagonist, Without Her is a film about an identity crisis that evokes George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944). The protagonist of the film is Roya (Tannaz Tabatabei), a young woman living in Tehran who is getting ready to move to Denmark with her husband. One evening, she finds a young, distressed woman (Shadi Karamroudi) outside her building. Roya takes her in. The nameless girl becomes increasingly attached to Roya and her husband. Gradually she starts behaving like Roya, who becomes more and more invisible to her husband and to the people around her. Informed by the experiences of several Iranian women who tried to emigrate, the film also adds an extra dimension to current discussions inspired by the ongoing protests for women’s rights in Iran. Without Her may perhaps suggest the distinctive identity crisis of Iranian women facing a new life in the West, with the radical changes that such an experience entails. In another sense, the film is a mesmerising journey through the mind of a woman who feels that the world around her has gone mad and sees no way out.

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Amanda was the debut feature film for the hugely talented Carolina Cavalli, delighting the Venice audience with one of the wittiest films shown at the festival. Amanda succeeds in that very rare balancing act between being a quirky, elegant film with a very personal cinematic language and one that is undeniably funny, despite its dark undertones. The homonymous protagonist of the title is a jobless – and friendless – twenty-something played by Benedetta Porcaroli, who, after her debut in the Netflix series Baby, here reaches a level of maturity that gives much hope about her acting future. Porcaroli brings to life an eccentric character who goes on a mission to make an agoraphobic girl her new best friend. Despite her fanatical resolve, Amanda fails miserably. It is this obsessive aspect of Amanda’s personality that makes this character both hugely funny and, as the story develops, movingly vulnerable. Is this the story of a young woman on the spectrum? It does not matter, because through Amanda, Cavalli ends up celebrating a kind of difference that, divested of any judgment, strikes for its warm-hearted imaginative power.
Historically, one of the prerogatives of top film festivals such as Venice has been to support and promote the rise of emerging auteurs, those filmmakers eventually developing a loyal relation to the festival that has launched them. The most recent ‘adoptive’ child of Venice has been Luca Guadagnino, who came back this year with Bones and All and won the award for best director.
It is hard at this stage to anticipate which emerging filmmaker will be the next to receive the Venice stamp of approval, but the young directing talents that we have seen this year at the Lido may indicate that perhaps something is moving.
The <a href="https://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/2022">Lido Di Venezia</a> ran from 31st August to 10th September 2022, organised by La Biennale di Venezia. It was the 79th Venice International Film Festival.
<pre>Featured Photo: Saint Omer (Alice Diop)</pre>

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Films to look out for from this year’s Venice International Film Festival, which finds mesmerising talent among a wealth of new female-directed films.

