Berlin International Film Festival

Interview: Kirsten Dunst Talks 'Midnight Special,' Making Her Directing Debut, Reteaming With Sofia Coppola, And More

Jessica Kiang — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 15:05:00 GMT

For the last of our interviews with the key players behind this weekend's "Midnight Special " (director Jeff Nichols' interview is here, actor Michael Shannon's is here and Joel Edgerton's is here) we finish up with perhaps the film's biggest star, who, though crucial, actually has one of its smaller roles. But Kirsten Dunst, who plays the mother of the supernaturally-gifted boy Alton, who is reunited with him on the run when he and his father Roy (Shannon) escape from the cult (called The Ranch) that they all used to belong to, has always pursued a strange kind of stardom. Her emergence as a Hollywood player (breaking out in "Interview with the Vampire," starring in Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" blockbuster series and more) never quite eclipsed her career as an indie sweetheart.

That parallel track really took off with Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and since then, Dunst has worked with a wide range of independent and arthouse talents, like Michel Gondry, Cameron Crowe, Walter Salles and Lars Von Trier. It seems a very filmmaker-led strategy, so when we met her at the Berlin International Film Festival after the premiere of "Midnight Special," that's where we started.

Your role in this film is not huge, as your character is simply not the main focus. So why did you take it — was it the lure of Jeff Nichols?
That's exactly it. I will do anything with a good filmmaker. I really didn't even need to read anything, it's really all about the filmmaker to me. You want to feel like you're working, with the director and the other actors involved, towards a common, creative, meaningful experience. Not every movie is like that and I knew that I would get that this time.

So sure, I was the lead in my last movie and I'm not the lead in this one, it's like, who cares? As long as you are doing something you think is good it doesn't matter.

So in general your decisions are based on who you get to work with, rather than the project itself?
Well, you know I worked with Leslye Headland [on "Bachelorette"] who was a first-time director… I do take risks too. But I like finding things that I feel I can help my life in a way. And I could never be an actress that does that same thing over and over again — I would be so bored. I would hate this job!

You didn't find working on "Fargo" season 2 to be too repetitious or boring then?
No — that was hard work. You don't get a lot of takes, two takes and move on. The way they cram the schedule, you really do a lot in one day. It doesn't look like that when you watch it, but… seriously the amount of money and time that we had, it looks like we had so much more than was given. It's really amazing to me. Yeah, it was hard work that show, and I talked a lot. I hate having so many lines!

So you must have been happy to play one of those stoic Jeff Nichols characters here...
Oh yes, but this came before "Fargo," for me, like a year before.

Ah, of course. So your voice was rested.
Exactly! I love movies where I don't have to talk. I'm great at silent acting.

But you know, I think this movie isn't really about the performances. I mean, when you watch a great movie you don't think "He was amazing!" "She was amazing!" You just watch it and you're like, wow, "That was amazing," and I think that's this kind of movie.

I think that's very true here, and part of it is that no one is playing the standard archetype of their role. Your character, Sarah, for example, is a very unusual, relatively unseen take on motherhood.
Oohh, I like that… an unusual take. You have a good perspective! Are you a mom? I'm not a mom either, but I like your whole depiction of this role.

It's just that she can be quite hard-headed and unsentimental, and has been separated from her son for some time.
You know what's interesting, though — I think she got thrown off The Ranch [the name of the cult Sarah, Roy and Alton previously belonged to], because she wouldn't let her child be taken. I mean, they lie and say she "abandoned" him, but really the head guy kicked her out because he wanted to raise her son as his own son. [This meshes with what Nichols told us about a prologue scene he conceived of but never shot]. And she can't call the cops or anything because the kid's life would be ruined, he'd be a science experiment.

So she lives with the love of The Ranch too. Jeff and I discussed how Sarah was probably into drugs or something, and The Ranch saved her, plus she met Roy there. That's why I think she keeps her hair in that braid, there's a love/hate with The Ranch. Even her house on the outside, where there's barely any furniture — it's not like she'd really cared about it, it was bare minimum, she was living such a sad life.

But also, I've met people before who have had such heavy trauma in their life that there's almost something a little bit… angelic about them. They're so kind and appreciative of every moment they're living and I feel like Sarah's like that, she's a little saintly, like a Mary. That's how I depicted her.

So you saw the film as at least partially a religious allegory?
Well, Jeff will say the movie's very anti-religion! And I'm like, but your major characters — you've got Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and you've got the disciple, how can you say that? I mean, even if you're not religious, something seeped through there. But he doesn't take it as that. And I guess it also shows how The Ranch, being a religion too, can manipulate people and brainwash them — it's just various different perspectives. And I think it's cool that it raises the questions of what else is out there and that we can't be the only things around.

I suppose as the writer/director it's his prerogative to interpret it differently. And you yourself are primed to make your directorial debut soon, isn't that so?
Not very soon — I would think that it could get rolling end of this year or next year. Next year would be better, but you never know. I've finished writing it, and I think they're gonna announce it soon.

I've read that it's a kind of dark comedy?
Well, hmm. It's like, I just like movies that are funny when they shouldn't be. So there's a little bit of that. It's not a dark comedy, though there's an element of that — if you knew the thing that I was adapting, you might be like wow, that is absolutely nothing like a dark comedy!

But you won't tell us what it is!
I know, I know! I can't. But they're gonna announce it soon, I think. And I will say that I don't want it to be just some "little indie." I want it to be a... bigger movie.

Quite a few — maybe all — of the roles you've chosen over the years have a dark element to them. Is that what draws you to them?
You know, it's funny because I don't watch movies like that -- the movies I watch are like, "Trainwreck" and "Straight Outta Compton." But I like being in the darker movies — I guess I like expressing myself that way, but usually my entertainment is different. Though, wait, I've watched pretty much every movie this year, so actually that's not true at all.

Oh you have? So what have been your standouts?
I like "Mustang" a lot. Obviously there's a 'Virgin Suicides' influence there, but she did it in her own way, a really beautiful way, I loved that movie. And — I couldn't get through it all, because it was making me physically ill — did you watch "Son of Saul"? Oh my God. I mean, I was so impressed by it, but then I was like I can't do this right now, this is a little intense for me.

So what's coming next for you?
Next I did a movie with my girlfriends who do a fashion line called Rodarte, that will come out this year [This is Kate and Laura Mulleavy's "Woodshock," co-starring Pilou Asbaek and Lorelei Linklater]. They showed a trailer for sales here, and it is going to be something special, I think.

And then I'm probably going to work with Sofia [Coppola] again this year. [This seems a tentative confirmation of this report we ran back in August of last year] So when people say there are actors who won't work with female directors… hey there! Hello!

And you're going to be one soon too.
Yeah, and there's a lot of good female roles in that movie too...

"Midnight Special" opens today.

Interview: Michael Shannon Talks 'Midnight Special,' 'Nocturnal Animals,' Herzog's 'Salt And Fire' & Working With Jeff Nichols

Jessica Kiang — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 17:05:20 GMT

Continuing our series of interviews with the principal players in Jeff Nichols' "Midnight Special" (Joel Edgerton is here; Nichols himself is here; Kirsten Dunst is coming soon), next up is the wonderful Michael Shannon, who teams with the director for the fourth time. Here he plays the father of an uncannily gifted child who must evade the clutches of a cult and of the government, to get his son not just to safety but to a place where the mystery of his powers might be explained.

The hardworking Shannon, who will also appear in "Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice" next week, has impressed us in almost everything he's done, from his standout turn on "Boardwalk Empire," to Ramin Bahrani's recent, incendiary "99 Homes," all the way back to William Friedkin's "Bug" and beyond. But it's the increasingly indelible partnership between him and Nichols that has yielded some of his very finest work, and "Midnight Special" could well be the pinnacle of that collaboration to date.

Talking with him after the film's Berlin Film Festival premiere (endearing detail: the craggily charismatic Shannon was wearing the official Berlinale hoodie), we got to ask him about the nature and the history of that partnership, as well as about some exciting upcoming titles on his crowded slate.

So it seems like you and this Jeff Nichols guy kind of get on?
Oh man, Jeff feels like a brother to me. We have a kind of rapport that just materializes out of thin air. We can go a long time without seeing each other or talking to each other, and then we meet and it's like we just saw each other yesterday.

Why do you think that is?
We both have kind of similar backgrounds and come from the same region of the U.S., and I think we have a lot of common interests and influences. And I think we both share an aesthetic in terms of storytelling: I've always appreciated Jeff's economy and directness in his writing — I've always found it challenging to work on. And I enjoy being challenged.

And it's that everything Jeff does is from the heart. He's conscious of cinema and film and he's interested in exploring genres, but underneath it all is basically a man just struggling with some fundamental questions that I think a lot of people struggle with. It's very heartfelt.

And that's why Jeff's surrounded by people that work with him time and time again. He's kind of a natural born leader — you want to make him happy. Nothing feels better than looking over after a take and seeing that he's got a smile on his face.

Did you sense that rapport immediately, back on [Nichols' debut] "Shotgun Stories"?
Well, it was kind of weird, the way our paths crossed, very random. He went to North Carolina School for the Arts — and I happened to do some work with Gary Hawkins, one of his teachers. Gary showed it to his class and Jeff asked, "You know how I could get a hold of him? I've got a script I'd love him to take a look at." And Gary said, "I don't know if I feel comfortable giving out his info." He was being protective because I already had some credits under my belt, but Jeff kept at him.

And I think even that exchange speaks volumes about who Jeff is. He's fearless. He's got this great combination of confidence and scrutiny. He's very hard on himself but when he knows what he wants, when he feels like he's found the right thing, he will insist on it. And that's something I respond to.

There's so much uncertainty in this business, people that are confused or maybe not even necessarily that good at what they do. And Jeff is not one of those people.

It could be that's part of the fellow feeling, then, because as an actor you have an unusual ability to project conviction.
It could be. I mean, I'm not necessarily interested in how I am perceived or whatever; I'm just trying to have the experience that's charted out by the script. And I get thrown into a lot of stories where the circumstances are pretty extreme and I'm dealing with big hairy questions that are hard to answer, but I guess I'm not afraid of that either.

We're going to see you contend with a lot of those stories and circumstances in the coming year [Shannon's IMDb page lists 11 titles currently due for 2016 release]
Oh yeah, it's crazy. I hope — I really hope — it's not too much. It was a weird year. I had some projects that I'd been attached to but weren't financed or were kind of nebulous, and then everything materialized at the same time and everybody was like "It's now or never!" And so I was just like, "I guess I'll do six movies in a row and we'll see how that works out."

But now I'm trying to be a little more — I don't want to say "picky," but you gotta be careful. Because when you say even just "Oh yeah, that sounds interesting," they take that to the bank.

There's some really great-sounding stuff in there — I'm particularly intrigued by Tom Ford's sophomore film, "Nocturnal Animals."
That's an amazing script. It's going to be a trippy movie, really unique — because it goes back and forth between two completely diametrically opposed worlds. It's a real head trip, half of it set in the LA art world and the other half is this grimy crime story in Texas. I'm just in the Texas part, playing a detective trying to help Jake Gyllenhaal's character solve a crime.

And you're also leading Werner Herzog's "Salt and Fire"?
Yes, I went down to Bolivia — an amazing experience. We shot on the Uyuni Salt Flats and it blew my mind. We even stayed in a hotel that's made out of salt; it claimed to be "The Premier Salt Hotel in the World." That was a great script, too: an environmental drama. We were pretending the salt flats are the site of an environmental disaster, [German actress Veronica Ferres] plays a scientist investigating, and I'm the head of the corporation responsible.

You speak often about the quality of the script. Is that what primarily attracts you to a project, or is it about the director?
Hmm...script's up there. Without a good script, we're all just hanging out in the breeze, you know? You can have the best director, actors, crew imaginable, but you gotta have something to shoot. And I dunno, I just read a lot of really great scripts recently — they're not always easy and there's not always a lot of money for them because they're kinda out there, but they're worth doing.

But it's also the filmmakers and the people. With Jeff, I've basically told [him] that I'll do whatever he wants me to, whenever he wants me to do it. So if he calls me up, I go, whether I can get the script in advance or when I get there — there's certain people I feel that way about. Werner [Herzog], Ramin [Bahrani] — there are certain people that you just want to be in business with.

This will be your third outing with Herzog.
Yeah, I did a little part in 'Bad Lieutenant' which was kind of like my audition for "My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done" But doing 'Bad Lieutenant' was a lot of fun because I got to work with [Nicolas] Cage, and man, he was on another planet in that movie. He was having a good time. A good time.

Hah, it shows in the film too! Can we expect a similar level of insanity from Herzog's "Salt and Fire"?
"Salt and Fire" is a little more sobering. It really is about the environment and our responsibility to it — it's very moving in that regard. And Werner is just such a man of the world; I've learned so much from him and seen so many things I would have never seen. I would never have seen the Uyuni Salt Flats if it wasn't for Werner.

You would never have stayed in the World's Premier Salt Hotel. You'd have stayed in some second-rate salt hotel.
Heheh! Exactly. The Ramada Salt Hotel.

Let's get back to "Midnight Special." I understand that Nichols basically can send up a batsignal and you'll come, but you must have been in on the development of this film early.
The first time Jeff ever mentioned it was during "Take Shelter." He said, "I'm going to write a chase movie for you and it's gonna be you in an old hot car driving around at night real fast." It sounded like "Cannonball Run" or something! I didn't know what to expect. Then when I read it, I was very moved, obviously, by that relationship between father and son. Jeff has continuously explored, in all the movies we've made together, that bond between parent and child. Either its strength or its weakness — both sides of it.

And also just I love to see Jeff playing with this genre. I was curious to see how he was going to do it, what was it going to look like, because it was not his wheelhouse, really. I didn't know he was so fascinated by the genre until he showed me his script.

Did this time out feel different because of the involvement of a studio [Warner Brothers]?
It was just more...it was a nice feeling. It made me proud for Jeff that he was gonna get to not worry so much. That he wasn't going to have to be staring at his watch all the time making sure the sun didn't set or whatever. That he could have the luxury of making a film the way it should be made.

I don't like this current trend of making films as quickly as possible for as little money as possible. It can be done; we proved that time and time again. But you're making something that's going to last forever, and if you make movies like that, there are shortcuts and sacrifices that can't help but diminish the overall product. So why not get a little more money and little more time and do it the right way? Why put all the onus on the artist to panic for 25 days and hope that it cuts together?

It doesn't mean that Jeff still wasn't anxious about it, because there were more resources but it was also more ambitious. But that's the thing about Jeff: Every movie he makes is always going to be a challenge to himself to broaden his scope, so it's kind of a tightrope. But he seems like he's managing pretty well so far.

Well, he has some great support. Long may your partnership continue.
Thank you, thank you. I hope so.

"Midnight Special" opens on Friday.

Interview: Jeff Nichols Talks Making 'Midnight Special,' Working With Warner Bros., The Trouble With Final Cut, And More

Jessica Kiang — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 15:08:28 GMT

Last week we ran a little nugget on "Aquaman" as a sneak preview of our Jeff Nichols interview from this year's Berlin Film Festival. And now, as the release day for his thoughtful, questioning sci-fi "Midnight Special" draws near, we're ready to unleash the rest of it on you. To recap, the film stars Michael Shannon, Kirsten Dunst, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver and Sam Shepard, and follows Roy (Shannon) as he attempts to flee the cult he had been a member of, with his son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). Alton has mysterious powers that are coveted both by the cult and by the government, but Roy, his best friend Lucas (Edgerton) and Alton's estranged mother Sarah (Dunst) believe his destiny lies elsewhere.

In the course of discussing the film, its themes and why Nichols brought it to Warner Bros., we've excised anything that could be considered a major spoiler, but hints as to the course of the film's narrative do abound, so the hyper-spoiler-sensitive should maybe come back here once they've seen the film. (But you really should — Nichols has some typically thoughtful and illuminating insights to share about his deeply-felt movie).

Avoiding those spoilers was made even more difficult, however, by the fact that Nichols, having only just begun at the time to get a feel for the response to his film, disarmingly mentioned that he'd read our review and asked, with unusually genuine curiosity (for a director in this position), for clarification on the section critiquing the film's ending. This kind of never happens...

The ending? Oh, well, I think I just meant that I felt it showed too much, the very last section.
You're funny — so many people want more clarity, more definitiveness around the ending. You're one of the few who wants less. But that's a good thing.

You know, I really don't care about plot. I really, really don't. I care about narrative structure, I care about how stories unfold. But the specifics of plot and specifics of endings just aren't really where I put most of my attention. And on this film I was really trying to figure out how to be a father, and how to process all this fear and all these feelings, and that are apparent in the film.

What I find interesting is I don't really have an answer to it. I really don't know how to tell you what it feels like to be a parent… "Take Shelter," I feel like I had my hands around the idea a lot more. This one — I've told the story about my son having a febrile seizure and that specifically made me have to experience what it would be like to lose him. But also Sandy Hook happened while I was making this which kind of put this shockwave impression through me.

I know what it is, but it's hard to enunciate — this film is about is what to do for your children. When you're afraid of something you immediately react by wanting more control over that situation. But that's the opposite thing that a parent really needs to do. The more we try to control our kids and create who they are and where they're going, the more that will fall apart, that's a dangerous thing. So you need to actually manage the fear and figure out who your kids are. Who do they want to be and how can you help shape that, but not control it.

Facilitate it.
Yes, exactly. So for me, the kid had to go someplace, someplace that the parents couldn't fully know or understand and they at some point had to accept that. And that to me is the trajectory of the thing. So the details, the specifics, the plot, that's just window dressing.

I think it's very clear that the heart of the film is not the who-goes-where-and-does-what. And to clarify, for me ending is not thematically definitive, but it is on kind of on a plot level, which is what didn't quite gel for me.
Yeah, of course. I just couldn't figure out how else to end it! If you have an idea... Seriously! How would you end it? Where would you end it?

[This really never happens. But I put forward my own suggestion, and Nichols is very nice about it while remaining politely skeptical.]

That would have been a crazy ending.

Yes, people would have been really, really annoyed about it. It's good I'm not in charge. But I really feel like that moment is kind of the sublimation of the theme of fatherhood.
I'm so glad you mention that one moment, but that's really kind of a subtle moment and…I was worried you wouldn't understand what was happening. But I'm glad that people are getting that. Those are the things I worry about.

It worked on me so well that most everything afterward felt superfluous.
It's an odd hand-off, it's a really odd hand-off. It goes against the grain. And I'm not saying this as like, "Look at me! I'm a badass because I did something different." [Nichols' soft-spoken manner is such that it's actually funny to hear him worry that people might think he's trying to be badass] It really does go against, like, a good idea! But the way I reasoned that out was [it's] fulfillment for Roy. He's already come to terms with the things that he didn't want to talk about in that motel room, with Kirsten's character…

Who, incidentally is one of the most unusual mother characters I've seen in a while.
Oh yeah. Have you seen my first film? The mother in "Shotgun Stories" is unusual too, but just basically wicked! She hates her sons, blames them for the dissolution of her marriage. She's an evil woman. But I remember reading "A Doll's House" in high school and thinking, "A mother that abandons her children, what a strange idea." And that's not what happens here, by any means.

