The Berlin Film Festival has the dubious distinction of signaling major changes in world weather. In 2020, festival-goers who blithely flew into town to their pre-arranged hotels and badges flew home on nearly empty planes: the COVID blight had begun while people were at the movies. Then in February 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine opened the Pandora’s box of war in Europe once again. This year, both those world-shaking events left their mark on a darker, more dispersive, less socially vibrant festival than its pre-COVID version. The atmosphere had changed. Many, walking around the construction work all over festival HDQ in Potsdamer Platz, called it gloomy. But to be honest, taking one’s eyes off the hypnotic silver screen for a moment, it is the whole world that is gloomy and uncertain, and the Berlinale is just an accurate mirror.
Certainly, the days marked by a driving cold rain didn’t lighten spirits, but a blustery Berlin did make the cinemas all the more inviting. According to press chief Frauke Greiner, press attendance has just about returned to pre-COVID levels and, very importantly, the same is true for the public ticket buyers, whose return to cinemas will hopefully continue after the festival. One TFV critic who came back after many years commented, “Through all these years, the Cold War, the wall and its fall, the Berlinale audience has remained faithful. Public screenings are packed every single day during the festival.”
One can also feel a lighter touch behind the main program. While it’s never really been the Berlinale’s strong suit, the international competition proved more interesting than usual this year for its sheer willingness to experiment with genres and be less “artsy”. Consider that an audience-friendly comedy like the manic, off-beat BlackBerry opened the section, and films that in other years would have ended out of competition popped up regularly, including animation (the delightful YA fantasy adventure Suzume from Japan and the more carefully measured Art College 1994 from China) and thrillers (Limbo and Till the End of the Night). More of this in 2024, please.
Perhaps it will not reassure artistic director Carlo Chatrian and his programming team that none of these won a prize on awards night, but considering how top-rated films beloved by the critics like the American Past Lives by Celine Song were also passed over, persistence may be called for to get the attention of future juries. This round, the main jury led by Kristen Stewart made the brave if surprising decision to award the Golden Bear to Nicolas Philibert’s On the Adamant, a very art house documentary which movingly recounts the people in a Paris psychiatric hospital floating on the Seine.
Films from Ukraine
Falling on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, against the backdrop of President Biden’s historic visit to Kyiv, the 2023 Berlinale inevitably turned a special focus on cinema from the war zone. Screened as a special gala premiere, Sean Penn’s Ukraine-shot documentary Superpower captures the Hollywood star’s bromance with President Zelensky following their dramatic first date in Kyiv, just as the first Russian bombs rain down on the city. This worthy dispatch from the frontline starts well but becomes too much like a self-regarding vanity project as a verbose, boozy, wild-haired Penn increasingly centres himself as a Hemingway-style narrator on the world stage. It’s not about you, Sean.
In a similar vein, another special Berlin gala premiere, Nenad Cicin-Sain’s Kiss the Future, revisited rock supergroup U2’s love affair with besieged Sarajevo during the Balkan war of the Nineties, which culminated in the Irish rockers playing a 1997 stadium concert in the Bosnian capital. This is a stirring and compelling flashback to the bloody aftershocks of the Cold War, drawing unavoidable parallels to Ukraine today. But Kiss the Future is also overly reverential to its self-important stars, at one point crediting U2’s live performance with ending a war that had actually concluded two years before. It’s not about you, Bono.
Thankfully, the Berlinale also hosted some far more impressive first-hand documentaries on the Ukraine war including Eastern Front by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko, a stunningly immersive conflict diary largely shot by brave frontline paramedics on current life-or-death duty, and In Ukraine by Tomasz Wolski and Piotr Pawlus, a meditative observational journey through a nation and people who are proving remarkably resilient against Putin’s genocidal tyranny. In stark contrast to these definitive and deeply engaged works of war-zone reportage, Penn and Bono ended up looking like ambulance-chasing celebrity war tourists, however noble their intentions.
The Movies We Loved
Some of the most memorable movies were the ones that served emotions as a sneak attack. Yui Kiyohara’s Forum selection Remembering Every Night stretches out over the course of a day, drifting like a gentle breeze, chronicling small scale stories of loneliness and connection that build to a quietly stirring elegy. Dustin Guy Defa’s The Adults similarly ambles its way around a tale of sibling estrangement, eventually unthreading truths about the shifting nature of familial relationships. Meanwhile, by turns both literary and cinematic, Afire unpacks the ripple effects of what’s left unspoken, what’s gained through empathy. As the world appears to be pulling apart, it’s heartening to know that artists, filmmakers, and dreamers haven’t yet given up on the unexpected power of compassion.