Venice Film Festival 2022: Competition u-turns and talent-packed surprises

Expectations were high for the 70th edition of the Berlinale. This year’s anniversary edition coincided with the much-awaited debut of the new festival director duo Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian. The Berlinale was never a glamorous red carpet-oriented film festival. Yet, this year’s edition felt even more sombre than usual. There were no big Netflix productions. Though, contrary to what happened at Cannes in the last couple of years, this did not seem like a political decision. There were also hardly any big Hollywood stars or directors. Some losses come with gains, however: the level of the main competition line-up was consistently higher than in the last few years and included the kinds of gems one would expect from the curatorial talent of Chatran, who has gained the respect of the film festival community during his much-acclaimed seven-year stint as the artistic director of the <a href="https://www.the-platform.org.uk/tag/locarno/">Locarno Film Festival</a>.
One of the most remarkable films shown at this year’s Berlinale was <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11697690/">The Woman Who Ran</a>, a beautifully unassuming film by Korean director Hong Sang-Soo. Over the course of three days, a young woman called Gambhee visits three old female acquaintances. The women have not seen each other for a while. Gambhee compliments them on the furniture of the houses they have bought; they talk about the weather and their everyday routines. There is something deeper behind these deceptively simple, almost banal exchanges. “How can he be sincere, if he only repeats himself,” asks Gambhee about her friend’s novelist husband, who always says the same things in his frequent TV appearances.
The Woman Who Ran celebrates the value of unhurried, subdued exchanges between people who try to do their best to be kind to each other. These people are women and this seems to matter. All the encounters are interrupted by men who turn out to be quite unpleasant. One of them knocks on the door of the first house that Gambhee visits to complain about the stray cats that the women feed, explaining that his wife is scared of cats and that they should stop. The exchange is extremely courteous and yet the women stand their ground, asserting that cats are not less important than human beings and that they need food too, to the disbelief of the man who thinks humans should come first. The Woman Who Ran contains one of the best cat scenes in the history of cinema, but I will not say more so as not to spoil the fun! “I never start from any kind of generalisation about topics,” said Hong Sang-Soon during the post-screening press conference. It is a comment that might explain why this film seems so interested in the truths that lie in the small, unspectacular moments of our lives. This is not really a cinema of endurance, but a kind of cinema which is inviting us not to look for fireworks, because the fun – and the substance – may be just there, in the everyday scenarios that most of us already live.
A big favourite for the Golden Bear, Kelly Reichardt’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9231040/">First Cow</a> was unfairly snubbed at the awards ceremony. It is a real shame because this was the kind of film that, for its gentleness and modesty, would have been a very fitting winner of this year’s edition of the Berlinale. First Cow could be jokingly summarised as a film about two men in the Old West living together under the same roof, making scones. Cookie is a shy young man from Maryland, while King Lu is a savvy business-minded labourer from China who has travelled the world before reaching the Oregon Trail to seek his fortune. The two men team up to share a shack in a remote settlement. The outpost is sparsely populated by brutish rogues and a pretentious English man who acts as the colony’s chief. Cookie and King Lu are the kinds of men that the cinema of the old American frontier has rarely shown us. They are gentle and reserved men, a far cry from the kind of aggressive pioneer masculinity that we have come to know through cinema history. One of the most exquisite pleasures of this film comes from the candle-lit night scenes inside the shack, Cookie and King Lu quietly busy with their domestic chores and occasionally exchanging a few words like a couple of married pensioners. They could be lovers but there is no evidence of any romantic feelings between them, only kindness and mutually supportive comradeship. It feels as though, with this film, Reichardt wants to rewrite a foundational American story, inviting us to imagine an alternative genealogy of US masculinity, one based on cooperation and resourcefulness, rather than aggressive individualism and competitiveness
For me, the third and final highlight of this year’s Berlinale was <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8478554/">Hidden Away</a>, Giorgio Diritti’s magnificent biopic on Italian artist Antonio Ligabue. The narrative arc of the film is fairly conventional. It follows Ligabue’s life from his childhood in native Switzerland, where he was put into confinement due to his mental illness, to his mature years in northern Italy. An untrained sculptor and painter, Ligabue became one of the most influential Italian artists of the 20th century. Boasting an extraordinary performance by Elio Giordano in the role of Ligabue, Hidden Away does more than simply celebrate the genius of a great artist. The film makes viewers embrace the perspective of someone who was mistreated all his life for being different, even in the face of the great admiration that his work inspired. Firmly aligned with Ligabue’s subjective experience of the world, Hidden Away attempts to articulate his unframed perspective. Signalled by frequent subjective shots conveying a blurred peripheral vision, this perspective seems to express optically the special connectedness to the world that this artist developed through his art. It is a type of connectedness which at times strikes one as primitive and unhinged, and other times appears surprisingly full of wisdom and tenderness. Giordano’s highly physical performance combines feral abruptness and child-like vulnerability. Giordano is truly magnificent at embodying the loneliness and anguish experienced by Ligabue throughout this life. Yet, this is far from a tragic story. Hidden Away is a film about an irrepressible man who has fought all his life to assert his humanity and different way of being in the world against the bigotry surrounding him.
The Golden Bear for Best Film went to <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11697844/">There is No Evil</a> (Mohammad Rasoulof). The full list of awards can be viewed <a href="https://www.berlinale.de/en/festival/awards-and-juries/international-juy.html">here</a>.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Allyson Riggs via A24 Films (First Cow)</pre>

FIRST COW

With new festival curators, this year’s Berlinale showcased new and underrated film talent. Enjoy three selections below.