But there's actually this really amazing scene that I wrote — well, actually I never wrote it down on paper — for the beginning of the film. That's the moment where Sam Shepard's character [who plays the leader of the cult] comes to Roy and Sarah and tells them that he's going to be taking their son. It was a really good scene. Basically he comes in and is just like, "Well, I spoke to God and Alton's going to be my son" and before she could help herself, Sarah just sits up and goes, "That's not right. That's not true." And Sam Shepard's character just sits back, and these women come in and start packing up the boy's things and then Doak and Levi [cult member heavies] come in and take her outside. And she's looking at Roy for help, but he knows if he says something, he goes too.

She becomes an apostate, for her spontaneous reaction to someone trying to take her child away.
Absolutely, they exiled her. So she has to deal with all this and be separated from her son which she doesn't want. She did not abandon him -- that's a false statement [from a character in the film], which I think you understand as soon as you watch her see her son for the first time.

I mean that scene is really damn good! And I needed to know about it, and Kirsten needed to know about it, but it was this experiment, this idea that I could have that scene exist [but not shoot it] and just feel some strange subtext from it all.

So, it's taken a long time to get to here with it, with delays and changing release dates. Are you happy with the decision to come to Berlin?
With hindsight yes. It was pretty — crushing is not the right word, but yeah. You have this thing and you know that it's a strange thing, and part of me was just ready to get it out into the world. So what if people like it or love it or hate it or whatever, just get it out there. I'm tired of thinking about it, I've been thinking about this thing for four years, I'm ready for other people to think about it so I can stop.

And now you just have to talk about it for the next two years.
Exactly. But that part's easy. Because people already have the answers...I just fill them in! But with hindsight, just as a business strategy, I took this film very purposefully to Warner Brothers, because I thought they made films that people really want to see. They make fanboy films you know, but they also make really smart films like "Her" and Clint Eastwood's films and "Inherent Vice." They seemed like a really interesting studio.

And having been through the independent film business, I really wanted the company that was going to release the film to be the same company that paid to make it. I want them invested from the beginning. And, although I didn't know the particulars of it at the time, I was really drawn to Sue Kroll (President of WB marketing division) and all of her marketing. I love the way they market films .

And so I really put all of that in their hands. And then they came to me and said "we don't think we should use the date that we picked for this film." The original date they'd chosen was before we even had a cut — the dating of these films is this crazy strategy that these people are doing.

So when they came to me and said, "we've seen the film now, it needs space, it needs space to breathe, 'Star Wars' is coming out a week after, it's going to be crushed," you know that was tough to hear, but I think it was very true.

That doesn't mean it's not about to be crushed anyway, by 'Batman v Superman,' but I think there's more space there. And time will tell if it was a good or bad decision. It was certainly a tough decision to have to wait, but I respect them for making it, and I've put it in their hands because I trust them.

So the relationship with WB is good, but this is your first studio film. Are there things that would have been different if there had been no studio involvement?
Yeah, there's one thing. So, obviously they tested the film. And I never tested "Take Shelter," I just showed up to Sundance and showed it to people. Had we tested that film it would have been ripped apart. Just ripped apart. And I don't know if I would have had the courage to not dismantle it. At this point though, I'm pretty stubborn. And Warner Brothers, from the very beginning gave me final cut. So I had this confidence.

But final cut is kind of the nuclear option, you know? You don't want to use it. Because you want people that are helping make your film, to like your film.

So I was very open to listening to notes, but it was nice to know that no one was going to force me to do them. Because this is mine. I created this. It's not some book they brought to me or some library title that they had. This was mine and I'll be damned if they were going to tell me how to do it. But luckily that attitude got to stay in a drawer!

And then what it does actually, is it makes you responsible for the film working. And so we start showing it to people. And 90% of the audience was completely opposed to your position [on the ending]! And the studio keeps coming to me and saying "Look, Jeff, we keep showing it to people and they want more. Here are the questionnaires." And I was like, "Of course, what else are they going to write? That's what everybody's going to write!"

So there is one scene that didn't exist in the original film… I thought [I had a] really elegant ending, where you just didn't know [the fate of a certain character]. But people were really bothered by it. They couldn't get over it. So I was sending it around to friends and saying, "No, I'm not going to address it, I'm not going to address it" and then I had this idea [that was] pragmatic, but it also felt thematic. So they allowed me to go back and shoot an additional scene for that and put it in. Does it make the film drastically better? I don't know.

But you like it.
I like it and I think it makes the film at the back end lay down a little bit more. I wouldn't have done it otherwise.

"Midnight Special" opens on Friday.

Berlin and its Political Stands: African Cinema Today

Sydney Levine — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 18:45:26 GMT

This 66^th edition of the Berlinale did not focus so much on films as it did on issues, especially the issue of mass migration including Germany’s one million immigrants being welcomed by Angela Merkel. The sentiment of the Berlinale was expressed by Festival Director Dieter Kosslick in his introductory comment, “We are 90 million Germans. What are one million Syrians? We spent billions and billions to educate our kids, to teach them what happened in the Holocaust.” Nevertheless, the controversy throughout Germany and Europe continues to grow, as it does in the U.S. about what to do about the massive wave of migration, as if there were any other place the people, dispossessed and disposed of by their governments and the governments of the west to go.

Dealing with the plight of African and Syrian refugees, “Fire at Sea”/ “Fuocoammare” by Giovanni Rosi won the Golden Bear led by the jury president Meryl Streep. All North American rights have subsequently been acquired from its international sales agent, Doc & Film by Kino Lorber who plans an autumn release. “Gianfranco Rosi captured the hearts and minds of the Berlinale this year with what will become one of the essential films of our times,” said CEO Richard Lorber. The Italian distributor 01 Distribution profited from its Saturday night Golden Bear win as the Italian box office’s Sunday profits spiked +166%. Tuesday’s take was 40% up on Monday’s box office. By Wednesday the film had taken $169.5k (€154k) and the following weekend 01 almost doubled screens to 76. Imovision took Brazil, Caramel took Spain, Curzon took U.K. Rosi previously won the 2013 Venice Golden Lion for his documentary “Sacro Gra”.

“Fire at Sea” captures today’s Zeitgeist. Though it may not be a film of the highest merit when judged over time, it is the film with the highest contemporary-social-issue-political focus.

Its story is told from a superior point of view; what misery we see of the immigrants’ plight makes us sad and depressed – though not as much as the actual footage we see daily on the news. The only uplift we receive is to witness the acts of the good physician Pietro Bartolo. He not only cares for the island’s 4,000 inhabitants as they go about their daily business of fishing, keeping house, and going to school without much interaction with the invasion of refugees, but he also cares for the 400,000 immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, treating them or identifying them as already dead. As he said at his press conference, “This has become a dramatic problem, an epochal problem. I don’t think that a barbed-wire fence can stop these people. I don’t think there’s a person on earth who wants to leave his country if he isn’t forced to.”

A noble effort, the film in many ways misses the boat. Not to say that any other film was better (I did not see them all), but to make a point about the Berlinale itself as a festival, I note here the majority of other films in the Competition all had socially relevant foci and that is the point of the Berlinale. It is to its credit that it takes a stand and to its detriment that perhaps the films chosen do not attain cinematic stature internationally. The recent years’ Golden Bear winners were (in my opinion) certainly worthy with a couple of exceptions. “Caesar Must Die” a doc about Italian prisoners engaging in the production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and “Black Coal, Thin Ice” a Chinese hard-boiled detective saga were both quickly forgotten.

Memorable winners worth noting were in 2011 with Iran’s “ Jodaeiye Nader az Simin/ “A Separation”, Romania’s 2013 “ Poziţia Copilului”/ “Child‘s Pose” and again from Iran in 2015, Jafar Panahi’s “ Taxi”.

Looking at the other films in Competition this year, Mohamed Ben Attia’s “Hedi”(ISA: The Match Factory, sold to date to Austria’s Polyfilm, Germany’s Pandora, Norway’s Mer Film, Switzerland ’s Cineworx, Taiwan’s Maison Motion) deals with a quiet man’s personal struggle for freedom from the constraints of his Tunisian society; Ivo M. Ferreira’s “Letters from War” (ISA: The Match Factory) deals with the final years of the Angolan War of Independence against Portugal in 1961-74; Danis Tanovic deals with the more recent Bosnian War as a Frenchman sits in his hotel room while a World War I Commemoration takes place in Sarajevo in “Death in Sarajevo” (ISA: The Match Factory); protests against the Nazi regime are the subject of “Alone in Berlin” (ISA: Cornerstone, the new sales company of Alison Thompson and Mark Gooder, sold to Altitude for U.K., Pathe for France. X Film, the producer keeps German rights) by Vincent Perez; in Rafi Pitts’ “Soy Nero”( ISA: The Match Factory, sold to date to Neue Visionen for Germany, Sophie Dulac Distribution for France, Ama Films for Greece, Bomba Films for Poland, Filmarti for Turkey,MegaCom for Serbia and Montenegro, Moving Turtle for Lebanon, trigon-film for Switzerland) about a 19-year-old Mexican boy dreaming of immigrating north to the U.S. who takes the route of joining the U.S. Army to fight in the Middle East in order to get his “green card”. The Philippine Revolution against Spanish Colonization is treated in a 482 minute epic “ A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery” (ISA: Films Boutique) by Lav Diaz. In “United States of Love” (ISA: Films New Europe sold to Imovision for Brazil and Angel for Denmark), four women share the urge to change their lives in 1990, immediately after the fall of Communism. All of these films are dealing with issues of gaining freedom today. “Being 17”(ISA: Elle Driver sold Belgium to Lumière, Brazil to F ênix, France to Wild Bunch, Serbia to MCF Megacom, Switzerland to Frenetic) by Andre Techine also deals with adolescents growing up gay in a working-class neighborhood in France, another current human rights issue.

These film choices remind us that the Berlinale itself was founded in 1950 during the Cold War as West Berlin’s way of confronting East Berlin’s imprisonment of its people by flaunting its own freedom, a truly Berlin way of life which still today animates its spirit of freedom. This casts a certain character upon the films chosen by the Berlinale selection committee to this day.

A political tone of the festival was also echoed by the pronouncement “We are all Africans really” spoken by Meryl Streep when she was questioned about why the Berlin Film Festival had appointed an all-white jury (not that she was responsible for choosing the jury).

Meryl Streep’s rather blithe comment, to quote Lindiwe Dovey in The Guardian , “plunged the actress into a debate about the lack of diversity in Hollywood. At best, Streep’s comment was an attempt to show solidarity. But what she unwittingly also underlined was the absence of Africans and African filmmaking in mainstream cinema. If we really are all Africans, and if we are going to take black filmmaking more seriously, why are we not watching African films?” Again, Streep is not responsible for the Berlinale’s selection either.

Only five African films are being shown at this year's festival and they are not all sub-Saharan African, that is to say “black”, but are also North African -- that is to say of the MENA region or Arab. These are two very different aspects of the giant continent called Africa. We are seeing many films from the MENA, that is Arab and North African regions this year.

In an attempt to find answers to this question of why we are not seeing more “black” films, we attended the Berlinale World Cinema Fund’s “Africa Day”. This one-off, and therefore insufficient, day was dedicated to discussing the memory, present and future of African films. Insufficient for finding answers and for creating any call for action, the day was, nonetheless, important and for that we all should thank the German Federal Cultural Foundation for providing the funds which guarantee the existence of the World Cinema Fund until at least 2018 and to the German Foreign Office, which substantially raised its level of support allowing the WCF additional discretion in its actions.

The presentation by Nigerian film critic Didi Anni Cheeka was a fascinating exposé of what has happened to the “archives” of Nigerian cinema. The 60s to the 80s’ post-colonial cinema is not discussed today at all and Cheeka has searched for those filmmakers, called “The Seven Ups” who worked along with such filmmakers as Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. The Ministry of Information in Nigeria gave him permission to organize the films of the 60s which were lost during the Civil War in a collective amnesia. In the process, he discovered a room closed, locked and forgotten in the 1960s at the end of the independent movements throughout Africa, a room containing movie machines and more than 2,000 cans of films laying around like dusty dead bodies. This and other sad cases have revealed that in fact, there are no archives of African cinema at all.

But even the later Nollywood producers do not have copies of their films. Memories of what Africa looked like are lost along with the artistic efforts of its cineastes. Silence has been instilled by the governments of today as well.

Cinema as culture does not really exist in Africa. To create awareness takes education, leisure, city life and a cultural and cinema community nourishing one another. More than production funds, awareness needs the support of people with ideas.

Cheeka also stated, "We have the strange situation that new cineplexes are coming up every day, but they only show Hollywood movies. It's a common problem all over Africa: High quality movies from the continent hardly find an audience or even a place to be shown. Without a market in sight, few high-quality movies are shot. Only so-called ‘Nollywood movies’, mostly produced in Nigeria in just a few days or weeks, are thriving. Nigeria's movie industry earns around US $250 million from Nollywood movies. This is the first time an economy has been established around the notion of film. In 1999 the first Nollywood delegaton came to Sithengi, the South African Film Market and they took over. Last year in Nigeria, many layers of Nollywood were apparent; the usual low budget exploitation or dramatic movie was giving space to other kinds of film. This opens the possibility of further discussion of film economy in all Africa, from Algeria to South Africa.

Pedro Pimento, Director of the Durban International Film Festival, gave the keynote address analyzing the lack of African film and the lack of distribution for what few African films there are. This was the high point of the day as he was heard loud and clear, at least by me, as he was articulate and to the point.

Pedro Pimenta is a filmmaker and producer from Mozambique. He produced the 1997 film "Fools", the first feature film shot by a black South African, Ramadan Suleman, and the same year "Africa Dreaming" a chronicle of Africa in six acts, with the common theme the love. Pimenta is also "foreign corresponding member" of the "Association of Real Cinema" the international meeting of documentary films held at the Pompidou Center in Paris created in 1978 which invites the public and professionals to discover film auteurs. The producer-director is also the founder and director of the documentary film festival "Dockanema" in Maputo, Mozambique. The first edition was held in September 2006 with support from the Mozambican Ebano Multimedia, in association with AMOCINE (Mozambican Association of Filmmakers).

According to Pimenta, "the documentary is an observation and testimony which brings the spectator something which otherwise would be merely read as news and quickly forgotten. Directed by great filmmakers, it can be a work of art; made by an amateur holding a small hand-held camera, it is a daily familiar record of an historic moment. The documentary brings us closer to the great achievements of the better side of humanity even as it brings us the violent scourge of today's world. It thus gives us the opportunity to replace prejudice by solidly based judgments and to take conscious positions."

Pedro Pimenta started his movie career with the National film Institute of Mozambique in 1977. Since then, he has produced and co-produced numerous short fiction, documentaries and feature movies in his country as well as in other African nations.

Between 1997 and 2003 Pedro was the chief Technical Adviser of the UNESCO Zimbabwe Film and Video Training Project for Southern Africa in Harare. As part of his function, he conceived and managed various training programs. He is one of the founders of AVEA (Audio Visual Entrepreneurs of Africa) which runs an annual training program for professional producers in Southern Africa. Until December 2005, Pedro was a member of the Prince Claus Fund Awards Committee of the Netherlands.

He presented practical and pragmatic steps for a concrete approach to invigorate African Cinema.

First of all, there is no case for Africa as a country. It is too diverse and too vast. Knowing the context(s) of film, there is a solution. However, there is a total lack of reliable data vis á vis Africa, just as there has been a lack of data for the case of women in film until the past couple of years. A structure as a way to access information must be built. Experience has been accumulated for what works and what does not work in changing contexts; there are constant paradigm shifts; there is “generational regeneration” in content every few years; but all facts are anecdotal and not data oriented.

And there is the traditional value chain of cinema going like this:

The money follows from production costs to recoupment through distribution and it should be put back into film education along with production. The weakest point in the chain is exhibition.

Currently there is good energy, but there is no system. There are two recognized international film festivals and Mogadishu might be a third festival but it will take four to five years. There were attempts to create Pan African film distribution utopias, but they failed. Neither the British nor the French ever involved themselves in distribution systems and the models died.

From the mid 80s to 2000 the IMF World Bank’s involvement in Africa was built on a model of all nations feeding off of Mother Africa like a litter of trucks feeding off the oil tank that was Africa.

Today, the need to control distribution is apparent and it can generate money, but governments have made it clear that culture today is a “negative priority”. International corporations serve as African nations’ only means of survival.

While commercial distribution models have failed, the number of film festivals has increased. Out of the 54 countries in Africa, only two have no film festival. From 1980 to 2000 there were only two countries with festivals. Plus there is the current digital revolution which points to new directions one can go.

If any form of distribution reaches a critical mass like that of Nollywood, the governments can think critically about its policies. Keep an eye on the cinemas opening in Ethiopia which are based on local demands for local films. Ethiopia is currently producing 200 films per year. Uganda has informal screening spaces located all over the capital city. Pathé looks like it might have a shot in Francophone Africa. These examples all go to show there is a small cultural economy through cinema.

Morocco and Mauritius have local incentives to encourage local production.

But overall, exhibition is the weakest link in the value chain shown above.

In 2016 we see Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Iroko TV/ Buni. We see TV, African Films and TV, Vidi, On Tap TV etc.

However, I am of the belief that VOD is not the answer for Africa and African cinema. A minority of so-called middle class Africans, who do not identify or show interest for African films will have access. The majority of Africans (the market) are left on the sideline (once again) and are not really considered in any strategy.

But with 1.4 billion people, 60% of whom live in urban settings and with a majority of young people, young consumers – one out of three being “middle class”, there is a demand for entertainment. But we need to find the reality and economy of Our Cinema.

There is a demand for a mirror of oneself. The origin of an audience is Our Grandmother. What does she say about our ideas? She was the storyteller who passed our values on to this new generation. How can our creative cinema advance if we do not head this real mirror.

Here are the transversal issues:

1. Training vs. Education. There are many training initiatives in Africa, but what of film education? To train an audience, to train storytellers rather than to train support for outside production companies shooting in Africa is imperative.

2. Relevance of data. Data is limited to say the least.

3. Role of the producer in Africa’s content and support strategies.

4. Role of film festivals. By default they are the exhibitor of African content throughout Europe and they are part of a larger year-round circuit supporting African films for African audiences.

5. European support models only create two to three projects a year. This includes Hubert Bals Fund of Netherlands, Cinema du Monde of France, World Cinema Fund of Germany and ACP of the European Market.

We need new ways and a new system of support from Europe that is matched by support from Africa. Any system based on support however is not adequate.

“Screen space” is not necessarily a theater. It can be universities, museums; it might be similar to the recent attempts in Cuba of “salon cinemas” which were separate rooms in restaurants and hair salons.

Another model might be Argentina’s building of 45 digital cinemas throughout Latin America for Latin American content or the recent creation of Retina Latina, a free online service of Latin American films for Latin America.

The Market exists. There is a lot of money in Africa. The problem is that the money's offices are in London.

Pimento’s response when I sent him Meryl Streep’s comment as it was reported in The Guardian follows.

“Interesting but what bothers me really is the fact that we never really critically talk about quality (or not) of African films and also the belief that things will happen out of some divine intervention and not by triggering purposeful market dynamics .

