If the old saying is true that a good day starts in the morning, then the reverse should also hold. Unfolding amid the worldwide gloom of two high-profile wars in Ukraine and Gaza and who knows how many others, the 74th Berlin Film Festival, held February 15-25, chose as its opening film the relentlessly downbeat Small Things Like These, and never seemed to recover its vigor through a sluggish main competition peppered with a few heart-warming surprises.
Although Small Things was widely admired as a quietly devastating take-down of the Catholic Church’s power in Ireland, and Emily Watson won the Best Supporting Performance award, it signaled that this was not going to be a year of joyful movies and glamorous galas. For one thing, the well-liked team of executive director Mariette Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian, who arrived at the Berlinale in 2020 and negotiated the difficult years of the pandemic, are stepping down amid soaring costs that challenge the festival to continue operating on its current €29 million budget. They will be replaced by Tricia Tuttle, former director of the BFI London Film Festival, and their imminent departure cast an end-of-school-year atmosphere over the festival that seemed reflected in less exciting programming.
Bizarrely, it was the closing awards ceremony that created a real drama and a political flurry that has rocked the pro-Israel German government. As might be expected at a world forum like the Berlinale, there were several statements made on stage by prize-winners in support of the Palestinians under Israeli attack in Gaza.
Showing how close to the surface the war in Gaza is, the Berlinale Documentary Award, as well as the Panorama Documentary Audience Award, went to a film about the destruction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, No Other Land. When two of the film’s four directors, Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, went on stage and denounced the “slaughter and massacre” of Palestinians in Gaza, calling on the German government to stop sending weapons to Israel, among those seen applauding was minister of culture Claudia Roth. The following day there was much back-pedaling by Roth and other officials like Berlin mayor Kai Wegner, who called the pro-Palestinian remarks “antisemitic” because they didn’t mention the role of Hamas in the war. One political party called for the government to suspend the festival’s financing, while Yuval Abraham received over 100 death threats on social media. The political fallout is ongoing and its long-term effect on the festival unknown.
While the Berlinale remained avidly attended, especially in the Cubix and Zoo Palast screening rooms, its central hub in Potsdamer Platz was once again a bit of a wasteland. This has been an issue since 2020, when CineStar closed its doors permanently and the Arkaden mall (now The Playce) was out of order due to renovations. This year, with the Sony Center basically reduced to a construction site (though the underground Arsenal cinema still hosted Forum screenings) and the CinemaxX still partly unusable and restricted to press screenings only, the general audience was largely absent from the main festival area, save for the three daily gala screenings in the Berlinale Palast.
The Programming Side
On the programming side, one could sense that Carlo Chatrian and his team, knowing they were on the way out, decided to be bolder than usual, at least when it came to the competition. Even just last year, titles like Architecton and Pepe would have felt more at home in the Encounters section, one of the highlights of the Chatrian era. Many members of the press wonder whether the section will survive under the incoming new management, or go the way of now-defunct sidebars like Culinary Cinema and Perspektive Deutsches Kino (despite having better attendance figures than both of them).
A glance at this year’s competition confirms that elevated genre cinema was unusually prominent this year, with major U.S. indie powerhouse A24 fielding a wide range of titles at the festival, while various U.S. and European art house auteurs took a bold sideways detour into science fiction, horror-adjacent drama and dystopian fantasy. The Silver Bear Jury Prize went to French director Bruno Dumont’s deranged but ambitious The Empire, a visually stunning blend of small-town seaside farce and epic space opera, while Sebastian Stan picked up the Best Lead Performance prize for his multi-faceted role in A Different Man, Aaron Schimberg’s darkly funny Kakfa-meets-Kaufman satire on beauty standards and ableism. A potent proto-feminist historical thriller dressed up in eerie folk-horror tropes, The Devil’s Bath by Austrian duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala also won a Silver Bear for cinematographer Martin Gschlact.
Not all these arty genre experiments hit the target, however. Italian director Piero Massini’s glum sci-fi fable Another End, starring Gael Garcia Bernal as a grieving man who takes advantage of advanced medical science to bring back his ex-lover in a different body, was an interesting idea ruined by its baffling and ponderous treatment. Johan Renck’s Netflix-bound Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler as a Czech deep-space astronaut receiving marriage guidance counselling from a giant extraterrestrial spider, also wasted a fine cast and superlative production design by taking itself far too seriously. Conclusion: Tarkovsky, Malick and Christopher Nolan are all fine directors, but their enduring influence on lesser film-making talents who ape their style is frequently disastrous.