The Forum
Marking Cristina Nord’s fourth and final year at its helm, the Berlinale Forum delivered films which combine topical themes and rigorous style. The winner of the section’s Caligari Prize, Selma Doborac’s De Facto, is a tough two-hour-plus title in which two deadpan actors recite confessions from perpetrators of horrid war crimes and analysis of the mental state of its victims.
Found-footage cinema remains prevalent in the section, including Vlad Petri’s Between Revolutions, which relays a long-distance friendship/romance over powerful archive footage from 1970s Iran and 1980s Romania. Also gaining rave reviews was Ulises de la Orden’s The Trial, a tautly structured 3-hour edit of hundreds of hours of TV recordings made during the civilian trial of the Argentinean generals who oversaw thousands of extrajudicial killings during their reign from 1976 to 1983.
Among the young filmmakers who made a splash in the Forum, two women directors in their early 30s stand out. Japanese director Yui Kiyohara conjures magic in her subtle small-town drama Remembering Every Night, while Rwanda’s Myriam U. Birara showcases an eye for social critique and brilliant mise-en-scene in The Bride.
Short Films
Meanwhile, the Berlinale Shorts once again threw up a number of interesting projects like Anthony Ing’s Jill, Uncredited, Kantarama Gahigiri’s Terra Mater – Mother Land, and Stephen Vuillemin’s A Kind of Testamant — not to mention the Golden Bear prize winnerd Les chenilles by Lebanese directors Michelle and Noel Keserwany. Outside of the competition, standout shorts included Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi’s Waking Up in Silence (Generation Kplus) and Deborah Stratman’s Last Things (Forum Expanded), while Todd Field’s one-time-only screening of The Fundraiser cast insight on the director’s cult feature Tár.
The Problems
Even before the 73rd Berlinale began, it was hamstrung by several problems, only one of which it managed to somewhat overcome. Already in November 2022, journalists at Die Welt were raising alarms about infrastructure problems that would significantly impact the festival, not just this edition but in the future as well. The Potsdamer Platz hub was a shadow of its former self: the CineStar multiplex, where many Panorama and market titles used to screen, was gone; CinemaxX was reserved for a reduced number of press and market screenings; and the central meeting place, the Grand Hyatt, was no longer the festival’s heart, which meant it was far more difficult to run into people you knew and worked with.
The scattered screening locations, which make absolute sense for Berlin residents, were a major headache for accredited visitors, as it meant significant amounts of time on the U-bahn (featuring detours due to construction work) or hefty outlays for taxis and Ubers. Cubix, the comfortable 9-screen multiplex in Alexanderplatz, was entirely turned over to the festival, but Cinema 3 had bothersome projection issues which were never addressed. There is talk that Cubix may be sold and converted into a food court. If so, would deprive the festival of yet another venue.
One look at the printed press schedule told you there was a major miscalculation: great chunks of time were blank or had far too few screenings. The result of all this was that few people were willing to take risks by chancing into a screening they were uncertain of, to which they had to travel across the city and then back.
In terms of programing, the line-up when announced was greeted with shrugs by many. Fortunately the dim expectations were somewhat overcome by a number of stand-out titles. Celine Song’s Past Lives already had positive buzz following its Sundance premiere and was greeted with equal warmth in Berlin. Also widely loved was Christian Petzold’s Afire (Roter Himmel), a beautifully constructed, intimate summer drama that highlights the differences between merely observing and seeing beyond surfaces. As always, every section had its highlights, including Yemen’s The Burdened, winner of the Amnesty International Film Award and Panorama’s second-place audience award, and the moving COVID-19 documentary The Walls of Bergamo in Encounters, the section that screened Tatiana Huezo’s hauntingly beautiful family tale, The Echo.
One major disappointment for returning press was the sad discovery that the highly coveted, almost mythical Berlinale catalog is gone. It is not only not printed on paper, it’s not even available in electronic form. A huge loss for cinema lovers everywhere, along with the once-indispensable EFM directory that was a reference bible for so many.
–Deborah Young, Jay Weissberg, Stephen Dalton, Clarence Tsui, Ben Nicholson, Kevin Jagernath, Lucy Virgen and Max Borg contributed to this story.