I find also that using Ms. Streep’s comment as a way to reach some visibility does not necessarily reflect any intellectual honesty… it’s just a quick expedient for a sector of dogmatic- bordering-on-racism African filmmakers who claim the rest of the world needs to provide solutions to their problems/ frustrations/ obstacles .....

There are many less visible examples of positive African people and initiatives driven by the notion that our destiny is in our hands really and not in the hands of any international cooperation/ aid/ humanitarian system."

Interview: Joel Edgerton Talks Jeff Nichols, 'Midnight Special,' 'Loving,' And Reteaming With David Michod

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 19:26:29 GMT

This weekend, Jeff Nichols' "Midnight Special" opens in limited release. We're already on record as huge admirers of Nichols, and of his latest film especially (here's our review), but one thing we particularly engaged with this time out was the film's uncanny atmosphere, which oscillates between the wondrous and the humdrum. In that context, the role played by Joel Edgerton comes into its own. More perhaps than any of the other principals in the film, Edgerton is tasked with grounding the film's more fantastical elements. There's a blunt decency in his particular charisma that makes him the perfect choice both for this role and for the lead in Nichols' upcoming "Loving," the story of the landmark civil rights case of interracial couple Richard and Mildred Loving (and a film we hope to see in the Cannes lineup).

READ MORE: 'Jane Got A Gun' Starring Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton & Ewan McGregor

We got to meet Edgerton during the Berlin Film Festival where "Midnight Special" premiered, and while we wrote last week of his comments on his recent rough ride on the troubled Natalie Portman western "Jane Got A Gun," the immediate future for the actor, who also recently made a cracking directorial debut with "The Gift," looks very bright. Here he discusses "Midnight Special," "Loving," reteaming with "Animal Kingdom" director David Michod and his hopes for the shape of his directing future.

This combination of the ordinary and extraordinary in "Midnight Special" works so well, and your character, Lucas, is part of the "ordinary" —he's such a grounding influence. It's a recurring motif for the parts you play —was it part of the attraction?
Well, really I was attracted to working with Jeff. He could have dragged me to work on almost anything. But I do remember the feeling of reading the script that first time, how interesting a mystery it was, with the chase vibe and a science fiction element too, but it was really about every character's relationship with faith and meaning beyond the day-to-day living of life.

And what I loved about Lucas was that you get the sense that [prior to] the story, four days earlier or so, his life was moving in a particular rhythm with a very day-to-day existence, albeit as a cop. But he just abandoned that life because he caught a glimpse of that comfort [of a higher plane]. And that was the pulling of the thread —that maybe there's some greater purpose to him being on the earth.

And he is not completely devoted —yet— to the fullness of that vision, but he's devoted enough to service, and to serve and protect this child, with the hope that at the end of that journey, however long it takes, that there was going to be a confirmation of that initial spark. That there is a purpose, something greater to the world and life in it. And I love that Lucas was the one character that had a choice, and he made that choice willingly. He's not related by blood, and yet there's a devotion. And in that, he really is a disciple.

He sometimes seems not exactly envious of the family unit, but very aware of his outsider status.
Yeah, there's a couple of moments when he just observes them… I always said to Jeff that I like to think that one of the little mysteries of the movie is: what has Lucas left behind? And if it's somewhat insignificant to the audience, it's significant to me, and I always thought that either Lucas has left his own family or he longs for that kind of unity. And part of his interest in the journey is to [have some of that]. Like when he says "Y'all would have made a nice family," knowing that there's something coming that will divide them. It is a shame, because he sees there's a togetherness, a comfort. The big word that leaps out of this movie for me is "comfort."

Speaking of families and comfort, going straight from this to "Loving," which is also directed by Nichols and features Michael Shannon again, must have felt a little like that.
Oh yes. We finished shooting "Loving" in November. A wonderful experience and much more of a kind of real-world experience than this one.

Really? Even though it's a period film?
It's a period movie, but Jeff was as thorough as he could be in the research of what really occurred, and the movie reflects that deep research. In terms of a civil rights seismic shift, the Loving case is actually very gentle. There was no bloodshed. And yet there was a huge cost to the couple in terms of their freedom, their rights, where they could live and so on.

Jeff had the opportunity, in taking that real-life story, to really dial it up, to make it Hollywood. He refused to do that, and in that sense the fabric of the movie is very real. For example, when the Supreme Court handed down the decision to change the anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S., because of the push by Mildred [Loving] and the young Jewish lawyers, Richard and Mildred weren't in the courtroom. And you imagine the Hollywood version of that —they punch the air, and everyone's hugging each other. Jeff wanted to stay true to the reality of it, which was that Richard was mowing the lawn when that phone call came through.

And there's something beautiful about that, because they weren't trying to be the poster children of the civil rights movement. They just wanted to love each other and have the right to love each other. And so the movie's a love story first. The fact that it also is a watershed civil rights moment is the B-story to me. And so it remains true to what we all want, which is the right to love each other whatever the formation —whether gay, straight, white, black, whatever. The simplicity of that is really lovely.

And perhaps the stability of working with a lot of the same people is welcome after some less pleasant experiences of late?
It is. Things go smoothly on a Jeff Nichols movie —as smoothly as a movie can. Mind you, we were battered by the weather on "Loving": it wasn't such a comfortable shoot, since it was a cold winter in New Orleans. But there's a precision and planned feel —there's a very organized chaos on a Jeff Nichols movie, compared to other movies I've worked on. And it's very clearly detailed in the script as well. He gives you a really thorough road map and makes sure to articulate that vision for an actor. So it's always a very close replica of what the movie ends up being. He has really thought things through; he does not have a blanket scattershot approach.

And now that you've made your directorial debut with the "The Gift," is that a lesson you're taking for your directing career?
My feeling is there's a nice combination: a detailed battle plan that needs to be open to a fluidity. Personally, I like to go with a plan, but not look at the plan until I really need to. But I've learned a lot from Jeff and from all the directors I've worked with.

One of whom, David Michod, told us a while back that you guys were collaborating again, writing a script?
We have a thing that we're trying to make soon. He's putting his next movie ["War Machine" with Brad Pitt] together now, and then we have a project. It's like a reimagining of "Henry IV" and "Henry V," with some parts akin to Shakespeare and some more detailed through history and some parts our own imaginings, our own creative license. He'll direct and I'll be in it.

It is definitely happening, then?
Well, you know, I can't ever say that again, not until we're there and actually shooting… But our intention is certainly to make the film. Someone just has to give us a lot of money to do it.

And how about your next directing gig?
I'm planning it, but I can't say what it is yet. I am developing a couple of things. And, yeah, I hope to be shooting by end of this year or early next year.

On a similar scale to "The Gift"?
I want to go for something slightly bigger, but I don't want to go too big. I think it can be a mistake for someone to do a small movie and then be given the keys to the kingdom and do a $100 million movie. Some people have made that transition well, but I personally want to do it in smaller steps.

But ultimately in a few years' time, you see yourself directing a $100 million movie?
I don't know if I'll ever reach that mark. I imagine myself stopping around the 50-60 mark.

All he wants, Hollywood, is 60 million dollars...
I know. Come on! That's all I want.

"Midnight Special" opens on Friday.

Berlin 2016: Middle East and North Africa at the Berlinale

Sydney Levine — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 18:54:41 GMT

This year we are seeing many films from MENA, that is an acronym for the Middle East and North Africa. More commonly called “Arab” cinema, (though the term is inaccurate because several countries in the region are not actually “Arab”) the films of this region are winning many awards and garnering much interest worldwide.

More than 10 Arab films participated in the Berlinale’s Forum and Forum Expanded programs this year, in addition to the ones which participated in the Official Competition (“Inhebek Hedi”/ “Hedi” from Tunisia and “A Dragon Arrives!” by Mani Haghighi from Iran). This makes an especially remarkable year for Arab cinema’s presence in Berlin.

The Forum focus on Arab cinema, represented with films from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia highlights mostly young directors whose works explore both the past and present of their homelands.

The films included: “A Magical Substance Flows into Me” by artist Jumana Manna (Palestine), “Akher ayam el madina”/ “In the Last Days of the City” (Egypt) by Tamer El Said (international sales by Still Moving), documentary “Makhdoumin”/ “A Maid for Each” (Lebanon) by Maher Abi Samra (ISA: Docs & Film), “Barakah yoqabil Barakah”/ “Barakah Meets Barakah” (Saudi Arabia) by Mahmoud Sabbagh and Manazil (ISA: MPM), “Bela abwab”/ “Houses without Doors” by Syrian-Armenian director Avo Kaprealian. Of course the 46th Berlinale Forum also screens films from European, Latin American and Asian directors.

The Tunisian film in Competition “Inhebek Hedi”/ “Hedi” by Mohamed Ben Attia, won the Best First Feature Award and its leading man, Majd Mastoura, received the prestigious Silver Bear for Best Actor for his role as Hedi. Attia’s debut feature film is a thoughtful love story about identity and independence in Tunisian society. It is being sold internationally by Luxbox.

Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel won the Silver Bear Jury Prize for Short Film for “ A Man Returned”, a 30-minute portrayal of a young refugee struggling to make a life for himself in Lebanon’s Ain El-Helweh camp, being sold internationally by 3.14 Collectif. He previously made an award-winning documentary about his own experience as a refugee. The short film was also selected as the Berlin Short Film Nominee for the European Film Awards.

The Ecumenical Jury awarded the Forum Prize to Saudi filmmaker Mahmoud Sabbagh for his well-received romantic comedy “Barakah Yoqabil Barakah”/ “Barakah Meets Barakah”, a social commentary on the lives of young people in Saudi Arabia. It shared the prize with Danish production “Les Sauteurs”/ “Those Who Jump” – a film that also highlights the plight of Europe-bound refugees.

Egyptian filmmaker Tamer El-Said’s feature film “Akher Ayam El-Madina”/ “In the Last Days of the City” won the Caligari Film Prize. The film looks at a young filmmaker’s struggle to complete a film about Cairo. It was the only Egyptian film to participate in the 2016 Berlinale Forum.

Lebanese filmmaker Maher Abi Samra’s documentary “Makhdoumin”/ “A Maid for Each”, a look at the legal system that controls the lives of Lebanon’s foreign domestic workers, won the Peace Film Prize.

“Zinzana”/ “Rattle the Cage” director, Majid al Ansari, from the Arab Emirates, was honored with Variety’s Mid-East Filmmaker of the Year Award at the Berlinale. The film is the first genre movie of its kind produced in the UAE. It was financed and produced by Abu Dhabi’s ImageNation. It is repped for US by Cinetic and international sales are by IM Global.

Projects “Mawlana”, based on Ibrahim Issa’s best-selling novel and shortlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize and director’s Mohamed Yassein’s “Wedding Song” based on Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, the Nobel Prize Winner for Literature were being promoted at the Arab Cinema Center at the Market. Reflecting a decadent Egypt from the 1970s, “Wedding Song” is one of the largest TV productions in the Arab World in 2016.

“Theeb”, a Jordanian Epic about Bedouins, is the Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. It played in Venice. International sales agent Fortissimo has licensed it to Film Movement for U.S., ABC for Benelux, New Wave for U.K., AS Fidalgo for Norway, JIFF for Australia, trigon-film for Switzerland. MAD Solutions is handling the Middle East. “Ave Maria” a 14-minute Palestine satirical short is the Academy Award nomination for Best Short Fiction and is being sold internationally by Ouat Media. “ The Idol” (Palestine) played TIFF 2015 and other top fests and has sold widely throughout the world through Canada-based international sales agent Seville. Not since Elia Suleiman won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival for “Divine Intervention” has a Palestinian film director made as much of an impact as “The Idol” director Hany Abu-Assad whose “Paradise Now” and “Omar” both went to the Academy Awards.

Kudos for much of the success of Arab cinema go to MAD Solutions, the Cairo, Abu Dhabi and New York based marketing and distribution company for its marketing and social media strategies as well as its release of “Theeb”, “Zinzana” and “Ave Maria”. It also helped create the Arab Cinema Center which was launched last year at the Berlinale and EFM.

In all, 20 MENA films played in the Festival and Market this year.

And what of that other small country in the region called Israel (and/ or Palestine) which is not included in the term MENA? While Israeli films that showed in Berlin received international praise, they will never show in any of the Arab countries and are sometimes boycotted by international film festivals who succumb to censorship tactics.

Most of the larger Israeli features go to Cannes, Venice and Toronto; “Afterthought” went to Cannes, “Mountain” to Venice, “Barash” to San Sebastian”, “Wedding Doll” to London and “A.K.A. Nadia” to Talinn Black Nights Film Festival. In Berlin many are screened as German Premieres.

What Israeli films have won acclaim lately? Is it possible that our hero, Katriel Schory, head of the Israel Film Fund, whose stand for true art has earned him Israeli government censure at home (A prophet is never honored in his own land) and fame abroad with new countries striving to create national cinema, is being eclipsed by the growth of “Arab” cinema?

“Sandstorm” directed by Elite Zexer (international sales by Beta) made its way to Panorama from its world premiere in Sundance where it won the Best Actress Award for Palestinian actress Lamis Ammar’s portrayal of a young Bedouin woman forced to choose between modern freedom or traditional societal strictures within an arranged marriage.

Panorama also screened “Junction 48” (international sales by The Match Factory) which received international praise and audience acclaim. The Israeli-Palestinian hip-hop movie by Israeli-American filmmaker, Udi Aloni, was supported by the Israel-based Rabinovich Foundation. The story is about Kareem who lives in a mixed Jewish-Arab crime-ridden ghetto outside Tel Aviv. He deals drugs and lives dangerously until he discovers hip-hop and decides to express his life as a Palestinian youth along with young singer Manar. Palestinian and Israeli musicians drive this music movie and for Aloni, just seeing the film made, and then shown at the Berlin Film Festival proves its success.

“Suddenly a group of people just choose to make a film and the film is extremely professional. It’s very important that this bi-national energy can create high quality stuff, the high quality is almost the symbol of the resistance. We should not even have to tell the story about the issue. The fact that we could create it is amazing,” Aloni told Euronews.

Thirty-seven-year-old Arab-Israeli rapper Tamer Nafar plays the lead role, and has known the 56-year-old Aloni for some time. “We have been on the same demonstrations, in the parties since 2000, so we live in each other’s world. He has been to my concerts many times, he directed a video clip, I was in his movies as a producer a few times. It’s not about an old generation and new generation, it’s just about creating the right generation,” he said. “He has that gift of being a good story teller and director but he gives us the stage, no, he doesn’t give us a stage, we are building a stage together… he has his own perspective but we are all on the same level,” said actress Samar Qupty. The struggle for equal rights for Palestinians or Arab Israelis inside Israel is at its crux.

Panorama Documents screened “Who’s Gonna Love Me Now?” directed by Tomer Haymann and Barak Heymann co-directed by Alexander Bodin Saphir and being sold by Austria’s Autlook. Forum showed “ Inertia” by Idan Haguel being sold by Oration Films’ Timothy O’Brian of the U.S., and “Between Fences” by Avi Mograbi, being sold by Docs & Film’s Daniela Elstner of France. Culinary Cinema showed “Café Nagler” by Mor Kaplansky and Yariv Barel is being sold internationally by Go2Films.

Teddy 30 (the retrospective of Teddy Award winners over the past 30 years) honored Dan Wolman’s 1979 film “Hide and Seek”/ “Machboim”. Berlinale Shorts screened Rotem Murat’s “Winds Junction” from Sapir College which also holds international rights; Generation 14 Plus screened “Mushkie” by Aleeza Chanowitz from the Jerusalem San Spiegel Film School, being sold by Cinephil. Seven other films were sold in the market by various sales agents.

One of the very special events I attended at the Berlinale this year was the Shabbat Dinner, held the first Friday in the Festival and hosted by Nicola Galliner, Founder and Force of the Berlin Jewish Film Festival. There was a table full of Jews: the new Director of the Jerusalem Film Festival, Noa Regev, PhD; Jay Rosenblatt, Program Director of San Francisco’sJewish Film Institute and its former Director, Peter Stein, now the Senior Programmer of Frameline, San Francisco’s LGBTQ Film Festival; Judy Ironside, the Founder and President of UK Jewish Film and of the sixth edition of the Geneva and Zurich Jewish Film Festivals, the new young director of the Boston Jewish Film Festival, Ariana Cohen-Halberstam who recently moved from the New York JCC to Boston, the prolific Israeli director, filmmaker Dan Wolman whose new film will soon be out and whose 1979 film “Hide and Seek”/ “Machboim” was part of the Teddy 30^th Anniversary Retrospective held by the Berlinale Panorama.

Talk was about films, about politics including gender politics, about our concerns, (we Jews are better worriers than warriors) and just plain gossip.

Now if my readers will excuse my interjecting myself into this article:

It is my opinion that the region of the world called the Middle East, and the three major monotheistic religions of the world whose origin is there had better learn to do more than merely co-exist peacefully if we are to see peaceful and fruitful consequences which will set the world back upon its proper axis.

Art breaks down borders; it is subversive rather than observant of the exigencies of ever changing governments. It creates new perspectives and breaks down old ways of seeing. What I call “Cinema” is Art. Other movies may simply entertain and not aspire to more or they may propagate dogmas, but Art serves no master; it is not tethered; it is freedom of expression which should be honored with freedom to travel.

Casting Europe at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival

Tara Karajica — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 17:09:58 GMT

It is often said that it takes talent and luck to land a role. Today, proactivity and grace are added to this list of skillsets. In contemporary times, recognition seems less of a far-fetched notion than before thanks to the state of the art technology and interconnectivity. However, film festivals of the likes of Berlin play a substantial role as the gridiron for the discovery of new European talent as well as the creation of new roles and new relations, prompted by the ever so popular and widespread practice of co-productions on European turf. Among these relations is the one between actors and casting directors.

European Shooting Stars

Every February, for the past 18 years, European Shooting Stars, a unique pan-European initiative, takes place at the Berlinale, shining a little light on Europe’s most prominent up-and-coming young actors and placing them at the top of the busy film program that unfolds year after year at the festival. These ten emerging acting talents, hailing from across the Old Continent, are selected by a jury of experts who hand-picks them among a long list of potential candidates nominated by the member organizations of the European Film Promotion (EFP).

During the craze of the festival’s first weekend, the Shooting Stars connect and network with casting directors, talent agents, directors and producers with the objective of broadening and strengthening industry alliances. They are involved in a wide range of activities that include presentations to the film industry and the press as well as one-on-one meetings with international casting directors, a reception and an Awards Ceremony at the Berlinale Palast.

The Shooting Stars program kicked off in 1998 during the Berlin International Film Festival. But, why the Berlinale? The project finds unique support in this particular festival. Moreover, its director, Dieter Kosslick is especially enthusiastic about the initiative as well as supporting young talent. According to Karin Dix, the project director of the European Shooting Stars, the Berlin International Film Festival “is an ideal platform for Shooting Stars,” pointing out that the EFP would not receive such exposure anywhere else.

Bridging Cultures Through Actors

Behind the glamour of film festivals, is a world, unknown to audiences, where films are made and discussed by the movers and shakers of the industry. Everyone sees the actors’ and directors’ work during the production of a film. But, very few people are aware that before the shooting even starts, casting directors have already dove deep into the script and spent hours, days and months researching the right people for a specific role. This demands intrinsic skills and gut instincts. The important work is felt behind the scenes, indeed, but when it comes to the public presentation it is often already forgotten.