Berlin Film Festival 2020: Redefining Masculinity and Masterminds

Directed by Turkish filmmaker Ayse Toprak, the documentary Mr Gay Syria follows activist and journalist Mahmoud Hassino and some of the members of the Istanbul-based Syrian LGBT group ‘Tea and Talk’ as they prepare for the competition that will send the first Syrian delegate to the 2016 Mr Gay World contest in Malta. As the representative of the diasporic community of gay Syrians who escaped their homes when the war broke out in 2011, Mr Gay Syria – we learn – will be the only refugee competing for Mr Gay World.
The expedience of the Mr Gay World contest allows for the initial building up of a narrative of hope: we learn that the winner will go to Malta and then, maybe, will get a VISA to live and work in Europe; maybe he will find a boyfriend there and get married, one of the organisers says with a smile. The plan to send a Syrian to Mr Gay World with the objective of making LGBT refugees more visible internationally mirrors the way in which the documentary itself aspires to engage a global audience to convey its message. A Turkish-German-French co-production, Toprak’s film has been shown in over 55 international film festivals (winning 11 awards) but cannot yet have national distribution in Turkey, and it is unlikely it will be shown in Syria in the foreseeable future.
At one point in the documentary, Hassino explains the reason why he decided to organise the Mr Gay Syria contest: “It’s to change perception. The only image of gay Syrians [we have] is given by ISIS.” Hassino is referring to the horrific videos showing <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/chilling-new-isis-video-shows-7708759">ISIS jihadists throwing several gay men off rooftops</a> during the Syrian war. Far from simply shying away from this human tragedy, he insists on the need to substitute this array of deathly images with one of queer resilience and survival. As Toprak explains in an interview, Hassino “wanted the world to know about the living gay Syrians, not just the dead ones”. Hassino’s desire speaks to the kind of demand for recognition that Mr Gay Syria makes to its viewers, one that asks us to replace the depersonalised, anonymous image of the refugee that our contemporary media culture has fed us with real faces and life stories. It is an endeavour that comes with some costs, especially for the individuals who decide to share with us the pain of forced migration and the difficulty of living in homophobic societies. While revealing some of the challenges that these individuals face with their families and communities following their decision to appear in the film, the documentary gives voice to their shared determination to fight back.
For Philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the figure of the refugee forces us to abandon the concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of political life (citizen, sovereign people). In his essay ‘Beyond Human Rights’, Agamben refers to the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights […].’ While the article refers to all human beings, Agamben notes that the case of the refugee shows that human rights are not compatible to the mere condition of being alive. Although refugees are living beings, they do not automatically have access to the same rights as most of the citizens of a nation state, having to undergo assessments by immigration and naturalisation services intended to turn them into citizens. As the figure that should more than any other embody the notion of human rights, the refugee marks in fact the radical crisis of a notion that has been imbricated since its conception with the paradigm of the nation-state and the notion of nativity.
Considering the current plight of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean and the inhumane response of many European nations to the current refugee crisis, it is hard not to take Agamben’s point seriously. Mr Gay Syria complicates this point by showing the ways in which the predicament of LGBT refugees fleeing war-torn Syria may shed light on some of the limitations of the much celebrated rise of a globalised LGBT political culture and its human rights agenda. A 24-year-old barber who fled Syrian, Hussein is the documentary’s main character who will eventually win the Mr Gay Syria title. Things turn out differently from what one might expect. Hussein has to endure a strenuous visa application process to see if he can travel to Malta. Mr Gay Syria ends up shedding light on some of the hypocrisies underlying the seemingly inclusive agenda of global LGBT brands such as Mr Gay World and their commitment to fight for the human rights of LGBT people around the world.
Through the focus on Hussein and the singularity of its title, Mr Gay Syria may seem initially invested in a narrative of queer politics that privileges the individual, one in which only one can win (and go to Mr Gay World), leaving others behind. This is where the film most surprises, allowing us to get to know a resilient network of friends, activists and lovers who appear deeply invested in collective practices of political action and mutual support.
On stage, Hussain wins the Mr Gay Syria’s competition with a moving monologue in which he talks to his mother about the hatred he has faced through his young life. For this monologue, Hussein kneels in front of an empty chair. It is an evocative image that relates to another heavy absence within the film: the country that these refugees clearly love, from which they have been forced to escape. Throughout the film, we never see the Syria that Hussein and his friends sorely miss. At the beginning and at the end of the film, Hussein sits on a roadside facing the Turkish-Syrian border. We see him looking ahead. Yet, as we are prompted to pay attention to his gaze, we don’t see what he is looking at. Evoked through the off-screen space, this painful absence haunts our viewing experience: maybe as a call to see beyond our restricted horizons?
In the ‘Beyond Human Rights’ essay, Agamben sees the refugee as a paradigmatic figure from which we should start re-thinking politics and a future ‘political community’ in radical ways. With the number of refugees and migrants forced to leave their countries increasing in the last few years (it is estimated that <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/berlin-s-lgbtq-refugee-center-haven-those-fleeing-civil-war-n854591">3,500 queer refugees</a> currently live in Berlin alone), films such as Mr Gay Syria ask us to also re-think the meaning of LGBT politics and the scope of queer film culture.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Mr Gay Syria (dir. Ayse Toprak)</pre>