The main jury headed by Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o were clearly drawn to a wide assortment of films, and despite some highly controversial prizes to the likes of the sexy sci-fi delirium The Empire, the confused story of a talking hippo Pepe, and a minor-key Hong Sang-soo (A Traveller’s Needs), they found an excellent choice for the Golden Bear in Mati Diop’s thought-provoking documentary on looted cultural artefacts, Dahomey, which touched on increasingly thorny issues around the legacy of colonialism. Among the German hopefuls, Matthias Glasner’s Dying was a critical favorite until the end, and received the Best Screenplay nod. Another much-liked film was the tragi-comic Iranian rom-com My Favourite Cake, whose directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha were banned from travelling to Berlin by the Iranian authorities. The film won the Fipresci Critics’ Award for competition and the Ecumenical Award.
Short Films in Competition
The top prize for Berlinale Shorts was scooped by Francisco Lezama’s An Odd Turn, the strange tale of a museum security guard whose life takes a series of unexpected directions. Far more quotidian was Wenqian Zhang’s Remains of the Hot Day which described the lunchtime of a single family in 1990’s China, filled with snippets of detail evoking the director’s own childhood memories.
In that vein, there were several short films that engaged with documentary form or non-fiction aesthetics to interesting ends. Eva Konnemann’s That’s All from Me, which got a special mention from the jury, included a documentary-like short-with-a-short about birdwatching to further explore the themes between its two fictional protagonists. Yuyan Wang’s The Moon Also Rises used documentary footage but re-framed it within a science fiction scenario by creating a new context around what was happening. Elsewhere, Boris Dewjatkin’s City Museum / My Paradise and Gala Hernandez Lopez’s for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world employed an essayistic approach to explore the filmmaker’s experience of the urban space of Berlin and the future-gambling nature of cryptocurrency and cryogenics.
The Political Mood
In terms of the general political mood in Berlin, it was the ominous week in which Alexei Navalny, the courageous Russian dissident and leader of the opposition to Putin, was killed in an Arctic prison camp. A memorial of flowers and lamps sprang up in front of the Russian embassy on the central Unter den Linden street, next to a standing protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The festival also made a feeble effort to address the ongoing war in Gaza, planting a wooden shack on wheels, the so-called Tiny Space, in front of the Red Carpet for three days, where festival-goers were encouraged to talk about Israel and Palestine. Though the idea might have been good for opening a door, the execution was problematic and felt almost like a PR move for the benefit of the festival’s government sponsors. The urge to “talk it out”, besides assuming that the two sides of the conflict are equal, belittled how complicated the issue is, while it ignored Germany’s involvement in the conflict and the role of German institutions in silencing pro-Palestine voices (even Jewish ones) in the press, culture, and academia.
Meanwhile, the film program continued to address the ongoing conflict in Ukraine with moving, nuanced, personal documentaries from mostly female Ukrainian directors, notably Intercepted and A Bit of a Stranger.
The Future of the Festival
Concern for the Berlinale’s future goes much deeper than whether new director Tricia Tuttle will be able to bring splashy Hollywood titles to Berlin. Major stars will certainly attract more sponsors, which is crucial given how the festival has been hemorrhaging benefactors in the past few years.
Significantly compounding the issue is that the war in Ukraine has propelled the German government to divert funds from culture to the military, threatening every institution in the culture sector that relies on federal grants. The writing was on the wall this year when festival organizers were told there was no money for the Retrospective, and while the resourceful Rainer Rother managed to put together an excellent program by tapping the fee-free riches of the Deutsches Kinemathek, it’s indicative of just how precarious state sponsorship can be when the trumpets of war are sounding nearby. All cultural institutions are bracing themselves for significantly greater budget cuts, leading many insiders to wonder how the Berlinale will manage to maintain its position. Yes, more Hollywood names will help attract corporate backers, but can Tuttle bring in enough to halt the sense of a festival in decline? Given the tepid programming of recent years, plus the hollowing out of Potsdamer Platz and significant financial concerns, the new director has quite a task ahead of her.