Therefore, in 2005, the EFP acknowledged that the art, craft and business of casting should not only be incorporated in its activities but also better transmitted to the international industry. That is how and why the International Casting Directors Network (ICDN) was founded during the Berlinale, that year, by fifteen casting directors from seven countries. Today the network counts seventy-four casting directors from twenty-four countries world-wide. They meet annually on occasion of Shooting Stars in Berlin.

These casting directors come to the Berlin International Film Festival to “shop” for new talent, collaborate, and meet their fellows. Some will also meet the Shooting Stars who have already sent them tapes, like for instance María Valverde, for whom the human interaction is an important factor, “I think it’s a nice thing to just be yourself talking to them, not as a character in a certain role”, she remarks. On the other hand, for Londonderry Entertainment’s Sheila Wenzel, who works with top young female stars and holds a strong and well-respected deal-making reputation, “the world has gotten so much larger”. And, in that larger world, she is constantly looking for new talent anywhere.

In that regard, apart from offering support and publicity to these fresh faces of the big screen as they step from national fame into the international spotlight, the endeavor also highlights the vital role new actors can play in the marketing of European films. And, this year’s Shooting Stars are very well aware of that.

For Daphné Patakia, the Greek star of "Interruption" (Yorgos Zois), it is a “great opportunity to open in a European way and meet people from all over Europe,” adding she hopes to find work in different languages. The international cooperation and linguistic dimension of Shooting Stars are something that fellow Dutch Shooting Star Reinout Scholten van Aschat and former Shooting Star and this year’s jury member, Anamaria Marinca, also share, “…everyone is involved in co-productions so there is place for someone from Croatia or France or Spain in an international production spoken in English, or Spanish or another language and because they have these aptitudes and they can act in another language, not only speak it,” the latter observes. Scholten van Aschat, a fan of European film, and in particular the Danish film industry, is especially sensitive to the aforementioned aspects. Not only does he have great respect for casting directors but he also feels the need to improve his language skills (German and English) and believes that the Dutch still have to learn from the Danes, “and the way to do that, of course, is to work together,” he admits.

Impactful and Inimitable

With the recognition as a Shooting Star, the impact is often instantaneous. For Anamaria Marinca, it has given her the opportunity to meet French casting director Nicolas Ronchi who offered her her first French script, which led her to being represented by French talent agent Annabel Karouby, and thereby “facilitated a possible career in France”. Her time in Berlin as a Shooting Star “kind of started these other possible languages [she] could work in.” Former Shooting Stars include such talent as Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Alicia Vikander, Carey Mulligan, Daniel Brühl, Mélanie Laurent or this year’s Berlinale International Jury member Alba Rohrwacher.

What’s more, the Shooting Stars initiative is inimitable and unique. Indeed, many have tried to copy the concept but no one has the expertise of the EFP’s member organizations, according to Dix who also concedes that the fact that each country nominates one actor is a guarantee for the high quality of the selected actors and actresses from Europe.

On the European film market where co-productions are common practice today, familiar actors help the audience relate to a particular “foreign” film. As harsh as it sounds, bankability is the key of the film biz. In that, actors are the faces of the films. They move the audiences, create their enthusiasm and need for films and are the personalities that promote them. Casting directors stand right behind them and make it happen. They bridge the gaps between cultures and open new horizons and possibilities. They help actors speak the European language of film. They are its unsung heroes.

Berlin Review: Danis Tanovic's Exciting, Intelligent Silver Bear Winner 'Death in Sarajevo'

Jessica Kiang — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 22:20:33 GMT

Bosnian director Danis Tanovic has had success before in Berlin, with another offputtingly-titled example of his particular brand of socially aware cinema. 2014's "An Episode In The Life Of An Iron Picker" netted him the Grand Prix, aka the Silver Bear, and after the relatively low-impact "Tigers," a true-life whistleblower saga about the Nestle corporation's profit-before-people exploitation of the African market for Formula, he repeated that achievement last week, taking the runner-up prize again for "Death in Sarajevo." Dour as the title sounds, it's a pleasant surprise that the movie, while certainly presenting an overtly politicized, often angry view of the fraught, complex history of the Balkans, does so largely through fast-moving, satirically-minded parable, in which the tribulations of the management, employees and guests in a top Sarajevo hotel, come to represent all of Bosnian society. Polemical as it is, "Death in Sarajevo" is a hotel movie, one that fluidly entertains even as it educates.

It's easy to see why Tanovic chose to set the film in this location: if the aim is to expose the various layers and levels of corruption within Balkan society, to have opposing ideologies and grievances represented by people in roles that parallel societal hierarchies, yet who are somehow forced to share the same space, it requires a large enough arena, simultaneously compartmentalized and yet holistic, to make the analogy work. Even so, there are some elements that of necessity feel contrived: of course, the seedy nightclub/casino in the bowels of the building has its ties to organized crime — a literal underbelly. And of course, this very day there is a TV crew filming interviews on the hotel roof which gives Tanovic an excuse to deliver an enormous amount of historical exposition and context, all backdropped by a literal overview of the city. Still, despite these on-the-nose elements and expository conveniences, the film moves so swiftly from one strand to the next and finds such compelling and surprising ways to knit them together that it's rarely a distraction.

One other narrative choice that makes even the less plausible aspects of the telescoped plot feel more organic, is that it is set on the day an EU delegation is due to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip, the event widely regarded as having catalysed the outbreak of World War I. This sudden influx of high-profile business may just be the thing that pulls the hotel back from the brink of bankruptcy, if harried manager Omer (Izudin Bajrović) can keep the creditors at bay for just one more day. To do that, however, he must find a way to quash a brewing trade dispute, with many of the below-stairs employees threatening to strike (quite reasonably, since they haven't been paid in months). These events all colliding might seem overly convenient, except of course the reason the staff are choosing that day to lay down tools is so that the Euro bigwigs will notice: they all understand that no one cares about the plight of the little guy unless it threatens to disrupt something more "important."

But the personal is tangled up in the political too: the head receptionist Lamija (Snežana Vidović), hungover after an ill-advised drunken one-night stand with a persistent sous-chef, discovers it's her own mother Hatidža (Faketa Salihbegović Avdagić) who has worked in the hotel laundry for decades, who's been tapped to lead the strike, which Lamija opposes. But when she sees the heavy-handed tactics Omer's shady connections from the nightclub use to suppress the strikers, she starts to fear for her mother's safety. Meanwhile on the roof the interviewer (Vedrana Seksan) gets into a heated debate with a firebrand Serb nationalist (Muhamed Hadzovic), which continues off camera, with a current of odd attraction fizzing between the two despite their diametrically opposed stances. Elsewhere, in a suite, a VIP (Jacques Weber) practices an important-sounding speech, while being spied on via a closed-circuit camera placed there by an overzealous junior member of the security detail, who himself must constantly field calls from his wife about a replacement sofa.

Tanovic mixes light and dark, earnest debate and soap opera very cleverly, but there is often an issue around characterization in a film constructed as this one is, so that people are less individuals with interiority and backstory than representatives of a type, or an ideology, or an approach. It means that even those whom we get to know most still feel more like pawns being pushed around a chessboard than people with whom we can empathize with on a human level — this may have the ensemble feel of an Altman movie, but it is more concerned with plot than character, and with idea than emotion. Still, the boardgame-style precision with which Tanovic moves his pieces around (until the slightly overcooked melodrama of the finale) foments its own kind of manic interest: we may not care too much about any of these people, but we certainly are compelled to find out what happens to them.

It's strange that a film with so somber a name, and such an overt agenda to illuminate the murky complexities of Balkan politics, should play out so successfully as a thriller. But though ultimately Tanovic's conclusions about the inescapably cyclical nature of the Bosnian national destiny seem pessimistic (when their backs are against the wall, almost all his characters behave in a cowardly, clumsy, or tragically self-defeating fashion) "Death in Sarajevo" has the energy and entertainment value of a Hollywood drama. The fluidity of the storytelling is no mean feat, considering just how intractable the region's intricacies can seem to an outsider, but Tanovic dexterously and intelligently leads us through the minefield, while reinforcing the idea that politics in the Balkans is not a matter of life and death — it's much more important than that. [B]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Berlin Review: "Rosemary's Baby' Meets David Lynch in 'Shelley'

Michael Pattison — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 20:45:59 GMT

READ MORE: The 2016 Indiewire Berlin Bible

For his atmospheric debut feature "Shelley," Iranian director Ali Abbasi reinterprets a beautiful lakeside idyll as — surprise, surprise — the setting of a cabin-in-the-woods horror story. The twist, if it is one, is that the spine-chills here come from within — literally, in the form of a malevolent fetus growing inside a woman who has, unwittingly, sold her soul. Pregnancy's a death sentence, motherhood a prison: it's "Rosemary's Baby" by way of David Lynch.

Elena (Cosmina Stratan), a former accountancy student from Bucharest, arrives in rural Denmark to work as a housekeeper for Kaspar (Peter Christofferson) and Louise (Ellen Dorrit Petersen). The Romanian has a five-year-old son back home, and is working abroad in order to save enough money to return and buy a new apartment. Louise reveals she recently suffered a miscarriage and hysterectomy — the latter operation not before some of her eggs were frozen. Keen to mother, she asks Elena if she'd be willing to be the couple's surrogate mother. In exchange, the couple will pay Elena enough money to allow her to return home and buy a home. The younger woman agrees.

Abbasi, directing a script co-written with Maren Louise Käehne (whose previous credits include the TV series "Borgen"), doesn't waste any time in getting down to things. The first four shots establish the unsettling nature of this secluded (Sweden-shot) backwater, alternating zooms out from a sun-reflecting lake and zooms into anonymous, shadowy woodland. As we learned from "Stranger by the Lake" (2013), Alain Guiraudie's moody, excellently controlled thriller, tranquil backdrops such as these are perfect for ramping up tension — and Abbasi's optical shifts suggest there's something at work that isn't immediately clear.

Nothing prompts audiences to invest in an image better than a slow, apparently arbitrary zoom: we're looking for ominous clues even before the screen turns blood red. Otherwise banal images here are given a charged air — though, needless to say, it isn't long before actual paranoia creeps in, before inexplicable incidents occur, and before things go thud in the night.

But when Elena, pregnant, begins to wake up with terrible bruises and a bloody mouth, opting for a diet of sugar and white bread, we remain uncertain as to whether events are real or imagined ("no irregularities whatsoever," says her jovial midwife despite the young Romanian's obvious distress).

"Shelley" treads a fine line between overplaying its ambiguity and undercooking its premise. While horrors often demand a suspension of disbelief even when their own protagonists ignore clear signs that things are deeply awry, it's a little unclear here as to whose perspective we're meant to be seeing events through — which means some characters appear selfish and others merely stupid.

Is this the point? As it unfolds, the film risks an increasingly cumbersome psycho-thriller vibe, in which too many ideas fail to gel: Elena's fugue states and nighttime tramps along country lanes, unnerving silhouettes in the corner of rooms, and the mysterious presence of Leo (Björn Andrésen), a family friend and spiritual healer with a long grey beard.

Leo, who's introduced, forgotten about and dragged into proceedings again when Abbasi and Käehne see fit, performs a medicinal ritual on Louise — who talks of there being good forces and bad forces in the world. Later, Leo performs a similar ceremony to cure newly impregnated Elena of a headache. Though Elena's complaint might be read as a sign in itself of something being afoot, the inclusion of this ailment-expulsion is more convincingly the point at which things begin to turn sour.

The good/bad mumbo-jumbo might account for the repeated references to "evil" in the film's press materials. Without a more allegorically rigid set-up, however, such forces come off as nebulous and unexciting — the outcome of some vague, original sin rather than well-worked characterization. (The film's title is presumably a nod, and a rather fanciful one, to Frankenstein.) Though not without its moments, Abbasi and Käehne's script tries to have it both ways: to provide a solid scaffold on which to rearrange well-known genre tropes, but to play boldly loose with their new configuration.

Note, for instance, the double-edged way in which the film institutes its isolated claustrophobia. "Peace and quiet" is the reason Kaspar gives Elena when she asks why they live in such seclusion. "We try to live a simple life." Easy for some: never mind how they expect to buy Elena a home, Louise and Kaspar grow their own vegetables, go without running water, and don't have any electricity. This latter revelation, which startles Elena, exemplifies the script's corner-cutting ways. On the one hand, it cleverly allows for most of the action to unfold in suitably semi-dark interiors, but on the other such detail is an unwelcome distraction.

Abbasi claims to have watched no more than four or five horror films in his life — which is either a giant fib or a consequence of naïve definitions. His early employment of shock-cuts, from a serene but dimly lit scene to the ultra-loud squawk of a distressed hen, is evidence of someone perfectly aware of the cheaper thrills that make the genre. "Horror is like porn," he says. "The more you know about it, how it's made, the less sexy it becomes." Well, yes — but isn't that the test of an inventive, original artist?

Grade: B-

"Shelley" premiered last week at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Berlin Review: Gianfranco Rosi's Golden Bear-Winning Documentary 'Fire At Sea'

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 21:47:06 GMT

It is easy to sink into the quiet waters of Gianfranco Rosi's newest documentary, which brought him his second top honor from a major festival ("Sacro GRA" won Venice 2013) when it picked up the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlinale this weekend. It's a beautifully shot, meditative and poignant piece of work that clearly represents the fruits of a long period of intimate contact with its subjects, and a kind of fascinated love for the rhythms of traditional Italian islander life that goes beyond the anthropological and becomes almost spiritual in nature. It is creatively presented in a manner that stretches, but does not snap the elastic relation of documentary to reality. It is compassionate despite its austerity. It is a sort of star vehicle for its central character, the wonderful 12-year-old Samuele. What it is not, however, is a documentary about the European migrant crisis.

READ MORE: 'Fire At Sea' Takes Golden Bear At Berlin Film Festival, Mia Hansen-Love Wins Best Director And More

This is an issue, because that's how this arthouse film, more an auteurist artistic expression than a traditional, informational documentary, is being described almost everywhere. But while there are segments dealing directly with the crisis, including viscerally upsetting images of bodies dead and dying being dragged off catastrophically overloaded boats, and recordings of terrified voices begging for help and sending up their last prayers to God via radio, they are, despite their intensity, not the focus of the film. Mostly the crisis is described in almost abstract terms — a stream of people wrapped like candy in tinfoil blankets that twinkle in the dark, radio reports of deaths and drownings being gently tutted over by a woman chopping tomatoes in her kitchen; a rough-and-tumble impromptu football match in the migrant compound between "Eritrea" and "Syria."

The film's real focus is not on the new arrivals, but the longtime inhabitants of Italy's southernmost island. Lampedusa, 20 square kilometers of land that lies 112 km off the Tunisian coast, has just 6,000 inhabitants, almost all of which are involved in the fishing industry. Rosi shapes the film around a small group: the dedicated doctor who provides the only real point of contact between the migrants and the permanent residents; the radio DJ who appears to receive more or less daily requests from Aunt Maria for creaky-sounding traditional folk songs; and the small family unit over which she presides, especially the child of that family, the irrepressible Samuele.

An engaging mixture of old man and young boy — he takes great pride in his slingshots, but on a hilarious visit to the doctor comes across more like a Woody Allen proxy than a rambunctious 12-year-old — Samuele is an electrifyingly natural presence. We spend a lot of time with him (and we wouldn't want to lose a moment of it) and whatever he's doing, wandering through the scrubby growth at night trying to find a songbird, throwing up at sea, trying to learn how to row (it's utterly endearing how lacking Samuele is in the basic skills of a fisherman), visiting the optician for his lazy eye or laboriously working through his English homework, he is an extraordinary subject. And he also has the most transcendently un-self-conscious spaghetti-eating scene since "Blue is the Warmest Color."

But in contrast to this small group of islanders who are individual people living continuous full lives only occasionally troubled by the disaster unfolding around them, the immigrants are largely undifferentiated. And when we do focus on one man or one woman for a spell, as during a mesmerizing moment when one of them bursts into a kind of spoken-word-meets-folk-ballad-meets-Homeric-epic-poem version of the story of his journey, instantly memorializing it like it's a tale that has already passed into collective memory, it is only ever a one-off — we never see them again. When the depersonalizing rhetoric around the crisis is part of the problem (British PM David Cameron using terms like "swarm," for example) it feels a little like an opportunity missed that Rosi, with his keen eye for capturing a whole personality in a lady making a bed or a child "mending" a cactus he's been using as target practice, does not train it more fully on one or two of the migrants.

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Of course, that is not the film he wanted to make, and "Fire at Sea" is testament to Rosi's singular approach. But as beguiled as I was, I also found it, or perhaps my own response, slightly questionable: is it even ethical to use such a raw and ongoing disaster as context for a different story? Is Rosi creating interest in the underreported migrant crisis, or borrowing it? And if ultimately, as seems to be the case, we are meant to notice the bifurcated structure in which the traditional rhythms of life on Lampedusa go on all but untouched by the humanitarian calamity happening a slingshot's reach away, wouldn't the film benefit from a little more balance between those two parallel lines? And what is that insight worth — to us, to them?

Not all documentaries must be prompts to activism, of course. But the almost lyrical, background-chorus way the undifferentiated migrant masses are portrayed here, coming in ceaseless waves like the sea that crashes against the coast, packed into holding areas segregated from the island population, lined up for processing and assigned numbers like prisoners — it all combines to locate our point of view entirely outside of them as people. Instead we're encouraged to parse the actions and attitudes of one little boy for symbolism: are Samuele's complaints of breathlessness and allergies actually neurotic manifestations of stress (a word he stumbles over in an English lesson) due to a generalized sense of tragedy in the air? Is his childish habit of firing an imaginary machine gun into the air some expression of unconscious antagonism toward the low-level threat the migrants pose to his tranquil way of life? Possibly, but frankly drawing this sort of conclusion feels like reaching, and it's not a little disturbing when the people whom these symbols may be representing are dying horribly, and non-symbolically, a few kilometers away.

"Fire at Sea" is two films, either one of which is astonishing, powerful and human. But the difference in scale and perspective they are accorded means that taken together they present a one-sided and oddly passive conversation, one that does not ask us to step too far out of the place where our innate biases, as largely middle-class Western audiences, most likely lie anyway. Despite all the craft and care it seems just slightly deflating that "Fire at Sea" can elicit a relatively complacent reaction when it is such a thoughtful, deeply-felt and exquisitely observed film, set right in the eye of a raging storm. [B/B+]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Berlin Review: Eugène Green's Droll, Adorable 'Le Fils De Joseph' With Mathieu Amalric

Jessica Kiang — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 17:28:01 GMT

"Details bore me," declares Mathieu Amalric's Oscar more than once in Eugène Green's witty formalist triumph "Le Fils De Joseph" ("Son of Joseph"), unapologetically excusing his inability to remember the names of his three children. Not only does his deadpan-casual-hilarious delivery immediately declare him the villain of the piece, in being an outright rejection of the film's preoccupation with all things paternal, it also puts him on the outside of Green's fabulously minute approach which takes the phrase "God is in the detail" to new heights of literalism. Shot through with an intensely pleasurable intellectual playfulness, this is the American-born French director's most accomplished and surprising film to date, boasting his trademark thoughtfulness and precision, yet also being almost puppyishly easy to love.

READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2016

Drollery is easy to achieve if you don't care too much about the characters who inhabit its empty spaces and laconic silences, and if your ultimate aim is no higher than to point out the nihilistic absurdity of life. It's much harder, however, to be creatively, optimistically droll, and to find in life's absurdity a cause for hopefulness and defiant celebration. But "Le Fils De Joseph" does exactly that, using Green's hyper non-naturalistic dialogue and shooting style, which is composed of static, often symmetrical shots in which the characters frequently look straight to the camera though they're talking to each other, to frame a parable about the consolations and the limitations of art when it comes to more vital, basic functions like love, faith, and family.

Vincent (newcomer Victor Ezenfis) is a somewhat lonely teenager, first described as "weird" by the two companions he abandons in the act of torturing a trapped rat. He stares endlessly at a print of Caravaggio's gruesome "The Sacrifice of Isaac" in his bedroom and gets an illicit thrill, indicated by the tiniest of smiles on his usually impassive face, from shoplifting small tools from a local store, only to return them immediately. He refuses to help out with an entrepreneurial friend's new business wheeze — selling his semen on the internet — even though the friend can't get production to meet supply. Vincent's new obsession is to discover who his father is, because his mother (Natacha Régnier, radiating an almost palpable aura of worried kindness) refuses to tell him. But when he discovers the elusive man's identity, wouldn't you know it, it turns out to be fastidiously detail-averse, philandering publishing magnate Oscar Pormenor (Amalric) — no one's idea of father of the year. Through a variety of contrivances that would be slapstick if they weren't played with so straight a face, a fleeing Vincent is then mistaken for a dazzling new literary talent by chronically forgetful art critic Violette, played wickedly by a terrific Maria de Madeiros, as permanently sozzled as she is eternally stylish.

Amid encounters with the great and the good and the satirically swiped-at of the Paris art elite, Vincent also meets Oscar's dispossessed brother Joseph (Fabrizio Rongione, star of Green's last film "La Sapienza" as well as "Two Days One Night" from the Dardenne brothers, who produce here). Bonding as they wander around Paris together, Vincent and Joseph trade observations about art and God, and a chance remark — about how Jesus may not have been St. Joseph's son but that St. Joseph put in the hours and so basically became his father — gives Vincent the idea of testing the old "you can't choose your family" adage and introducing his new friend to his mother. Joseph, meet Marie.

READ MORE: Cannes Review: The Dardenne Brothers' 'Two Days, One Night' Starring Marion Cotillard
The biblical references that abound are never overdone, rather they come as sweet little surprises in a film that's filled with multicolored pick-and-mix referentialism, taking in Jules Verne and 17th century chamber music; religious iconography and Truffaut; the Paris street photography of Cartier-Bresson and Doiseau and the Baroque theater tradition. But the lightness with which Green employs the kind of symbolism that is usually so heavily pregnant with Meaning and Importance that it might as well have a stop sign erected beside it attached to a 6-volume explanation, is a relief. Calmed by Raphael O'Byrne's resolutely tranquil camera, there's a sense that it's okay not to parse every passing nod for significance — they are the means by which Green is communicating, not the end. "Le Fils de Joseph" is fun, even before the donkey appears.

But that's not to say it's the finger-painted daubs of a child playing with a palette they don't understand. Green's polyamory for all these disciplines — art, architecture, cinema, music, theater — isn't just broad, it's deep and discerning. You get the feeling that what we see here are merely the tips of many icebergs of hard-won, well-earned knowledge, it's just that Green is the diametric opposite of a show-off. And that's what makes his film, despite the stiff formality of his style, and the relative obscurity of many of his areas of expertise, feel so genuine, generous and joyful. Art, religion, music, literature — all are valuable, but not so much for themselves as for the means they provide for people to connect, and then get on with more important things. [B+/A-]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Berlin Review: Moving Documentary 'Strike A Pose' Catches Up With Madonna's 'Blond Ambition' Dancers

Jessica Kiang — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 17:19:23 GMT

There is something eternally fascinating about survival stories — not necessarily the ones that involve Robert Redford on a sinking boat or Sandra Bullock in a leaky spacecraft, but real survival stories, of people going on with their lives after the sometimes brief period that defined them. That fascination is multiplied, shaded with regret, nostalgia, and maybe even bitterness, when those defining moments involved youthful beauty, a physicality that time has eroded, or at least changed. Ester Gould and Reijer Zwann's crowd-pleasing, where-are-they-now-style documentary catches up with the troupe of dancers from Madonna's 1990 "Blond Ambition" tour, several of whom were subsequently featured in her then-controversial movie "Truth or Dare," as well as the iconic video for "Vogue." Of the seven — Slam, Kevin, Carlton, José, Luis, Gabriel, and Oliver (the straight cuckoo in this gay nest) — not all survived. Some contended with HIV/AIDS, some had to overcome addiction or homelessness, but all shared a unique and life-altering experience: a moment on the crest of a wave of fame that, with the arrogance of youth, they believed would last forever. Right until it crashed.

Actually, their time orbiting the biggest star in the world, just at the point at which she went supernova, was short, really only lasting from the beginning of the tour to the fallout following the 1991 release of "Truth or Dare." The film, with its spontaneous gay kiss between Gabriel and Slam, became the subject of a lawsuit when Oliver, Kevin, and Gabriel sued Madonna for, essentially, involuntarily outing them. It's a bitter moment that in retrospect takes on an almost matricidal air (they frequently refer to Madonna in maternal terms), as though it were a premeditated plan to cut the apron strings. It wasn't, of course, but it did abruptly sever their connection to the Queen of Pop. And it feels somewhat ruefully moot now, when all of them now acknowledge their intense pride in inspiring a generation of gay people just then coming to terms with their sexuality in an environment less enlightened than today's.

READ MORE: 'Fire At Sea' Takes Golden Bear At Berlin Film Festival, Mia Hansen-Love Wins Best Director, And More

Oliver, the self-confessed former homophobe despite his fondness for flamboyant clothing ("How can you be a homophobe? You look like a parrot" Luis remembers thinking) is now married, works in a restaurant, and the right hand side of his face sags slightly as a result of Bell's Palsy, which he and his wife explain good-naturedly in one of the film's most unexpectedly endearing moments. Jose lives with his boyfriend in a room of his adored mother's apartment: he cries when she reminds him of the house she thought he'd one day buy her. Slam confesses to a secret he has held close since 1987, Carlton talks openly about his HIV-positive status, Luis refers to his heroin addiction: not one of them fails to understand just how young and naive they were when this whirlwind hit.

But neither would any of them exchange the memory of that period for anything, and most have remained connected to the dance world in one capacity or another. This contributes to the film's loveliest sequence, where we cut between each of the men performing today: in contrast to the crisp bravado of the moves that made them famous, their short routines are elegiac and slow, scored to an delicate instrumental track rather than a pop hit, often performed in silhouette or near-darkness — a rather lovely metaphor for a graceful withdrawal from the limelight.

Otherwise, Gould and Zwann's film runs along perhaps too familiar formal lines to have many tricks up its sleeve: it establishes a rhythm of switching between the dancers individually in their post-fame lives, that we just know must end with a reunion. Yet that does not rob the inevitable meeting of its simple, sweet power, and the gentle revelations, mellowed with time, that punctuate the excited chatter are truly moving. Yes, the contrived nature of the situation contributes to a performative feel, but these men are all performers, and their interactions are no less authentic and sincere for being self-consciously dramatic.

There is also the palpable air, hanging over that dinner table, that some or maybe all of them secretly hoped that Madonna herself would make an appearance. Because aside from their personal stories, "Strike A Pose" also functions as an examination of the halo effect of fame, and what happens when the flame moves on and leaves you behind. Despite Luis' more philosophical take ("She doesn't owe us anything… and we became who we are because of us, not her"), Madonna is the film's structuring absence. As a result, some noticeable omissions (we never see the "Vogue" video, for example, and concert footage is used more sparingly that you might expect), while possibly rights-based, also feel thematically appropriate.

Indeed, a deus-ex-machina last-minute appearance by the star would have thrown the whole center of gravity of the film off, because it's not about her, it's about life after her. And that's how "Strike a Pose," despite the melancholy nature of some of the stories, becomes such an uplifting survival tale. "At the time any one of us would have taken a bullet for any one of the others," declares Oliver definitively, but there's not always a hail of gunfire handy in which to prove your mettle: mostly it's how you persevere in the absence of drama that really tells you who you are. [B]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Berlin Review: The Surprising, Fond & Funny 'Saint Amour,' Starring Gerard Depardieu, Benoît Poelvoorde & Vincent Lacoste

Jessica Kiang — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 07:48:53 GMT

Has there ever been a comedy in which every single joke struck you as equally funny? Just curious, because if the worst thing that French directing duo Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern's latest film, "Saint Amour" can be accused of is a certain reckless hit-and-miss quality, it's in pretty good company. A late-festival treat to wash away the brain grime accrued over the previous day's 8-hour Lav Diaz marathon, perhaps, or a sweet little bonbon served up as a reward for sticking around for this final weekend when so many others have skedaddled, its joyously tacky humor, and extreme, eccentric lovability, are a tonic and a trip. It shares narrative DNA with about half of the back catalogue of Alexander Payne, (equal parts "Nebraska" and "Sideways" with a faint of bouquet of "About Schmidt"), but "Saint Amour" is twice as funny as any of them, less than half as pretentious despite being ineffably French, and, running counter to Payne's notorious misanthropy, it has a heart so big it could fit all three of those movies inside it and still have room for Gérard Depardieu.

Delépine and Kervern, in their 6th collaboration have perfected the art of creating characters you can simultaneously laugh at and with. Here, these shambolic yet charmant individuals are represented by three generations of French-speaking acting talent: Depardieu plays Jean, the elder lemon, a recently widowed farmer who hopes his son will take up his cattle-obsessed mantle but can only seem to express his true feelings in furrow-related farming metaphors. Belgian national treasure Benoît Poelvoorde ("The Brand New Testament," "Three Hearts") plays the resentful son Bruno, constantly pasting the greasy remnants of his hair to his head as a nervous tic, who longs to escape farm drudgery for the comparative glamor of a local gardening center. Bruno blames his chronic lack of success with women on the idea that he is "cursed" (the truth veers a lot closer to "creepy") -- not a problem that their goodlooking driver apparently has. Fresh from his roles in Mia Hansen-Love's "Eden" and Julie Delpy's "Lolo," Vincent Lacoste lends his Parisian sneer and cupid's-bow pout to the role of Mike, the casually insolent taxi driver who agrees to take father and son on a bonding tour of the wine region around Paris, while Jean awaits a date with fate in the form of a competition which might finally net him top prize for his beautiful white bull, Nebuchadnezzar.

At first the laughs come in the form of cringey chuckles as wastrel Bruno, determined to enjoy his time away from the farm at the Parisian agriculture fair they attend annually, samples all the wines on offer, hits on every woman he sees and turns bitter and shouty when they, inevitably, reject him. But they, and the film, are soon liberated from these confined quarters. Jean, bulky as a bear but soft as a marshmallow (and it's a lovely, simple performance from Depardieu that reminds us that his range encompasses the lower as well as the higher end of the bluster spectrum) wants to reconnect with his son. So he hires Mike to drive them all over the country sampling wine -- Bruno's true passion, though more for alcohol content than oenophilia. It's not really a spoiler to confirm that yes, they do reconnect, because "Saint Amour" is not a film that makes a secret of wishing only the best for its tenderly drawn ensemble of buffoons.

Cattle farming vs viticulture, town vs country, old vs young, farmer vs sophisticate, attractive vs hopeless -- there are many dichotomies that separate the three guys who, despite mutual shifting tides of antagonism, spend almost every waking moment together for the next few days. But like any road trip, this is as much about the people you meet as the people you're with, and along their boozy route Jean, Bruno and Mike encounter a series of people -- bar a hilarious cameo from Michel Houellebecq as the owner of a believably dire bed and breakfast, they're all women -- into whose own dramas they can't help but insert themselves. These vignettes include a waitress, an estate agent, an overweight ex-ice skater identical twin, a bachelorette party, a flirt at a hotel breakfast buffet and finally a flame-haired horse-riding hotelier unsubtly named Venus (Céline Sallette), who runs an eco lodge where your bed-hopping can be facilitated by zipline, and who cries when looking at eggs.

If it sounds dodgy, well yes it is: the film's point of view is rooted with the men, and not one of them understands a single thing about women. But that's the sweet little point that Delépine and Kervern are making -- men without women are absurd. Mainly for not realizing that women without men are similarly so. A lot of the film's loopy, silly humor comes from those moments when the women cease to be projections of some idealized, and are revealed instead to have a lunacy all of their own.

It runs out of steam before the end, and the Venus chapter that concludes it is certainly the most on the nose in its overtly fable-like construction. But by then, having glugged and sloshed the film down to that point, you're probably at stage 5 of Bruno's "10 Stages of Drunkenness" (Excessive Love) and slobbering tearfully all over it about how it's your best friend in the whole wide world. Featuring a ridiculously high character-as-comedy quotient and several major LOL moments, the slightness of the shambling odyssey story may keep it off the Grand Cru status accorded only to the very finest wines. But it's at least, as self-appointed expert Bruno says to a bemused Chiara Mastroianni about the wine she serves in plastic cups at a roadside pizza shack, "Medium Cru. No no: medium and a half." [B+]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

'Fire At Sea' Takes Golden Bear At Berlin Film Festival, Mia Hansen-Love Wins Best Director And More

Kevin Jagernauth — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 23:33:23 GMT

You never know which way the jury is going to swing at any given festival, and while our intrepid Jessica Kiang hit as many of the big titles as possible at the Berlin International Film Festival, two of the big awards winners just didn't make her schedule. But the honors given these pictures means they'll be on our radar as they are likely to make more appearances on the festival schedule this year.

READ MORE: Check Out All Of Our 2016 Berlin International Film Festival Coverage Here

The Meryl Streep-led jury awarded the Golden Bear for Best Film to the refugee documentary "Fire At Sea," while the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize went to Danis Tanovic's "Death In Sarajevo." Elsewhere, Lav Diaz's eight-hour "A Lullaby To The Sorrowful Mystery" picked up the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize for a feature film that opens new perspectives, while other prizes of note include Best Director to Mia Hansen-Love for "Things To Come," while Trine Dyrholm nabbed Best Actress for her turn in Thomas Vinterberg's "The Commune."

Check out the full list of winners below.

COMPETITION

Golden Bear for Best Film
Fire At Sea
Italy/France
Dir: Gianfranco Rosi

Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize
Death In Sarajevo
France/Bosnia and Herzegovina
Dir: Danis Tanovic

Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize for a feature film that opens new perspectives
A Lullaby To The Sorrowful Mystery
Philippines/Singapore
Dir: Lav Diaz

Silver Bear for Best Director
Mia Hansen-Love, Things To Come

Silver Bear for Best Actress
Trine Dyrholm, The Commune

Silver Bear for Best Actor
Majd Mastoura, Inhebbek Hedi

Silver Bear for Best Script
Tomasz Wasilewski, United States Of Love (Poland/Sweden)

Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution
Mark Lee Ping-Bing, Cinematographer, Crosscurrent (China)

Best First Feature
Inhebbek Hedi
Tunisia/Belgium/France
Dir: Mohamed Ben Attia

Golden Bear for Best Short Film
Balada De Um Batráquio
Portugal
Dir: Leonor Teles

Silver Bear Jury Prize (Short Film)
A Man Returned
UK/Denmark/Netherlands
Dir: Mahdi Fleifel

Audi Short Film Award
Jin Zhi Xia Mao
Taiwan
Dir: Chiang Wei Liang

PANORAMA AUDIENCE AWARDS

Fiction Film
Junction 48
Israel/Germany/U.S.
Dir: Udi Aloni

2nd Place
Grüße Aus Fukushima (Fukushima, Mon Amour)
Germany
Dir: Doris Dörrie

3rd Place
Shepherds And Butchers
South Africa/U.S./Germany
Dir: Oliver Schmitz

PANORAMA DOKUMENTE

Best Documentary
Who’s Gonna Love Me Now?
Israel/UK
Dirs: Tomer & Barak Heymann

2nd Place
Strike A Pose
Netherlands/Belgium
Dirs: Reijer Zwaan, Ester Gold

3rd Place
Weekends
South Korea
Dir: Lee Dong-ha

EUROPA CINEMAS BERLINALE LABEL
The First, The Last
Belgium
Dir: Bouli Lanners

GENERATION KPLUS

Crystal Bear Best Film
Ottaal (The Trap)
India
Dir: Jayaraj Rajasekharan Nair

Special Mention
Jamais contente (Miss Impossible)
France
Dir: Emilie Deleuze

Crystal Bear Best Short Film
El Inicio De Fabrizio (Fabrizio’s Initiation)
Argentina
Dir: Mariano Biasin

Special Mention Short Film
Ninnoc
Netherlands
Dir: Niki Padidar

Grand Prix for Best Film
Rara
Chile/Argentina
Dir: Pepa San Martín

Special Mention
Genç Pehlivanlar (Young Wrestlers)
Netherlands/Turkey
Dir: Mete Gümürhan

Special Prize for Best Short Film
Semele
U.S./Cyprus
Dir: Myrsini Aristidou

Special Mention
Aurelia Y Pedro (Aurelia And Pedro)
Mexico
Dirs: Omar Robles, José Permar

GENERATION 14PLUS

Crystal Bear for Best Film
Es Esmu Seit (Mellow Mud)
Latvia
Dir: Renārs Vimba

Special Mention
Las Plantas (Plants)
Chile
Dir: Roberto Doveris

Crystal Bear for Best Short Film
Balcony
UK
Dir: Toby Fell-Holden

Special Mention
Kroppen Ar En Ensam Plats (The Body Is A Lonely Place)
Sweden
Dir: Ida Lindgren

Grand Prix
Las Plantas (Plants)
Chile
Dir: Roberto Doveris

Special Mention
Zhaleika
Germany
Dir: Eliza Petkova

Special Prize for Best Short Film
O Noapte In Tokoriki (A Night In Tokoriki)
Romania
Dir: Roxana Stroe

Special Mention
Kroppen Ar En ensam Plats (The Body Is A Lonely Place)
Sweden
Dir: Ida Lindgren

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Berlin International Film Festival Winners Announced, 'Fire At Sea' Grabs Golden Bear

Kate Erbland — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 19:22:23 GMT

READ MORE: 'Fire At Sea' Wins Berlinale Golden Bear

The Berlin International Film Festival has drawn to a close after another successful year filled with buzzy titles and big discoveries. At its Saturday evening awards ceremony, the Berlinale doled out its most important accolades to a wide variety of films, with Gianfranco Rosi's documentary "Fire At Sea" walking away with the Golden Bear for Best Film, with Danis Tanovic's "Death in Sarajevo" snapping up the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize.

Other winners included Lav Diaz's epic-length "A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery" and Mia Hansen-Love for best director for her "Things To Come." Check out the full list of winners below.