Mr Gay Syria &#8211; Large

Ayse Toprak’s award-winning film complicates our understanding of both the refugee crisis and LGBT human rights movements.

LGBT Refugee Cinema, Queer Politics and Human Rights: ‘Mr Gay Syria’

Following the Weinstein affair and the rise of the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/films-for-the-metoo-era-the-bfi-london-film-festival-2018-round-up">#metoo</a> movement, a raft of gender equality campaigns have sprung up across various segments of the film industry. Last May, <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/5/13/17347738/cannes-womens-protest-march-film-festival-cate-blanchett-agnes-varda-timesup-red-carpet">82 female filmmakers</a> marched in protest on the red carpet at the Cannes film festival demanding concrete measures to achieve greater female representation in the industry. The response of some of the major film festivals to these demands has been disappointing. Of the 21 films competing at the 2018 Venice film festival only one was directed by a woman, <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2018/09/nightingale-italian-film-critic-sexist-jennifer-kent-venice-1202001092/">Jennifer Kent</a>. Even Cannes, whose line-up last year included the highest number of female filmmakers since 2011, selected only three films directed by women in the main competition.
The <a href="https://www.berlinale.de/en/HomePage.html">2019 Berlin film festival</a> (Berlinale) showed that, finally, something is changing. Almost half of the 400 films screened at the festival were made by women, with seven (out of a total of 16) of them included in the main competition. Having opened with a pledge signed by the festival’s director Dieter Kosslick to promote the work of women in the industry, the festival featured a number of events addressing questions of inclusion and diversity in film and television. Over the years, the Berlinale has established itself as a unique platform for politically engaged cinema. Attracting massive crowds in different venues sprawled all over the city, the 2019 edition did not disappoint festival goers in search of challenging discoveries.
Some of the films shown in the main competition line-up openly foregrounded their socio-political concerns: Francois Ozon’s By the Grace of God, which went to win the Silver Bear, tackles the complicity of the Catholic Church in a recent child sexual abuse scandal in Lyon, while Claudio Giovannesi’s Piranhas, based on Roberto Saviano’s novel, exposes the plague of teen gangs in Naples by charting the descent into organised crime of a group of young boys. Giving the Silver Bear for Best Director to Angela Schanelec for her I was at Home, But, the Jury presided by Juliette Binoche recognised the extraordinary achievement of a filmmaker who has shown that one of the most poignant political commentaries a film may make these days is one that addresses the changing structure of the family under late-capitalism and the experience of women within this.
One of the most captivating films in the main competition was God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya, by Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska, whose politics were intelligently filtered through the lens of tragic-comedy. Played by Zorica Nusheva, the film’s titular protagonist is an unemployed 32-year-old still living with her parents. After a humiliating job interview during which her potential employer tells her that he finds her so unattractive that he would never offer her a job nor make sexual advances to her, Petrunya finds herself in the middle of an Orthodox ceremony. A noisy crowd of men are about to dive into the river to retrieve a crucifix thrown by the priest. Catching us totally unprepared, Petrunya impulsively throws herself into the water and gets it. The men are furious. Petrunya escapes but is eventually found at her parents’ home and taken to the local police station.
In some of the film’s most poignant moments, we see Petrunya sitting calmly in the interrogation room, as she faces several officers and the local priest who try to bully her into returning the crucifix. Seemingly unaffected by some of the officers’ insults, Petrunya cleverly unravels their manipulative interrogation tactics. Other times, she just remains silent, looking unimpressed by their dull, sexist remarks. A biting satire on men’s self-entitlement, the film cleverly weaves comic scenes marked by a quiet, steely humour with terrifying mob scenes involving the village’s men outside the police station. Also thanks to Nusheva’s brilliantly atonal performance, God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya turns out to be a moving tribute to the quiet resilience and the obstinate determination of women who will not give up what they have deservedly earned.
