Despite a powdery snowfall at the beginning of the Berlinale, which was a visual delight for attendees, the atmosphere at the 75th anniversary of the Berlinale was a little less sparkling, less urgent and generally less frizzante than many fondly remember it. It marked a muted changeover of festival brass, with the new director, American film programmer and journalist Tricia Tuttle, lately of the BFI, taking over from Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek.
While world politics dominated virtually every private discussion, the festival films seemed to shy away from geopolitical controversy of the raucous type that has always, positively, characterized the Berlin festival. Pro-Palestinian protests did not upset the apple cart as they did last year, but they were occurring all around Berlin, just as Germans went to the polls to vote in a crucial election. Pro-peace activists and film workers instead organised a separate event taking place the same week as the festival, the Palinale Film Festival, “as a response to the ongoing repression of Palestine solidarity in Germany,” which also addressed broader systemic injustices.
But there were good wins for Arab cinema at the Berlinale, albeit in the side sections. Tetes Brulees by Maja Ajmia Yde Zellama got a Special Mention from the Generation 14plus jury, as did Beneath which Rivers Flow by Ali Yahya. Taking second place in the Panorama Audience Award for documentaries was the Palestinian film Yalla Parkour by Areeb Zuaiter, while third place went to the Sudanese film Khartoum by Anas Saeed.
Ukraine was also present. Falling on the third anniversary of Russia’s illegal invasion of the country, the ongoing war on Europe’s eastern borders was once again a major motif this year, amplified for all the wrong reasons by Donald’s Trump’s unhinged pandering to Putin. Two beautifully composed documentaries, Kateryna Gornostai’s competition entry Timestamp and Vitaly Manksy’s Time to the Target, each captured a year on Ukraine’s civilian home front.
While Gornostai travels all over Ukraine observing schoolteachers and children bravely keeping up a sense of normality, despite air raid sirens and drone attacks, Mansky focusses on a military band in his home city of Lviv. Both are heartbreaking but inspirational portraits of grace under pressure. Russian-born U.S. director Julia Lotkev also came to the Berlinale with My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow, an epic six-hours-plus documentary that captures Putin’s brutal assault on free speech and anti-war protest in chillingly close-up detail. All three films richly deserve more exposure after Berlin, starting with educational screenings in the Oval Office.
The winners’ circle focused attention on some of the festival’s smaller but well-liked titles, including the Norwegian relationship drama about a 15-year-old with a crush on her teacher, Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams (Drømmer). This final part of a triptych began last year in Berlin’s Panorama with Sex and continued in Venice competition with Love, the last winning Haugerud the Golden Bear.
The two Silver Bear Grand Jury and Jury prizes went to Latin American stories. Winning the first was Gabriel Mascaro’s Orwellian fantasy The Blue Trail, animated by a fiercely delightful Denise Weinberg as a 70+ woman who refuses to board the “wrinkle wagon” and be deported to an old folks’ colony. The other award went to Iván Fund’s mysterious road movie The Message, in which a young girl’s gift for communicating with animals is exploited by her guardians in a nuanced relationship film on the road in rural Argentina.
Two Chinese film had a lot of buzz with art film fans. Living the Land is an exquisitely observed portrait of ancient village life that earned director Huo Meng the Silver Bear for Best Director. Bolstered by strongly favorable word-of-mouth, the Generation Kplus Grand Prix-winner The Botanist left an indelible impression in its stunning landscapes on China’s border with Kazakhstan, where different ethnicities mingle.
Australian star Rose Byrne won the award for best actor in a leading role for her bruisingly funny performance in Mary Bronstein’s dark comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and the whole creative ensemble of The Ice Tower — the coming-of-age story based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale and directed by Lucile Hadžihalilovic — took home a prize for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.
Alas, this was not a great Berlinale edition for major-name auteurs with strong festival pedigrees. The most famous German director of the 21st century, Tom Tykwer resoundingly missed the target with his gala opening film The Light, a stylish but shallow portrait of a Berlin family in crisis, which left critics cold. Likewise, Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s much-anticipated follow-up project to his multi-Oscar-winning modern classic Parasite, the all-star sci-fi comedy thriller Mickey 17, began strongly but soon got bogged down in a laboured muddle of illogical twists and half-baked subplots.
Even many of the prestige names in the Berlinale competition seemed to be operating on low voltage this year. Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a compact biopic of legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart. fell short of expectations. Despite fine performances, including Andrew Scott’s prize-winning turn as Richard Rogers, the wise-cracking script was let down by clunky staging and a jarringly miscast Ethan Hawke as the short, balding Hart. Meanwhile, Romanian punk provocateur Radu Jude softened his usual riotous style with the righteous but unusually conventional social drama Kontinental 25, which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. Mexican firebrand Michel Franco also delivered a rare misfire, Dreams, a study in racial and erotic tension that was fatally lacking in both, and overshadowed by thick political messaging.
As politicians launched threats to carve up other people’s countries, the festival venues in Potsdamer Platz seemed to be undergoing their own slow erosion. With the loss of all multiplex venues in the Sony Center near the main Berlinale Palast showcase, and the CineMaxx now dedicated to press screenings of films in the official selection, titles from important sidebars like Panorama, Perspectives and Generation screened far and wide around the city. This may have given more people access to them, but it definitely made it harder for fest-goers to see them and diminished the atmosphere of festive crowds stirring up excitement as they milled around. It is not an easy problem to solve for the festival; for journalists it meant an ever-growing reliance on screeners from PRs and sales agents.
The addition of a new venue in Potsdamer Platz, the Stage Bluemax Theater, was a noble attempt to add Perspectives screening to Marlene Dietrich Platz, though the steeply terraced venue on a top floor was too structurally awkward to be well-liked. Sadly, one of the main casualties in the area is the Dussmann bookstore, once a prime destination for DVD/Blu-ray purchases.