COMPETITION

Golden Bear for Best Film
"Fire At Sea"
Italy/France
Dir: Gianfranco Rosi

Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize
"Death In Sarajevo"
France/Bosnia and Herzegovina
Dir: Danis Tanovic

Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize for a feature film that opens new perspectives
"A Lullaby To The Sorrowful Mystery"
Philippines/Singapore
Dir: Lav Diaz

Silver Bear for Best Director
Mia Hansen-Love, "Things To Come"

Silver Bear for Best Actress
Trine Dyrholm, "The Commune"

Silver Bear for Best Actor
Majd Mastoura, "Inhebbek Hedi"

Silver Bear for Best Script
Tomasz Wasilewski, "United States Of Love"

Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution
Mark Lee Ping-Bing, Cinematographer, "Crosscurrent"

Best First Feature
"Inhebbek Hedi"
Tunisia/Belgium/France
Dir: Mohamed Ben Attia

Golden Bear for Best Short Film
"Balada De Um Batráquio"
Portugal
Dir: Leonor Teles

Silver Bear Jury Prize (Short Film)
"A Man Returned"
UK/Denmark/Netherlands
Dir: Mahdi Fleifel

Audi Short Film Award
"Jin Zhi Xia Mao"
Taiwan
Dir: Chiang Wei Liang

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED

PANORAMA AUDIENCE AWARDS

Fiction Film
"Junction 48"
Israel/Germany/U.S.
Dir: Udi Aloni

2nd Place
"Grüße Aus Fukushima (Fukushima, Mon Amour)"
Germany
Dir: Doris Dörrie

3rd Place
"Shepherds And Butchers"
South Africa/U.S./Germany
Dir: Oliver Schmitz

PANORAMA DOKUMENTE

Best Documentary
"Who’s Gonna Love Me Now?"
Israel/UK
Dirs: Tomer & Barak Heymann

2nd Place
"Strike A Pose"
Netherlands/Belgium
Dirs: Reijer Zwaan, Ester Gold

3rd Place
"Weekends"
South Korea
Dir: Lee Dong-ha

EUROPA CINEMAS BERLINALE LABEL
"The First, The Last"
Belgium
Dir: Bouli Lanners

GENERATION KPLUS

Crystal Bear Best Film
"Ottaal (The Trap)"
India
Dir: Jayaraj Rajasekharan Nair

Special Mention
"Jamais contente (Miss Impossible)"
France
Dir: Emilie Deleuze

Crystal Bear Best Short Film
"El Inicio De Fabrizio (Fabrizio’s Initiation)"
Argentina
Dir: Mariano Biasin

Special Mention Short Film
"Ninnoc"
Netherlands
Dir: Niki Padidar

Grand Prix for Best Film
"Rara"
Chile/Argentina
Dir: Pepa San Martín

Special Mention
"Genç Pehlivanlar (Young Wrestlers)"
Netherlands/Turkey
Dir: Mete Gümürhan

Special Prize for Best Short Film
"Semele"
U.S./Cyprus
Dir: Myrsini Aristidou

Special Mention
"Aurelia Y Pedro (Aurelia And Pedro)"
Mexico
Dirs: Omar Robles, José Permar

GENERATION 14PLUS

Crystal Bear for Best Film
"Es Esmu Seit (Mellow Mud)"
Latvia
Dir: Renārs Vimba

Special Mention
"Las Plantas (Plants)"
Chile
Dir: Roberto Doveris

Crystal Bear for Best Short Film
"Balcony"
UK
Dir: Toby Fell-Holden

Special Mention
"Kroppen Ar En Ensam Plats (The Body Is A Lonely Place)"
Sweden
Dir: Ida Lindgren

Grand Prix
"Las Plantas (Plants)"
Chile
Dir: Roberto Doveris

Special Mention
"Zhaleika"
Germany
Dir: Eliza Petkova

Special Prize for Best Short Film
"O Noapte In Tokoriki (A Night In Tokoriki)"
Romania
Dir: Roxana Stroe

Special Mention
"Kroppen Ar En ensam Plats (The Body Is A Lonely Place)"
Sweden
Dir: Ida Lindgren

Berlin Review: Atmospheric, Twisted, And Stylish Pregnancy Horror 'Shelley'

Jessica Kiang — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 19:01:52 GMT

There's a nasty little genre horror swelling in the belly of Iranian director Ali Abbasi's "Shelley," but the film is far more effective for largely being set before those elements come squealing into the world. Containing not one single jump scare, but building a disquieting atmosphere of dread that leads us to make some brilliantly gruesome inferences, it's a classy take on the often trashy pregnancy horror category, with a subtle social critique underlying its neo-gothic texture. Immaculately photographed by cinematographers Nadim Carlson and Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, whose virtuosic work on one-take wonder "Victoria" is about as far removed from the chilly formalism of "Shelley" as is possible, the film is also flattered by its careful sound design, which mixes the ambient noises of water and forest and wind with Martin Dirkov's amniotic score to almost subliminally unsettling effect. Add to all this two perfectly pitched central female performances from Ellen Dorrit Petersen (so great in "Blind") and Cosmina Stratan (Cannes Best Actress for Cristian Mungiu's "Beyond the Hills") and you have a film that, until an unnecessary series of cruder epilogues, pulsates soft waves of fear like a fetal heartbeat.

READ MORE: Check Out All Of Our 2016 Berlin International Film Festival Coverage Here

Louise (Petersen) and Kaspar (Peter Christofferson) live an aggressively ecological, new-agey lifestyle in a remote house with no electricity and no cellphone reception, surrounded by organic vegetable gardens and, beyond that, forests and lakes for miles. This austerity is very deliberately portrayed as a choice that only the very privileged could have the luxury of making, but not so for Romanian economic migrant Elena (Stratan), the live-in help they hire to aid the sickly Louise's recovery from a miscarriage. Initially disconcerted by these strictures and made uneasy by the ghostlike Louise's enigmatic aloofness, as well as the occasional presence of a spiritual "guru" (Bjorn Andresen), Elena's natural cheerfulness reasserts itself when she learns there is a landline telephone she can use to call her son back home, and she settles in, her warmth and slightly snarky wit soon defrosting Louise's demeanor. In fact, the women, despite their profound differences in background and worldview, become friends.

With less capable actresses in those roles, it might seem a stretch that the earthy Elena and the ethereal Louise could possibly connect, but Petersen and Stratan are wonderful together, with each woman seemingly regarding the other as amusingly wrong about life, but possessed of a truly good heart, or, in Louise's case, a sad one. Stratan especially, as the homesick but inherently upbeat and goodnatured Elena, makes her character such a fully-rounded, grounded, decent person, that the terrors to come assume the dimensions of a tragedy. Because Elena, partly for the promise of enough money to buy an apartment in Bucharest where she can live with her son, but a lot as a simple act of kindness to a friend in need, agrees one tipsy afternoon to be a surrogate for the baby Louise so desperately wants. The discomfort of her pregnancy, however, soon progresses far beyond normal. She starts to sicken. She discovers bruises and scratches on her body, possibly self-inflicted. She has bad dreams that might not always be dreams.

In a way it's a shame that "Shelley" is a horror: the two actors are terrific and the weird set-up of their class-divided friendship and a surrogate pregnancy in the middle of the wilderness would be more than enough to sustain interest. Instead, we lose out on Elena's characterization as she becomes less a protagonist than a vessel for terror, while Louise's monomaniacal fixation on the child inside her quickly subsumes any real care for the friend she'd made.

This generic twist does allow Abbasi, who has kept the pace deliberate and the scares subtle till now, to push into more stylistically diverting territory, with dreams that might be flashbacks occurring more and more frequently, like contractions. Elena becomes a prisoner of her own kindness and of Louise and Kaspar's lifestyle choices, and grows more helpless until the payoff for all that slow build — and only rarely has a simple shot of an otherwise innocuous prop prompted so many audience members to clap their hands over their eyes. After that terrifically understated then stomach-turning climax, the further horror twists Abbasi indulges in seem especially desultory.

Of course, the film could be read simplistically as a kind of screed against the very idea of surrogacy, an almost faith-based suggestion that if [Higher Power] has deemed you unfit to be a mother, trying to "cheat" nature can only result in something unnatural. But the specificity of the characters and the setting thankfully complicates that interpretation, throwing issues of entitlement and social class into the mix as well, while also presenting the possibility that Louise's excessively ascetic lifestyle has essentially deranged her. Abassi's cleverest flourish, though, is that while this is not the kind of "is it real or is it all in her mind?" narrative of the other recent arthouse pregnancy horror "Hungry Hearts," the origins of the evil remain mysterious, along with the questions of who exactly is being punished, and for what. In the twisted world that "Shelley" occupies so stylishly where biology is morality, motherhood is sacred enough to justify any malevolence. [B+]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Berlin Review: Hans Steinbichler's 'The Diary Of Anne Frank'

Jessica Kiang — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 18:24:14 GMT

A competent, sometimes even clever film adaptation of a book that requires a film adaptation possibly less than any other in history, the chief problem with Hans Steinbichler's "The Diary Of Anne Frank" is that it's hard to work out who, or what, it is for. Handsomely mounted, with little expense spared in the recreation of the world's most famous attic, and a few flourishes designed to render its confinement narrative somewhat cinematic, it feels founded on the mistaken belief that if you're deeply respectful to your source material, and approach it in a time-honored prestige-y manner, then the glossily watchable rendering of the story that results is a self-evident Good Thing.

READ MORE: Check Out All Of Our 2016 Berlin International Film Festival Coverage Here

But Anne Frank, admired and mourned and beloved by everyone who has ever read her book (which is, I hope, everyone) is not famous because of her story, which can be summed up in a couple of horribly short sentences. She is famous for her diary, for the way we get to live in that lively, lovely, contrary, mercurial mind of hers during the most desperate and glorious years of her short life. But a diary is a first-person work, while a film favors a third-person point of view, however partial. So not only does it seem a somewhat dubious endeavor to interpret everything Anne wrote as objective fact, it actually sells short the enduring power of her voice, to see her pen-portraits literalized, and her internal thought processes externalized. Her diary is what makes us think of Anne as a person; it hurts, indefinably, to see her as a plot.

To be strictly fair, while Steinbichler and screenwriter Fred Breinersdorfer are nothing if not immensely deferential to this 14-year-old's 75 year-old book, there are moments, some more successful than others, when they get beyond a mere visual translation of what Anne wrote. The opening sequence is leaden but almost experimental: a silhouetted Anne (Lea Van Acken), tears glistening on her face, speaks aloud a segment from the diary as bombs and explosions strobe the curtained window behind. The end is even more so, as Breinersdorfer allows himself the license to imagine what Anne might have written in her diary had she had it with her on the cattle train to the concentration camp. It's a somewhat ghoulish, somewhat maudlin instinct, but along with pictures of Anne, Margot, and their mother getting their heads shaved, while a huge silence wells up on the soundtrack, it's undeniably moving.

Elsewhere, on a couple of occasions we get brief glimpses of Anne's freedom fantasies: lying in a meadow, splashing at a beach, walking barefoot through a cold, rushing brook. In all these moments you can see the green shoots of interpretation, as opposed to literal translation, but mostly Steinbichler is tentative, content to remain relatively anonymous, as though to place any sort of discernible directorial slant on the film could be interpreted as disrespect toward Anne Frank.

So largely, the choices that go into making "The Diary of Anne Frank" are about editing: which scenes to choose, which storylines to pursue, which momentous days to allow to play through and which to skip over in ellipses. The film is to be applauded for not taking the most obvious approach and using the burgeoning puppy love between Anne and Peter Van Daan (Leonard Carow) as its main narrative spine, for including a surprisingly frank approach to Anne's curiosity about her body and her sister Margot's (Stella Kunkat), and for pulling no punches in its selection of many of Anne's not-so-fine moments. Her casual, child's cruelty to her mother (Martina Gedeck), her occasional insufferable self-satisfaction, her snooty dismissal of the terrible Mrs. Van Daan (Margarita Broich) — these are included alongside her moments of grace, her jokes, her adoration of her dad (a wonderful Ulrich Noethen), and her irrepressible liveliness within that impossible situation.

These are the whats and hows, but we're still no closer to a why. Does "The Diary of Anne Frank" exist simply because it's a perennial bestseller and that's what you do with bestsellers? Does it exist because kids don't read anymore, but it's on the curriculum so they need a kind of cinematic Cliff's Notes? Or does this rather worthy German-language version exist as part of a sort of ongoing cultural reparations project whereby Germans have a self-imposed requirement to ceaselessly confront their Nazi past in the most unequivocal terms? The simple fact that the film, about one of the most famous Jewish victims of the Holocaust is in German (where Anne obviously wrote in Dutch) is noteworthy, especially when it's self-consciously acknowledged, as in the scene in which she reads off her jokey list of rules for living in the attic and ends it with, "Only civilized language is allowed — so no German!"

Frankly, none of these seem like very good reasons for this version of "The Diary of Anne Frank" to have been made, however tastefully. In this case it goes beyond the familiar refrain of "the book was better than the movie!" to say that the instinct to memorialize and commemorate her cannot ever be better served than by reading the words she left behind. In fact, it's vaguely terrifying to imagine that some future kid might watch this film and not bother reading the 'Diary' because they already "know the story." As history's extraordinary everygirl, no one should meet Anne Frank trapped in the amber of a historical biopic, when on the page, in her own hand, she was so completely free. [B-/C+]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Watch: The Berlin International Film Festival Announces Its Winners Live

Kate Erbland — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 18:16:43 GMT

Starting today at 1:00pm EST/10:00am PST, you can watch a live stream of the Berlinale awards ceremony announcing the complete list of winners from this year's festival.

Immediately following the awards ceremony, at approximately 2:45pm EST/11:45am PST, you can watch a live stream of the Berlinale press conference announcing the winners again.

You can watch the live stream of the awards ceremony right here, on the official Berlinale Live Videos website (not embeddable).

You can watch the live stream of the press conference right here, on the official Berlinale Live Videos website (not embeddable).

We will update all of the winners of this year's Berlin International Film Festival upon the completion of the awards ceremony and press conference.

READ MORE: 9 Exciting New Films at This Year's Berlin International Film Festival

Berlin Review: Pernilla August's 'A Serious Game,' Written By Lone Scherfig

Jessica Kiang — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 18:33:00 GMT

A graceful but overcautious rendering of a well-known 1912 Swedish novel by author Hjalmar Söderberg, "A Serious Game," from actor-turned director Pernilla August, with a screenplay by "An Education" director Lone Scherfig, contains shades of Ibsen, and faint echoes of Ingmar Bergman's less experimental films, without ever achieving the piercing insights and intimate authenticity of those touchpoints. But the somewhat familiar tale of ruinous extramarital passion is elevated by the film's visual restraint — a cool Nordic palette of creams and pale grays framed in Academy ratio — and the solid performances from actors unafraid to commit to their frequently unlikeable characters. August's deliberate pacing and formal simplicity add thematic layers too: seldom has ungovernable passion seemed more premeditated, meaning that where often this sort of love story often has a kind of exculpatory tone (It was out of my hands! It was Destiny! It was True Love!) "A Serious Game" never makes excuses for its characters. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

READ MORE: Check Out All Of Our 2016 Berlin Film Festival Coverage Here

Arvid (Sverrir Gudnason) and Lydia (Karin Franz Körlof) meet when they are both young, single, and unencumbered by anything more oppressive than a spirited desire to make their own mark on the world. Lydia is the daughter of well-respected landscape painter, who lives an unsophisticated lifestyle in an isolated cottage on a lake, a situation from which Lydia longs to escape. Arvid, the newly hired copy editor for a Copenhagen newspaper comes to visit the house one day, tagging along with his editor (Michael Nykvist, wonderful as always). The attraction between the two young people is immediate, and told in breathy little details of glances and wisps of hair and hands grazing on the keys of a piano, artfully spackled with what looks like decades of paint spatter. Before it all gets too precious, however, Arvid declares his love for Lydia, but almost in the same breath explains he cannot marry her due to lack of wherewithal. Despite their feelings, they agree to part and leave their love unconsummated.

This pragmatism might seem to go against the accepted grain of the naive impetuousness of youth, but August does a good job of making it seem oddly logical, especially for these two self-centered creatures. Their decision to part despite powerful attraction seems at least partly predicated on an equally naive assumption that, having located their own capacities for wild love, passionlessness is inconceivable, even in the absence of its natural object.

Years later, however, passionlessness is a fact of both their lives. Lydia has married well, to the stiff older Roslin (Sven Nordin) and has a young daughter; Arvin's family life seems more fulfilling, largely due to the lovely lightness with which Liv Mjönes, possibly the film's underserved MVP, plays his wife Dagmar. But the comforts of stability evaporate following a chance encounter at the opera (again those pesky wisps of hair are at least partially to blame), and this time, the affair becomes torridly sexual: "How could I have lived my life never having given myself to you?" sighs Lydia.

Apparently the bolder and more forthright of the two (and also the more tremulously self-involved, despite her awareness of the double standard to which she, as a woman, is held) Lydia asks Roslin for a divorce, which he grants on the condition that she no longer can see her daughter. Arvid, in the meantime, contrives to send his family away on vacation without him, and spends an idyllic period with Lydia until news that his father is dying curtails their summer of love, and everything starts to get a bit ragged.

The story is hardly an unfamiliar one. In fact, it's almost archetypal in is classicism, at times summoning "Madame Bovary," at others, "Anna Karenina." But Lydia is not quite the tragic heroine of those stories: while her choices do make her unhappy, she has, as her defining trait, a kind of pugnacious independence and changeability that makes her spikily, believably real (as opposed to the "Betty Blue"-ish fantasy creature of untrammeled sexuality and instability she could have been), but also terminally hard to root for. We're all for complicated, non-saintly female protagonists, especially in the often airless confines of the period drama, but it's hard to see it as anything but a flaw that we care so little about the central love affair. Except to observe that the misguided and impulsive Lydia and the relatively milquetoast Arvid probably deserve each other, if for no other reason that it would take them out of the orbit of other, better people.

August, however, in concert with Scherfig's unfussy script, certainly makes her own fascination with this story felt, in every carefully composed frame, in every period-authentic interior, in every snap and hook on her leading lady's corset (the sheer length of time it takes to get Lydia divested of her armor-like layers of clothing would probably cool all but the most ardent of ardors.) But though her thoughtful and clear-eyed style makes "A Serious Game" an impeccably controlled affair, it cannot quite inject any real urgency into the story. Why, exactly, does the world need this movie right now? What is it telling us, with such fine craft and good taste, that we haven't heard many times before?