The Golden Bear for best film went to Synonyms. Directed by Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, it follows Yoav, a young man arriving in Paris, determined to leave his Israeli identity behind. The film’s narrative often feels like an erratic flow of perplexing scenarios with unclear character motivation and patchy plot logic. Refusing to speak Hebrew in this new city, Yoav buys a French dictionary. Through synonyms, Yoav expresses to his friend Emile how he feels about his homeland: abominable, loathsome etc.
In one of the most captivating moments of the film, Yaron, an Israeli intelligence agent that Yoav has befriended, convinced that Europe is profoundly anti-Semitic, angrily confronts the Paris metro travellers with his Jewishness. While this poignant moment may be read as a critique of contemporary Israel’s persecution complex, the muted, embarrassed response of the travellers who look away, also raises for us the suspicion that Yaron may, at the same time, not be so far off an inconvenient truth.
In trying to replace his Israeli identity with a new one, Yoav discovers that national identities are synonyms – the bloodthirsty words of La Marseilles that he sings during his cultural integration class being not so different from the hawkish Zionist tone of the Israeli anthem that he starts singing immediately after. A film on the difficult, perhaps impossible, attempt to escape one’s heritage, Synonyms is also a brilliant satire of Europe’s sense of self-importance and of its feelings of cultural superiority, which Yoav shines a light on through his Parisian encounters.
Öndög, directed by Chinese filmmaker Wang Quan’an, was this writer’s festival favourite. Set in the Mongolian steppe, it starts with a police car stumbling on the body of a naked woman unmistakably dead. One may get the feeling that this is the beginning of a Ceylan-esque rural murder mystery. A young police officer is left behind in the windy steppe to keep an eye on the body. The camera stays away from him, and we come to realise that this lonely figure in the majestic landscape is setting up the prevailing tone of the film.
While the murder mystery is eventually solved off-screen, viewers are confronted with a series of stunning long takes in which the place of humans appears secondary to the overwhelming power of nature. Far from being a mere backdrop for the lives of the herds people who inhabit this enchanting landscape – with its gorgeous twilights and the hypnotic sound of its winds – Öndög invites us to reconsider our efficiency-driven approach to the experience of time and space. A solitary herdswoman, nicknamed ‘the dinosaur’, accompanies us to the everyday routines of this remote world: the slaughtering of a lamb, the birth of a calf, or the silent smoking of a cigarette. The inner world of this herdswoman may seem impenetrable. We are never quite sure how she feels about the young man she ends up having sex with or about her unexpected pregnancy. Like a dinosaur, she is struggling for survival, but it is a struggle that seems to be constantly reliant on the wisdom of nature.
This has been the last year of the Berlinale under Dieter Kosslick’s direction. Kosslick leaves a distinctive legacy that has turned Berlin into a much celebrated audience-oriented festival. The two new directors, Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek, face the challenge to revamp a festival that many people hope will be even more ambitious and open to experimentation. One can only hope they will also remain committed to the festival’s pledge to fight the devaluation of women’s labour within the film industry by following up on the impressive legacy felt by this year’s edition.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Synonyms / Berlinale</pre>

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Dieter Kosslick leaves a distinctive legacy that has turned Berlinale into a celebrated and diverse film festival

Berlin Film Festival 2019: Women’s Labour, Hypnotic Landscapes and Plenty of Synonyms

