Berlin International Film Festival 2015
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Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015 -
Take What You Can Carry Director Matthew Porterfield, Producer Zsuzsanna Kiràly and d.p. Jenny Lou Ziegel on Collaborating Outside the System in Germany
With only three features under his belt, Matthew Porterfield has proven himself one of the most original voices in low-budget independent cinema, winning deserved praise from critics and audiences in both the US and Europe. Last year Porterfield made his first short film, the 30-minute Take What You Can Carry, which had its world premiere at the 2015 Berlinale. Inspired by a quote from French author Georges Perec, this self-described meditation on “communication, creativity and physical space” finds the Baltimore native working once more (in a somewhat more abstract mode than his features) with girlfriend Hannah Gross as Lilly, an American in […]
by Andrew Grant on Feb 25, 2015 -
Five Women Directors Discuss Their Art and Craft at the Berlin Film Festival
I walked out after the first 15 minutes of 50 Shades of Grey. Granted, I thought I was walking into a meeting, so this unexpected private screening caught me off guard. I was also thrown by the venue’s attempt to mirror the film’s billion-dollar company, “Grey Enterprises.” Christian Grey impersonators literally barked orders and insults at the arriving guests. This did not get me in the mood. Also, the film was dubbed in German (which is not to say that I would have preferred to suffer through it in English). Somewhere between the 15 minutes of 50 shades of folly […]
by Taylor Hess on Feb 20, 2015 -
Watch: Two Scenes from Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, the Iranian Director’s Third Feature Made During a 20-Year Ban
“Either you have to escape the country or start hoping to go back to jail,” a woman sitting in the passenger seat tells Jafar Panahi in the first clip shared from the Iranian director’s latest feature Taxi. Driving a cab through Tehran and conversing with passengers, Panahi is again the star in his third feature since a 20-year-ban on filmmaking imposed by the Iranian government. In another clip, a young girl reels off a checklist of guidelines necessary to make a distributable film in Iran (headscarves on women, no relations between the genders). The winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 17, 2015 -
Berlinale 2015: Jafar Panahi, Promising Newcomers and the Decline of Terrence Malick
In the weeks leading up to this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the festival’s press office revealed an increasingly enticing succession of titles competing in its main slate, generating very high expectations. Somewhat incredibly, they were met. While the Berlinale’s Competition customarily offers a few good films amongst a lot of mediocrity, the trend was reversed this time around, with easily the most outstanding selection in recent memory. In an equally welcome turn, the prizes awarded by Darren Aronofsky’s jury fully reflected the program’s quality, rewarding the most deserving entries while confirming the Berlinale’s avidly nurtured reputation as the most politically […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 17, 2015 -
“Awful!” vs. Applause: Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups
When it was announced late last year that Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups would be in competition at the 2015 Berlinale, many read this as a sign of hope – that the festival could still manage to snag a world premiere that most would assume was destined for Cannes. At the other end of the scale, there were those who, sight unseen, took this as confirmation that its unspooling here is a telltale sign that the film simply must be second-rate. That divide was as evident at the finale of Sunday’s press screening, where the first sound heard in the packed […]
by Andrew Grant on Feb 9, 2015 -
“I Argue that Cinema is Either Dying or Dead”: Peter Greenaway on Making Eisenstein in Guanajuato
“I argue that cinema is either dying or dead — it’s certainly changing very rapidly — so maybe now is the time to make a film about the greatest cinematic practitioner.” Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein In Guanajuato — focusing on 10 days out of the 14 months Sergei Eisenstein spent in Mexico shooting what would eventually be edited into ¡Que viva México! — is one of the more keenly anticipated titles premiering at this year’s Berlinale. Above is the first of a three-part documentary on the film’s production from Mexico’s IMCINE (the national film financing/production agency). There are two brief bits in Spanish; the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 4, 2015 -
Previewing Berlinale 2015: Malick, Herzog, Panahi and More
Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 4, 2015