Not only does it fail to bring any particularly new insights to the immaculately set table, it ultimately concludes on a deflatingly conservative note that suggests that all the pain that has been visited on so many innocent bystanders is somehow okay because it has brought these two selfish characters to a new understanding of their priorities in life. The music swells (which is at least a relief from an irritatingly overused tinkly piano motif), and the two lovers mutually acknowledge that the fires that once so consumed them are now burnt out. Pretty and sensitive and delicate as porcelain, it's a shame that as far as hard-fought wisdom goes, "A Serious Game" offers up nothing less cliche than, "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." Maybe they should all just stop taking themselves, and this game, quite so seriously. [B-]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Berlin Review: Lav Diaz's 8-Hour 'A Lullaby To The Sorrowful Mystery'

Nikola Grozdanovic — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 17:36:35 GMT

Somewhere around the 300^th minute of Lav Diaz’ immaculately chiseled glacier, the two most prominent characters have a discussion about art. Isagani (John Lloyd Cruz) believes that it is too romantic a notion to think that art can save the world, but Simoun (Piolo Pascual) encourages him not to give up writing poetry and singing lullabies because only through art can true emancipation be achieved. In the context of “A Lullaby To The Sorrowful Mystery,” this emancipation is directly linked to Pilipino liberation from an oppressive Spanish rule of over 300 years. In a 480-minute sea of conversations, it is one of the more jolting discourses because of its meta nature. The core of Lav Diaz’ intention with his most personal film to date is unmistakably shackled to the idea of emancipating the spirit of his homeland through art. To get even more poetic about it, you could take it even further and say it’s about liberating that abstract, ineffable concept we call “soul” from the human condition.

READ MORE: Check Out All Of Our 2016 Berlin Film Festival Coverage

As aesthetically dazzling as this picture is, with hypnotic compositions carved through meticulous mise-en-scene, there are certain conventional lines which — when crossed — must warrant good reason. In this case, the activity on the screen must be immersive and interesting enough to balance out the physical endurance asked of the viewer by the creator. For a film that lasts eight hours, or one third of an entire day, that’s already a high mountain to climb. When you add that it’s in black-and-white, without a score, entirely made up of static-camera shots (there are, maybe, five slight camera movements in all), composed of discussions in mainly Spanish and Filipino, and almost entirely devoid of a sense of humor? That’s a whole different level of endurance. Whether it’s a romantic notion to think of art as a saving grace or not is a fundamentally fascinating intellectual debate, but there’s another relevant question that can be put more bluntly: must art be so hard to endure?

None of this will be new to those familiar with the director’s modus operandi (who sticks to all of the above conditions for every film and, with this one, brings his average running time to about six hours), so let me be crystal clear: diehard fans of Lav Diaz will adore ‘Lullaby.’ This expansive and richly detailed story is to the screen what “War and Peace” is to literature. Tracing various character paths and threads throughout the Philippine Revolution of 1896-97, the embroidery on display through calculated measures that redefine patience weave urban legends, local traditions, real-life artistic expressions with the most sensitive chapter of Philippine history. Following the sorrowful Isagani and Basilio (Sid Lucero) as they attempt to capture the infamous, mysterious Simoun, or the mythical and sorrowful Gregoria de Jesus (Hazel Orencio), whose own reputation forms a search party for the mysterious Andres Bonifacio, the exalted Father of the Revolution, is something diehard fans will gladly embrace. In my case — and in case you’re curious, I am a Lav Diaz fan, but this movie has made me realize that I’m no diehard — there are too many ebbs in the flow that prevent me from justifying the elephantine duration. It’s films like these, more than actual literary adaptations, that best illuminate the true difference between reading a book and watching a film. You can always put down “War and Peace” and come back to it at a later time. Unlike other directors of lengthy films (think Miguel Gomes and “Arabian Nights”), Diaz’ intends you to watch his film from start to finish. He makes no chapters, there is no intermission; the very nature of the time you put into watching his films is part of his experiment and artistic expression.

Diaz is a naturally gifted filmmaker, clearly a master of his craft and all-knowing creator of his very own genre of film, so I was naturally enthralled with certain characters and conversations. The old, cackling Tikbalang (Bernardo Bernardo), who cries out, “you’re full of microbes!” and neighs and brays? Impossible not to be mesmerized every time he’s on screen. The conversations Captain General (Bart Guingona) has with Simoun and others, listening to him expand on human nature while exhibiting the very worst of it through a veiled evil; wholly compelling stuff. The phantasmagoria elicited from the smoke and fumes of caves and forests tickle every bone of my body. The anguish, pain, and longing emanating from all of the characters, whose names are so often repeated in conversations to create a soothing, anesthetic rhythm, often traveled through the screen and into the marrow of my senses. The beauty of the songs and poems touched me, the plight of the characters even more so, the aspect of learning a whole new world about the Philippine Revolution was gratifyingly cerebral. String that all together and translate it into screen-time, and I’ve just described what is only about 4 hours of the film. Therein lies the issue.

Cinematography and painterly production design can hold attention for so long. But when you have a character walking silently around a forest for a whole minute, collapsing by a gravestone, in the 6^th hour of your film, chances are that the audience will not be able to appreciate the scene the way its creator intends them to. Unless, of course, Lav Diaz’s intentions are not for any audience to do anything, in which case he’s making films for himself and not the world. That’s a subject for another debate. Larry Manda’s cinematography and Popo Diaz’ production design are breathtaking in every sense of the word. But once you’re out of breath, you start to choke, and, all of a sudden, watching a film turns into a physical feat. As endlessly fascinating as ‘Lullaby’ is to think about (once you’ve had a good day’s rest, in any case), and as much as the pristine black-and-white photography feels like a divine gift to witness, the purest, most emancipated thought of all is simple: it’s just too damn long, and it doesn’t reach the artistic level of a “Satantango” to wholly warrant the time spent with it. [B-]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Berlin Review: Susanne Bier's 'The Night Manager' Starring Tom Hiddleston & Hugh Laurie

Jessica Kiang — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 14:03:00 GMT

Reader, you find your humble reviewer in a state of some agony. Mistakenly under the impression I was "lucky" to be among the chosen few getting a sneak preview of the 6-part John Le Carré adaptation "The Night Manager," directed by Susanne Bier, I fear I now have to suggest that the screening was part of some malicious torture plan. I have as acute a case of cliffhanger angst as has been recorded, and I don't get even temporary relief until three weeks from Sunday. The utter moreishness of this instantly terrific, thoroughly escapist show may be its biggest issue: with the 6 hour-long episodes airing weekly on Sundays starting this weekend, on BBC1 in the U.K. (and in April on AMC in the U.S.), the only craving this smart, glamorous, knotty thriller can't satisfy is the urgent desire to binge.

For now, though, I can say that even the partial glimpse I've had of the first two episodes seems like the complete package: pacy as a whippet, sleek as one too, featuring top-tier filmmaking (Bier is back with a bullet after the misfire of "Serena") and crackling performances from a stellar cast. And I'll be careful about spoilers, but suffice to say that the very strong, more self-contained first episode is if anything surpassed by the second, which is where we see just where the rest of the show is heading. With the busy, fast-paced, plot-driven opener essentially acting as a prologue, the second installment introduces new levels to the characterization of all the principals, and suggests the mini-series overall will be as much about identity, wildly spinning moral compasses, and just how much a noble end can justify the ruthless means employed to achieve it, as it will be about the high-concept spy-jinks.

After crisp, Bond-esque opening title graphics, "The Night Manager" begins in Cairo in 2011, around the time President Hosni Mubarak resigns to much general rejoicing: a foundational moment for the Arab Spring. Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), to the admiration and dismay of his colleagues, walks calmly through a sea of protestors and riot police to get to the luxury hotel where he works. It's a nice character introduction for him, establishing his perhaps reckless self-confidence, and also his slight aloofness. His unflappability under pressure is reinforced by the coolly professional way he deals with panicking guests and tearbomb attacks alike. Hiddleston also, no surprise, looks heart-meltingly handsome throughout — and that is not a shallow observation (well, not only); it's a necessary attribute for Pine, who even in just these two episodes has several women fall for him, and a couple of sex scenes. This is not a role for a dowdy man.

But Pine is almost matched in the elegant sangfroid department by hotel guest Sophie (Aure Atika), the impossibly alluring kept-woman of Freddie Hamid (David Avery), a violent and ruthless member of an enormously powerful Egyptian family. Sophie has stolen some documents that prove Hamid's about to sign a massive arms deal with Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) a billionaire magnate who presents a public image of philanthropy while being, in Sophie's words "the worst man in the world." She makes a calculated gamble and gives Pine a copy of the documents to keep in case anything happens to her. Ex-soldier Pine, however, is spurred by conscience to send them over to his friend at the British Embassy from where they quickly end up on the desk of Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), a somewhat renegade intelligence officer on a years-long mission to bring Roper down from her shabby London office where neither the heating nor the elevator works.

Things unravel quickly. The arms deal is suddenly terminated, indicating Roper knows about the leak and that Sophie is now a marked woman. Pine, feeling responsible for her newly imperiled situation as well as attracted to her, spirits her away and...well, although the consequences of his act of conscience are pretty clearly foreshadowed from the start, let's skip specifics. Pine does eventually meet Roper years later, in a hotel in the Swiss Alps, when by chance he and his entourage, including resourceful lieutenant Corcoran (Tom Hollander) and American girlfriend Jed (Elizabeth Debicki) come for the night, causing Pine to secretly get back in contact with Burr.

As you might have gathered from all that, David Farr's script for "The Night Manager" is not really the kind of real-world, grittily authentic contemporary Le Carré adaptation we might have expected: it is closer in spirit to Craig-era Bond, with maybe a dash of Highsmithian sunshine noir (Pine's chameleonic personality certainly has echoes of Tom Ripley), than it is to "A Most Wanted Man." And while DP Michael Snyman's photography is certainly rich and the considerable expense all up there on screen, it's not filmic in the way that Tomas Alfredson's masterful, melancholic "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" was — and that's not necessarily a bad thing. One of the best aspects of "The Night Manager" in fact is that though I can testify that it looks great on the big screen, it is not afraid to be an almost old-fashioned TV show — that is, to glory in its increasingly pulpy plotting and to place sheer entertainment value (beautiful people in exotic locales doing dastardly things) above any kind of educational or philosophical bent. It's all surface, and knows it, but what a surface.

That said, as I mentioned, episode 2 starts to complicate a lot of the assumptions we made in episode 1. Jed (played by the willowy Debicki, officially the World's Longest Actress) is revealed to be a lot more than simply the careless, unthinking arm-candy she first seems to be. Pine's veneer of calm, even obsequious charm vanishes as he assumes a new role, or four. Hollander's initially worrisomely portrayed gay character gets to largely lay those worries to rest by delivering Corcoran's enjoyably spiky dialogue with such relish — I was particularly fond of his purred threat "I will hang you upside down by those beautiful ankles until the truth falls out of you... by gravity" and his admonition to a lackey to "piss off out" and then "piss off back in here again." Laurie's Roper benefits from a little humanizing, even though his main role is clearly that of a more-or-less cat-stroking arch villain. And special note again has to go to Olivia Colman whose uncompromising, brilliant-yet-beautifully-sensible Angela Burr (a great decision to make this character a woman, when it's a man in the book, by the way) grounds even the most credulity-defying twists with deft, witty, drizzly details like her Northern England accent and her tupperware of cookies. She might be the best version of this character since Frances McDormand in "Fargo."

The greatest kudos, though, have to go to Hiddleston, on major-movie-star form here, and Bier. Aside from a fleeting and unnecessary flashback/daydream moment that explains what a character is thinking when it's patently obvious, and a couple of slightly inelegant time transitions, her swift and sure direction of Farr's elegantly condensed and updated screenplay is a delight. She almost always knows exactly what we want to be looking at, and just how much we need to see to understand the complicated but not particularly complex plot. And as lavish as it clearly is, Bier has no illusions that she's making great art here, or even auteur TV; "The Night Manager" doesn't want to be "Top of the Lake" or "True Detective." Instead Bier delivers a pacy, heady cocktail of a show, garnishes it with delicious performances and serves it to us straight-up: not shaken, not stirred, just perfectly mixed, a little intoxicating and highly addictive.

Episode 1 [B+/A-]
Episode 2 [A-]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Why 'Things to Come' Filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve Refuses to Get Caught Up in Ideologies

Tina Poglajen — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 17:15:20 GMT

READ MORE: Berlin Review: In 'L'Avenir,' Isabelle Huppert Takes Stock of Her Life

One of the very best films to emerge from this year's Berlinale, the competition entry "Things to Come" was written and directed by the French director Mia Hansen-Løve, with the always-charismatic Isabelle Huppert in the lead role in a gentle, poignant story about a philosophy teacher whose life falls apart when her husband leaves and her mother dies. For Huppert's Nathalie, the only way to cope with it is to let time take its course — something that proves to be both a curse and a blessing at the same time. In a way, the film resonates with the filmmaker's previous work: While "Goodbye, First love" and "Eden" were films about passions of youth that wane with time, in "Things to Come," Nathalie has been in love with philosophy her whole life, but ultimately discovers she loves life even more.

With the story of a middle-aged philosophy teacher, Hansen-Løve draws on subjects from her own life once again: Her formative years with her parents, both of whom are professors of philosophy. Knowing her subject well, "Things to Come" is imbued with the director's characteristic brand of realism, as uncompromising in offering easy solutions as it is in giving in to conventional plot structures.

At first glance, it could be a completely different kind of film — we've seen before the kind of lengthy discussions of politics and constant referencing of philosophers that her characters indulge in, but this time, it's not about showing off. The film successfully transcends its own intellectualism, showing the truth to be elsewhere; and above all, telling its story through other means, from what is left unsaid, to what is going on while others speak. Most of all, the obvious artistry of Hansen-Løve's filmmaking testifies of her being a major creative force of European cinema.

Indiewire sat down with the director to talk about her film latest film and her ever-evolving filmmaking philosophy at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival.

Do you see a connection between "Things to Come" and your two previous films, "Eden" and "Goodbye, First Love"? They all deal with youthful passions, but in very different ways or at different stages in life.

They are all films about vocation. They are also films about the passing of time, even though "Things to Come" takes place within a shorter time period. I think that the themes of the films are quite similar to each other, though they take place in different moments of life and in different worlds; you could even argue that it's the same world, because they are based on members of the same family.

The thing that was new for me in terms of filming was that the character of Nathalie is older than the characters of my previous films. Also, it is about a philosophy teacher, and even though literature and art was always present in my films, I never dealt with them in such a concrete and direct way. In a way, that's surprising, because both of my parents are philosophy teachers. This is the world I've been growing up in, and my films are often biographical.
I read that "Eden" was partially inspired by "Something in the Air," but actually, I was more reminded of that film by "Things to Come." In it, the young people of contemporary Paris, who are very passionate about politics, seem like a distant echo of the revolutionary period of the 60s and 70s, perhaps even displaced somehow.

I think there is a dialogue between my films and the films of Olivier [Assayas]. I can see a connection between my films and a lot of his films. I guess it has to do with the time we've been spending together, for years, and the artistic similarities between us; there is bound to be some kind of an unconscious influence. I can even see it and define it after the film is done, but I don't think about that while I'm writing.

Actually, I realized there were some similarities between "Things to Come" and "Clouds of Sils Maria," like aging, and the relationship with the nature.

As far as young people and politics are concerned, I never thought about the connection between "Something in the Air" and my film because of that. I know the young people in my film might seem like they're coming from another time period, but actually, I've met a lot of people like that in my parents' social circles, especially my mother's. In the past years, she's had some very talented, very smart students with whom she kept in touch regularly. At some point, they decided to leave Paris and live in the countryside for political reasons. It's something really present in France right now. It's not a recreation of a utopia, it's not a movement — these people are seeking new ideals individually.

We live in a world where it seems you have to choose between brutal materialism and blind faith. It's very hard to be idealistic about the world we live in, and a lot of people have resigned somehow. But some haven't. With my parents and education, I really believe in them, in people who seek freedom and freedom of thinking. Whatever their way, those are the people I can connect with. Even though I'm not a gauchiste, a leftist, even if I don't exactly believe in the same ideas as they do, the fact that they are looking for something moves me.

At the press conference, some journalists questioned the gender politics of your film [because it doesn't reference Simone de Beauvoir, for example], which I thought was beside the point. On the other hand, your film is about how it feels to be a woman of a certain age.

I was only half surprised. What I mean is, a lot of people have a superficial relationship with films like this, unfortunately. They look for things that would justify them reacting in a very systematic way. There were two questions [at the conference] connected to feminism in a way that I thought was very naïve and simplistic. Even though I would not define myself as a feminist, because I'm not into ideologies, I obviously firmly believe in equality between men and women.

My parents were intellectuals and they raised me to believe in equality on all levels. I can't see the world any differently; I have very little tolerance for any view that would oppose it, for anyone thinking that women can't or shouldn't do the same things that men do. Just like a lot of other people, I find oppression around the world revolting.

But this doesn't mean I want to translate that into something so obvious for the audience of my film. I am telling a story about a character who is free, in all ways in which she can be free. It's really about freedom, about a woman who loses everything, and at the point when she's lost everything, she finds herself. It is about how inner freedom can help you through the hard times in life. It's about faith, strength and it all depends on freedom. Philosophy is really about that, too.

That's why the idea that the film is not feminist enough because I don't quote women, or philosophy books written by women — which, actually, is not even true, but that's not the point — seems absurd. But I know that unfortunately, some people will cling only to to the obvious, unwilling to see anything else.

I felt there was a tangible sexual tension between Nathalie and [the much younger] Fabien, and I thought that in a more politically correct film, they would end up together or at least have an affair. Did you want to avoid that so you could stay true to realism?

Thank you for saying that. It really was exactly that, for me. Yes, there is some kind of love, some kind of sexual tension, there is a desire between them, but there is also an impossibility. It's the way life is, as I observed it. I'm not saying that it's impossible for everyone, or that it's impossible in general, but in this case, in this story, I know it's impossible. It just won't happen. It would be more attractive, more commercially appealing and sexy to make it happen between them. It would be easier. But it wouldn't be the truth. For me, making films is about searching for truth.

I wanted to show the desire and the tension between them, because it exists, and I think it's very strong and beautiful. I tried to build it up increasingly, letting you feel it, and at some point, the film becomes exclusively about that. It wasn't there at first, when he was like as son to her, but progressively, he seems more like a lover. Well, he is not one, but he could be. But at the same time, I didn't want to make it happen just to please the viewer, because it won't happen, and that's it.

Actually, that is something that really moves me. It's very frustrating, it's still there, inhabiting the film. At the end of the film, when we hear the song "Deep Peace" by Donovan, and when she meets him again, it's clear that it's a love story, really. But I liked not saying that explicitly and I like that the viewers who want to see it will see it, and the ones that are not interested will not. But for me, after a certain point, this becomes the heart of the film.

There's an anecdote about a sculptor in Claude Lelouch's "A Man and a Woman," he supposedly said that in a burning house, if forced to choose between saving a cat and a Rembrandt painting, he'd save the cat. Your film made me think of it again. Nathalie does initially say that intellectual fulfillment is enough to be happy, but in the end, she does somehow choose life over philosophy or politics.

I think you can't escape life. When she says that, pretending she can cope with the losses in her life, she's in a kind of a denial. My characters say things that are not necessarily true, even if perhaps they're not even aware of it. I think the film is really about the force that brings you back to life; even philosophy is not something that should be separate from it.

Finding an inner truth, an inner peace, doesn't mean shutting the world out. On the contrary, it's really about embracing it, about not running either from the inside or the outside.

There is no real resolution in your films, at least not in terms of conventional screenwriting, the resolution is the passage of time. Could you talk a bit about your writing process?

For me, making films is about questions, not about the answers. I guess that if I would have the answers, I wouldn't have to write the film at all. When I start writing a film, I do it precisely because I don't have a solution to something. I write it to find a way out of suffering. I guess that is what you call resolution.