The <a href="https://www.berlinale.de/en/HomePage.html">Berlinale</a> is a strange film festival. One may find the line-up of the main competition often disappointing, especially if compared to other prestigious European film festivals such as Cannes and Venice. And yet the programme – most notably the Panorama and Forum selections – also offers plenty of gems revealing themselves almost by accident. It is a unique festival experience that is at once infuriating and extremely exciting. This was the penultimate year for Dieter Kosslick, festival director since 2001, and questions have been raised about the future of the festival, which, many argue, will need to raise its game in order to compete seriously with Cannes and Venice. Having said that, I know many critics who would happily skip their annual trip to the Croisette, but would never miss Berlin. The Berlinale may lack the glamour of its European counterparts but showcases a matchless mix of exciting experimental and political works, an extremely diverse array of international films, skilfully curated retrospectives of classics and Europe’s most important film trade fair – the European Film Market – which celebrated this year its 30th edition.
The Berlinale opened with the international premiere of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, the much-awaited stop-motion movie set in a dystopian Japanese island that brings together a stellar ensemble voice cast including Bill Murray, Greta Gerwig, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton and Yoko Ono. Anderson went on to win the Silver Bear Best Director Award, while the unexpected winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film was Touch Me Not by the Romanian director Adina Pintilie. A quasi-fictional documentary exploring alternative sexual practices and forms of intimacy, Touch Me Not left several critics underwhelmed.
It is still too early to know which of the films shown in Berlin will be released outside of the festival circuit. But there is certainly plenty to be excited about. My personal favourite was Theatre of War (orig. title: Teatro de Guerra) by Argentinian theatre maker Lola Arias. Thirty-five years after the end of the Falklands/Malvinas war, Arias invites a group of British and Argentinian veterans to face each other as former enemies. Rather than simply sharing their memories with us, the veterans restage them. Forming a theatre ensemble, they re-enact battle scenes, look together at photographs, maps and newspaper clippings, and talk to each other about their experiences at war. In a number of extremely touching scenes, the British veterans speak in broken Spanish to the Argentines; the Argentines answer back in their hesitant English. The exchanges are charged with an almost child-like desire for connectedness. In another poignant scene, a former British captain restages a military action that resulted in the killing of several Argentines. The captain holds in his arms a wounded enemy, who, just before dying, tells him in English of a trip to Oxford he had taken years earlier. The British veteran wishes the man had never spoken English to him. It is an image that torments him in his sleep, one that he will never be able to forget – he tells us.
Theatre of War does not try to look for reconciliation between enemies. Arias changes the perspective through which we normally look at wars, giving an active voice and an embodied presence to ordinary men who were sent to fight by their own countries, often without much choice, as it was the case for the Argentines who had to serve under conscription. The film may be said to restage the theatre of war, but its actors are certainly no puppets, their compassion, vulnerability, and fears so vividly present in front of our eyes throughout the film. Like Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, Theatre of War is a film that raises important questions about what it means to restage on screen some of history’s most painful chapters by involving directly some its actors – be they survivors or perpetrators – and about the responsibilities of the filmmaker in this process.
The most awaited film of the festival – and arguably the one that most stunned the Berlin audience with its re-enactment of the horrific mass killing that saw 69 teenagers die in Norway in 2011 – was Utøya. For 72 minutes (the actual duration of the slaughter on the island of Utøya), the film follows, in an unbroken single take, Kaja and the other teens at the Labour party youth camp where the slaughter took place, from the time they hear the first gunshots and run for their lives, to the arrival of the first rescue boats. While the camera always stays with Kaja, the audience never sees the attacker but only hears his gunshots. The shaky hand-held camera, as we follow the teens run through the forest, is likely to make viewers feel dizzy. While watching the film, I fought the temptation to leave the cinema, as I was feeling pretty sick. But I realised that this is precisely what one is supposed to experience: the gut-wrenching sense of what it might have been like to be on the island during the slaughter. The gunfire intermittently echoes in the distance, the film replicating the precise number of shots <a href="&quot;https://platformonline.uk/tag/breivik&lt;/a"> fired on the island.</a>
While other reconstructions of the Utøya slaughter have been announced in Scandinavia (a TV series is due for international release soon), questions remain on why Poppe thought it was worth making this film. During an excruciating sequence of the film, we see the teens asking why it is taking so long for the Norwegian authorities to get to the island to stop the slaughter. But apart from that, no other significant questions seem to be raised. Is Utøya simply celebrating the lives of teens like Kaja? And yet one wonders what spectators gain from re-living this kind of stomach-turning viewing experience. The film has been hailed as a tribute to the courage of the young victims of Utøya. Perhaps it is supposed to be a cathartic experience for the survivors, the screenplay being based on accounts given by them. At the end of the screening I attended, the director, Erik Poppe, explained that he made the film by working closely with the survivors and the families of the victims, and that he sought their approval before the film’s release. Still, one may ask why the fictional drama – bringing together melodramatic tones and the heart-pounding pace of the thriller – was preferred to the documentary form.
I loved The Prayer (orig. title: La Prière) by French actor and director Cedric Khan for its brave, unprejudiced approach to the difficult themes of religion and drug addiction. Set in the French alps, the film follows a young man called Thomas (played by Anthony Bajon, who went to win the best actor award) who arrives at a religious rural sanctuary. Here, several young men are trying to kick their habit with a mix of hard labour in the fields and prayer. Thomas’ integration in this community is far from easy. This rural sanctuary seems to have banished any form of pleasure or self-indulgence, and all its members are prevented from being alone at any time. Thomas eventually accepts the rituals of this sanctuary, until he meets sister Myriam (played by Hanna Schygulla), the foundress of the sanctuary, who asks him whether he truly believes in God and whether he is happy. Thomas answers “yes”. Sister Myriam repeatedly slaps him in the face, as she knows that this is not true. It is a disquieting moment, one that potentially undoes the very sense of order that Thomas has worked so hard to achieve in his new life. While, on the one hand, the film asks its viewers to understand the comfort that praying to a God one does not believe in might bring, on the other, this unsettling moment seems to pose the question of how to be truthful to oneself in the face of those protective social, moral and psychic narratives that prevent us from sinking lower and lower.
Other festival highlights included Boys Cry (orig. title: La terra dell’abbastanza), the first feature film by the young Italian twins Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo, a crime film set in the Roman outskirts. The film’s sophisticated visual style and the emotionally nuanced performance of the two lead actors, Andrea Carpenzano and Matteo Olivetti, impressed many critics, and are likely to guarantee the film’s general release outside the festival circuit. Other two films to watch out for are Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot starring Joaquin Pheonix who gives once again a phenomenal performance playing a quadriplegic cartoonist from Portland, and The Heiresses (orig. title: Las herediteras), a drama with an exclusively female cast that explores the precarious hierarchies and privileges of Paraguay’s upper bourgeoisie through two older lesbians who have fallen on financial hard times.
Despite its unassuming style, Berlin’s annual celebration of international cinema remains the industry’s most significant festival in Europe and welcomes audiences 10 times as large as those of Cannes. Last year, 79 high-profile filmmakers signed a letter harshly criticising the current festival’s leadership and calling for a fresh start. With <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/news/german-directors-call-overhaul-berlinale-dieter-kosslick-1202622600/">Dieter Kosslik</a> on his way out, the prospect of a new direction for the festival leaves many hoping that, in the near future at least, the curation of the program will look less scattered.
The 68th annual Berlin International Film Festival took place from 15 to 25 February 2018: <a href="https://www.berlinale.de/en/HomePage.html">https://www.berlinale.de/en/HomePage.html</a>. 
<pre>Photo Credit: Boys Cry / Berlin International Film Festival</pre>