Most of the time, there is no happy end to my films, no real solution in terms of scriptwriting, nothing can happen that would fix things. People that are dead, are still dead, people that are gone, are still gone. She can't be back together with her husband, she can't have a love story with this young man. You don't even know if she's going to meet somebody. You can only hope that she will.

But there is something that happens inside of her, something that has to do with the relationship you have with yourself, an inner peace. It has to do with experience, with the way you look at life. And at some point, you feel that the character has found herself. It's not a matter of being 20, 30, or 50 years old. It's path that you have to take, though you don't know how long it will last. You don't know when it's going to happen, but at some point, you feel that you've been freed of something.

That is what I'm looking for in my films, because I need that in my life as well. Besides making films, they are also a way for me to have a dialogue with myself, with my life, and very often, they are a way for me to escape my issues and my demons.

I like it how you tell stories without actually talking about them. Even though people in your films talk a lot, it's never to reveal the story. For example, we learn a great deal about Isabelle Huppert's character from how she moves around, walks, puts things in the trash angrily, and so on.

It's always about how something is said, what is being left out, what lies beneath, there's always a subtext. I think — compared to other talky films, maybe — there are also long moments of silence. I think it's about the balance, the feeling that comes from this movement back and forth between dialogue and silence.

I never told Isabelle Huppert to walk in a certain way, but I always give a lot of attention to the shoes the actors wear, because it changes the way of walking, and talking, too. It is true that in my films, you'll see people walking a lot. I was often told I keep filming promenades, people strolling, and while I wasn't aware of it, it made me realize that portraying people, capturing their presence has to do with thinking, talking, but also with how they look, not just the face, but also how they walk, their gait, how they appear physically, with their entire body. There is a landscape being formed by their presence.

I know that it keeps appearing in my films again and again, but I can't imagine a portrait without seeing the character walking in the street, downstairs, and so on.

Could you tell me a bit about the Juliette Binoche appearance in the film, when Nathalie goes to the cinema [its a brief excerpt from the film "Certified Copy" by Abbas Kiarostami]?

I wanted it to be a film that was made in 2011, because my film takes place in 2011. It also had to be a film that a philosophy teacher in Paris would see. There were a few films that I could get the rights for, and Kiarostami's was one of them. It's not my favorite film of his, to be honest, but I thought that it is exactly the kind of film that Nathalie would see.

It was fun to have Isabelle Huppert look at Juliette Binoche, to have both of their faces together in a shot. I don't know, there was something about it that fascinated me.

It's funny, because you all know each other in real life, so there's always the question if the in-universe version of Juliette Binoche in your film knows a version of Isabelle Huppert.

From time to time, I like to create a dialogue between films and reality. A film-in-a-film wakes you up, reminds you that there is a reality out there. It's interesting to create the confusion between films, fiction and reality, the way references to other films are made. I never referenced other films — I don't generally like that — but my characters do often speak about the films they've seen, like in "Goodbye, First Love," for instance. Lots of filmmakers and screenwriters avoid that, because they're afraid that it would take the viewer out of the film.

In "Things to Come," the young man, Fabien, says to Nathalie that she'll find another man and she replies that that won't happen. He asks, "Why not?" and she says that things like that only happen in films. I know it's the kind of line that filmmakers don't usually allow themselves — if you're in a film, you shouldn't say you're in one, because it will distract the viewer — but I like the idea. I like the confusion, because it's the way I experience films.

My mind is always going back between reality and fiction, and I wanted this confusion to be a part of my films, too.

"Things To Come" premiered this week at the Berlin International Film Festival. Sundance Selects will release it in the U.S.

READ MORE: Berlin: Sundance Selects Picks Up Mia Hansen-Løve's Popular Competition Title 'Things to Come'

The 2016 Indiewire Berlin International Film Festival Bible: Every Review, Interview and News Item Posted During Run of Festival

Indiewire — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 19:59:02 GMT

LINEUP

9 Exciting New Films at This Year's Berlin International Film Festival

Berlin Film Festival Announces Full Jury, Along With Tributes to David Bowie, Alan Rickman and More

2016 Berlinale Completes Competition Program With Spike Lee's 'Chi-Raq' and More

2016 Berlin International Film Festival Adds to Panorama Section With Ira Sachs' 'Little Men' and More

Thomas Vinterberg's 'The Commune' and Eight More Films Added to Berlinale Competition 2016

2016 Berlin International Film Festival Announces First Wave of Generation Section

Greta Gerwig-Starring 'Maggie's Plan' Leads 2016 Berlin International Film Festival Panorama Lineup

Jeff Nichols' 'Midnight Special' Leads 2016 Berlin International Film Festival Competition Lineup

The Coen Brothers' 'Hail, Caesar!' to Open 2016 Berlin International Film Festival

Meryl Streep to Serve as 2016 Berlin Film Festival President

NEWS

Kickstarter Launching New Partnership at Berlin International Film Festival

REVIEWS

Berlin Review: With 'Midnight Special,' Jeff Nichols Offers Up a Very Special Sci-Fi Thriller

Berlin Review: Thomas Vinterberg's 'The Commune' Packs an Emotional Punch

Berlin Review: The U.S. Is Knee-Deep In Cyber-Terrorism in Alex Gibney's 'Zero Days'

Berlin Review: 'Strike a Pose' Revisits the Complicated World of Madonna

Berlin Review: Emily Dickinson Biopic 'A Quiet Passion' Fails to Stir

Berlin Review: In 'L'Avenir,' Isabelle Huppert Takes Stock of Her Life

Berlin Review: Could 'War on Everyone' Be the Best Bad Cop Comedy Ever?

Berlin Review: From L.A. to the Middle East, 'Soy Nero' Follows a Strange Journey

Berlin Review: Cynthia Nixon is Excellent as Emily Dickinson in Terence Davies' 'A Quiet Passion'

Berlin Review: Europe's Refugee Crisis Receives the Powerful Treatment It Deserves in 'Fire at Sea'

INTERVIEWS AND PRESS CONFERENCES

Berlin Film Festival: Michael Grandage and John Logan Talk 'Genius'

Watch: Spike Lee and His 'Chi-Raq' Cast Talk About Their Incendiary Feature Live from Berlin

Watch: Jeff Nichols and His 'Midnight Special' Cast Talk About Their Secretive Sci-Fi Feature Live from Berlin

Watch: Joel and Ethan Coen Talk 'Hail, Caesar!' With Their Star-Studded Cast Live from Berlin

FEATURES

Fresh Off Controversial Remarks, Meryl Streep Champions Women in Film in Berlinale Master Class

ACQUISITIONS

Berlin: Sundance Selects Picks Up Mia Hansen-Løve's Popular Competition Title 'Things to Come'

Magnolia and Showtime Pick Up Alex Gibney's Cyber Warfare Doc 'Zero Days'

New Europe Film Sales Gains International Rights to Berlin World Premiere 'Aloys'

TRAILERS, CLIPS & POSTERS

Watch: 'The Second Mother' Director Anna Muylaert's Berlin Premiere 'Don't Call Me Son' Has an Intense First Trailer

Watch: Exclusive 'Letters From War' Trailer is a Stunning Declaration of Love

Watch: Suburban Bliss is Shattered in 'A Good Wife' Exclusive Trailer

Exclusive: Instruments Collide in Eye-Popping Poster for Yo-Yo Ma's 'Music Of Strangers'

Watch: Exclusive 'Aloys' Trailer is a Charlie Kaufman-Inspired Mind-Bender

Watch: Exclusive 'We Are Never Alone' Trailer Brings the Scope of 'Babel' to the Czech Republic

Watch: Experience the Power of Ghanaian Cinema in Exclusive 'Nakom' Trailer

Watch: Exclusive 'Time Was Endless' Trailer is a Transfixing Indigenous Ritual

Exclusive 'Barakah Meets Barakah' Posters Bring Vibrant Romance to the Middle East

Watch: Steve Coogan Takes on Death Row in Exclusive 'Shepherds and Butchers' Trailer

Watch: This Exclusive Trailer for 'You'll Never Be Alone' is Extremely Hot and Heartbreakingly Heavy

Watch: You Can't Escape the Past in Exclusive Trailer for Berlin World Premiere 'El Rey Del Once'

Berlin Review: Thomas Vinterberg's 'The Commune'

Jessica Kiang — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 18:31:15 GMT

Following the pretty, well-mounted but curiously anonymous "Far From the Madding Crowd," Danish director Thomas Vinterberg returns to territory much closer to home with the shaggy, partly autobiographical dramedy "The Commune." Loosely inspired by Vinterberg's own childhood experiences growing up on a Danish collective, the film teases a combination of the director's most intimate film ("Festen") with his most provocative ("The Hunt"), while also adding a dimension of personal insight into an excitingly arcane world, all wrapped up in an appealing period bundle. On paper. Disappointingly though, that paper doesn't appear to have been the script for "The Commune," which falls vastly short of its promise, and through a combination of cursory characterization, blunt relationship dynamics, surprisingly timid sexual politics and non-existent social commentary, amounts to not much more than a nicely lit kitchen-sink soap opera. Or at best, a feature-length pilot for a TV show that gets a pass only because it hints at all the richer storylines that will develop in forthcoming episodes.

READ MORE: The 10 Most Anticipated Films Of The 2016 Berlin Film Festival

This is especially depressing because, as a Vinterberg fan, and even as an occasional apologist (I have even been known to go to bat for the much unloved "Dear Wendy"), I'm especially fond of his collaborations with writer Tobias Lindholm (whose last directorial film, "A War" is so, so good). But the penetrating sharpness of their previous work together, which found compelling ways to scalpel apart the fabric of family life and place the slivers in a grander social context, is wholly absent here. Most damningly, the usually clean and progressive lines of the modern Nordic drama become tangled here by a narrative that too often lets the mores of the 1970s go unexamined and unremarked upon. This has the effect -- hopefully unintended -- of making it seem like the film condones the underlying conservatism and sexism of the characters. Certainly it's the least appealing, most selfish character Erik who is rewarded, while punishment is largely reserved for his wife Anna, whose crime would appear to be "getting older." You would think that her breakdown might be a cunning way to dissect the nature of the support network that a commune should represent, but you would be wrong.

Anna (Trine Dyrholm, who's very good in such a dubiously intentioned role) is a well-known TV news anchor whose insipid university lecturer husband Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) inherits a sprawling house upon the death of his estranged father. Mostly out of boredom, Anna suggests that instead of cashing in, they, along with their young teenaged daughter Freja (Martha Sofie Wallstrøm Hansen) could invite some friends to come live with them, to fill the house with life and to help out with the massive rent and upkeep. Mutual friend Ole (Lars Ranthe) is the first to sign up, and others follow, including two couples, one with a small boy who has a congenital heart defect, as well as a free-spirited young woman and a Middle Eastern man whom they're essentially guilted into accepting. It's all skinny dipping and tipsy communal dinners for a while, until Erik begins an affair with one of his students, the 24-year-old Emma (Helene Reingaard Neumann). Freja finds out, which forces him to confess to Anna and to choose, whereupon he chooses Emma. Trying to maintain the idealism of the commune while also experiencing the end of her 15 year marriage and the onset of menopause, Anna suggests that Emma move in.

Even without the unnecessary and somewhat tedious subplots involving Anna's job, the sick little boy and Freja's first boyfriend, you can see how this is a situation pregnant with possibilities for conflict and tension. But almost none of that is really made manifest. Particularly surprising in this regard is the complete lack of bed-hopping: excepting Erik's affair, which essentially amounts to serial monogamy, no one sleeps with anyone else's spouse, there is no hint of homosexual attraction anywhere and nobody even experiences improper sexual jealousy bar Anna pining for her own husband. Of all the many missed opportunities "The Commune" represents, the almost prudish, PG lack of sexual shenanigans is surely the most inexplicable and the most disappointing to those of us for whom the words "Danish" and "commune," especially in the context of the free-love 1970s, almost immediately suggest a bit of a bonkfest.

Without that dimension, after a zippy, bubbly beginning (the interviewing-new-housemates section is fun), the film quickly begins to deflate, and then bafflingly devolves further into a very ordinary story of a older man falling for a younger version of his wife. The other members of the commune are barely developed beyond the vaguest outline —Fares Fares is utterly wasted as Allon, whose sole defining trait is a tendency to burst into tears when confronted, while the rest of the cast is mostly distinguishable by hair color or mentally dubbing them "the strict one," "the fat one," etc.

This is perhaps the biggest failing of "The Commune": it's not about the commune at all. In fact, the plot as it plays out could more or less have happened with a cast of four —the family unit and the interloper Emma. There's next to no exploration of the commune's internal dynamics, no commentary on the folly or nobility of trying to live to utopian principles in a distinctly un-utopian world, and no examination of the sort of hubristic idealism it takes to decide that a small group is going to radically rewrite the way people have lived for centuries. But despite presenting an environment enriched to weapons-grade plutonium levels with potential for interpersonal drama, Vinterberg can't seem to find any, and elects instead to focus on Anna's menopausal crisis.

That might be an admirable avenue to explore, if only he didn't do it with such a palpable tinge of disdain: Dyrholm's performance goes some way to make Anna sympathetic, but all other cues encourage us to take sides against her, like everyone else does. Perhaps the taste it leaves wouldn't be quite so sour if there was any sense that the commune, which she instigated, has been compromised by its treatment of her. But the troubling inference of "The Commune," upbeat music cues, clinking glasses and all, is that somehow, all of this is for the best, and everyone's got exactly what they deserved. [C]

Browse through all our coverage of the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival by clicking here.

Berlin Review: From L.A. to the Middle East, 'Soy Nero' Follows a Strange Journey

Michael Pattison — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 15:50:30 GMT

Nothing is more universal, it seems, than border trouble. It's the heart and soul, the foreground and backdrop, of Rafi Pitts's "Soy Nero." The Iranian's fifth feature — his first in six years following "The Hunter" — begins in Tijuana, journeys to Los Angeles, and concludes in the anonymous "Na Koja-abad" (no man's land) of a Middle Eastern desert.

Co-writing with Romanian screenwriter Razvan Radulescu (who worked on notable award-winners "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" and "Child's Pose"), Pitts drags his figurative approach to storytelling into the muscular realms of urban drama and wartime thriller. As a world-we-live-in dispatch, the film offers plenty of interpretable discussion points.

In this righteous, sometimes gripping genre-melding work, geographical boundaries are the root of violent skirmishes, political tensions, racial prejudices, and class war. Laden with meticulously baked symbolism, "Soy Nero" will prove fine fodder for scholarly papers on dramatic representations of identity and nationhood, and the ironies that characterize both in the context of an increasingly volatile geopolitics. But is the film any good? That's a different story.

Pitts introduces us to Nero (Johnny Ortiz), a late-teens Mexican, with a chest-height close-up of him running from U.S. Border Patrol officers. Caught, he's sent back into Mexico despite claims that he's from South Central California. Determined in his pursuit of a better life, Nero again crosses the border — this time successfully, and evades suspicion long enough to find his older brother, Jesus (Ian Casselberry), a car mechanic who's somehow scored a fancy villa in Beverly Hills.

Things are not what they seem. In fact, they never were. Nero catches a lift to L.A. from Seymour (Michael Harney), a jolly, floppy-haired patriot who shows his new passenger the gun he has in the glove compartment ("I'm all about peace… healthy boundaries") before singing "Good Morning Mr. Zip-Zip-Zip" with his young daughter — who's sitting in the back. Stopping his Buick to take a leak, Seymour conspiracy-theorizes about a batch of local wind turbines being fueled by gas. In the next scene, he's stopped and questioned by highway police; Nero takes his cue and makes a run for it.

In Beverly Hills, Nero negotiates his way into his brother's new pad after appealing to a pair of suspicious beat cops ("sure thing… you bet"). The crib's impressive: swimming pool, music room, stuffed polar bear. "To the U S of fucking A!" Jesus enthuses, a little too desperate to enjoy the moment. No surprise, then, when it turns out that he's merely the servant of the house and not its actual owner. Apologizing to Nero and assuring him he'll come find him in a few months, he tells his younger sibling: "You be safe, awright?"

At this point we cut, rather abruptly, to a remote checkpoint in an unidentified country in the Middle East. Armed with a fake ID and now a semi-automatic rifle, Nero has wangled his way into the U.S. Army as a "green card soldier," in the hope of obtaining full citizenship. It's not quite the same as the Pittsburgh-to-Vietnam transition in "The Deer Hunter" (1978), but it's deliberately jarring even so.

Nero is one of four soldiers manning this outpost. Accompanying him are chip-shouldered Bronx (Aml Ameen), naïve Compton (British actor Darrell Britt-Gibson, the film's standout performer), and their ominously silent commanding officer, Sgt. McLoud (Rory Cochrane, perversely second-billed for a wordless cameo). This being a war-zone and these being U.S. soldiers, we wait for things to go wrong — and, after some racially-charged banter and an argument about the merits of East Coast and West Coast hip hop, they go very wrong indeed.

Pitts is a fine director of individual scenes, and "Soy Nero" boasts several distinctive, image-based set pieces. Working with Greek cinematographer Christos Karamanis, the Iranian anchors the action to two grittily authentic landscapes: a dustily suburban L.A. sprawl and the saturated beige of a mirage-blanketed desert.

Some of the imagery here is instantly indelible: a group of immigrants scaling a hill with the mesh-fenced border snaking into a quilt of jewel-like city lights below; Nero successfully breaching the U.S. border under a dreamily colorful New Year's Eve fireworks display; that brief shot of him crossing a graffiti-festooned footbridge spanning an interstate highway.

Never mind pretty images, though: capturing local flavor is one thing, but what of it? Action aside, Pitts and Radulescu are less interested in plausible drama here than the virtuous intentions that they presumably want their script to serve. While he's clever and careful enough to have picked out symbolic clothing choices (Nero's t-shirt when held in custody by U.S. Border Patrol reads "Enemy"), Pitts almost forgets his protagonist entirely in the second half of the film.

Focusing on scene-to-scene thrills, the filmmakers overlook the importance of good dialogue and line deliveries. Some of the drama's finer nuances are as fanciful as the DREAM Act that Nero tells Seymour about. (Seymour hasn't heard of it: an acronym for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors designed to grant conditional citizenship to foreigners, the bill has failed to pass several times since it was first drummed up in August 2001.)

The film's blunt, two-halves structure — to say nothing of the absurd-ambiguous, quasi-cynical ending — allows the writers to extend their metaphor without necessarily elaborating on it. The film's neat, symbol-serving nature is best summarized in its first image. We don't see it per se, but must imagine it as the impossible premise for a verbalized joke: an elephant and an ant having sex.

It's a romance, we're told, but one that ends in tragedy: the morning after this far-fetched dalliance, the ant finds its new bedfellow dead. "Great," it thinks. "One night of pleasure and now I'll spend my whole life digging a grave." The punchline doesn't so much encapsulate the film's themes as serve, like an exam question, a starting point for a persuasion-based thesis: while physically crossing a border might be relatively straightforward for the resolute and strategic-minded, here, finding legal citizenship — never mind a sense of genuine belonging — doesn't come so easily. Why can't we all just get along?

Grade: B-

"Soy Nero" premiered this week at the Berlin International Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.