Berlin Film Festival 2018 Sergio Rigoletto 19_11_19_LA

There is hope yet for the Berlinale with this year’s selection of films, from a real-time depiction of Anders Breivik’s slaughter to a French film exploring religious beliefs.

Berlin Film Festival 2018: Theatres of War, Terror and Faith

It was another great year for the <a href="http://visitgff.glasgowfilm.org/">Glasgow Film Festival</a>. Launched only in 2005, it has become what many consider the most vibrant film festival in Scotland. With over 42,000 spectators over 12 days, the 2016 GFF closed with its best attendance record ever. Screening 174 films (one of the largest programmes the festival has put together), the GFF kicked off with the UK premiere of Hail Cesar!, the Cohen brothers’ tongue-in-cheek tribute to Hollywood’s golden age. Other highlights included screenings of Dheepan, the 2015 winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes, and the UK premiere of Anomalisa, Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant stop-motion animation film.
One of the most intriguing films shown at the festival was Chevalier, a poignant portrait of 21st-century masculinity by Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari. The film, with an exclusively male cast, has for its setting a luxury yacht, on which a group of wealthy angling enthusiasts play a game. The objective of the game is to crown the best among them: the chevalier. The game takes the men beyond the point of no return. They obsessively scrutinise each other, doing their best to show their strengths and to come across as flawless. But the men live in constant fear of appearing inadequate, as they get judged on how they sleep, on their clothes or on the size of their hard-ons. The film ends up providing a complex picture of an absurd male universe dominated by appearance, competitiveness and an obsession with quantifying one’s worth.
The GFF showcased a great selection of <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/unorthodocs-who-is-dayani-cristal">Latin American</a> films. Highlights included the 2015 winner of the Venice Golden Lion, From Afar, and Paulina, the fantastic Argentinian film which left many critics in awe at the last Cannes Film Festival.
From Afar is the debut film by Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vagas, whose production team includes, among others, Guillermo Arriaga (the scriptwriter of Amores Perros, Babel and 21 Grams), who also collaborated on the story. Starring <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/the-pearl-button-documenting-the-shadow-of-water-and-tyranny">Chilean</a> veteran Alfredo Castro and the newcomer Luis Silva, From Afar focuses on the slow-blossoming love affair between a middle-aged dental prosthetics technician (Armando) and a street boy (Elder).
At the beginning of the film, Armando cruises the streets of <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/hugo-chavezs-venezuela-beyond-the-facade">Caracas</a> in search of young boys. The sex is distant, anonymous: hardly any words are exchanged. The film makes superb use of shallow focus as it follows Armando in the alleys of Caracas. Visually this suggests Armando’s emotional disconnectedness from other people and his surroundings. After Elder is beaten by some thugs and left unconscious, Armando takes him home and looks after him: it is the beginning of a strange father-son relationship in which desire and unresolved childhood traumas make the two protagonists dangerously dependent on each other, until Elder kills Armando’s father. 
There is much that remains unexplained: what has Armando’s father done to his son? Who has called the police to arrest Elder as Armando stares at him from afar? Like Armando’s blurred, out-of-focus perspective on his surroundings, viewers are denied a firm grasp on what has happened: we are invited to guess (it is probably Armando who has called the police), but cannot be absolutely sure.
Argentine writer and director Santiago Mitre’s second feature, Paulina, is a remake of Daniel Tinayre’s 1961 film, La patota. The film follows the protagonist (Paulina) as she abandons a promising academic career to move to a rural province and teach politics and social justice to the local kids. Paulina’s new life is far from easy: her students are disengaged and unreceptive. One night, as Paulina rides home after an evening with her friend Laura, she is attacked and raped by a local gang who mistake her for another girl. Paulina soon realises that her rapists were some of her students, but decides not to report them to the police. Through multiple flashbacks, the film keeps retelling the events leading to the attack and the aftermath from different perspectives, as Paulina recounts her traumatic experience to her counsellor and talks to her father about her decision to keep the baby that she is expecting as a result of the rape.
The protagonist’s response to her rape may seem incomprehensible. Viewers may initially identify with her father, who cannot understand her idealistic views. But Paulina’s determination will inevitably challenge them to consider the validity of her staunch rejection of a legal and social-economic system that keeps the oppressed at the bottom, and makes any possibility of redemption and transformation implausible.
The winner of the 2016 GFF Audience Award was Mustang, the brilliant Turkish film about five orphaned teenage sisters, that was also recently nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was a choice that arguably rewarded the efforts of the organisers to internationalise the festival and to offer its audience a high-profile programme that, in terms of quality and number of prestigious films, is certainly comparable to the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/the-enthusiasts-guide-to-the-2015-bfi-london-film-festival">BFI London Film Festival</a>.
<pre>Image from: Paulina / GFF</pre>

Paulina &#8211; Glasgow Film Festival

Latin American directors shine at the record-breaking Glasgow Film Festival