Berlin International Film Festival
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Form Follows Function: Noah Cowan on Three Winter Festivals Circa 1999
The following essay appeared in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1999 print issue and is being reprinted in remembrance of Noah Cowan. Cowan, a festival programmer, non-profit executive director and critic, was also Filmmaker‘s Contributing Editor and chief festival correspondent, and he passed away January, 25, 2023 in Los Angeles. “Festival strategy” has become one of the more annoying buzz terms of the American independent film “industry.” However, the presence of three major festivals, all distinctive and legendary, clustered together in the winter months demands, in fact, that any serious American independent filmmaker finishing a film in the fall recognize the need for […]
by Noah Cowan on Mar 16, 2023 -
Berlinale 2022 Critic’s Notebook: Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Dry Ground Burning, Rewind and Play, Camouflage, Happer’s Comet, The Middle Ages
My favorite film of the Berlinale was Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s ambitious and otherworldly fantasia about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a Chinese immigrant she meets while hospitalized. Inspired by two teenagers she befriended during the casting of her previous feature, Werewolf (2016), McKenzie first sketched out the central character, Star (Sarah Walker), whose everyday life is mediated by endless negotiations with social workers, doctors, guardians, landlords and the various bureaucracies that employ them. Star is aging out of child protective services and has been deemed unfit to live independently, so as […]
by Darren Hughes on Mar 22, 2022 -
Berlinale 2022 Critic’s Notebook: The Novelist’s Film, Both Sides of the Blade, Robe of Gems
2020 got off to a fine start. In February I made my first visit to the Berlinale, where I interviewed a couple of filmmakers and indulged in the competition lineup, a King Vidor retrospective and the 50th anniversary of Forum. Like all of my festival trips, I considered it a working vacation—a chance to see friends, explore a city and escape for a few days from my suburban, white-collar life. At the last press screening I attended, another critic asked if I was Italian before taking a seat a few feet away. Even in the cloistered environment of the festival, […]
by Darren Hughes on Feb 19, 2022 -
“I Believe that Valuing African Audiences Will Break the Pattern of Cliches That We Have Become Accustomed To”: Akuol de Mabior on Her Berlinale-Debuting doc No Simple Way Home
South Sudanese director Akuol de Mabior’s No Simple Way Home is a gorgeous example of what African filmmakers can accomplish if Westerners would just get out of their way. A world premiere in the Panorama section of this year’s Berlinale, the doc is produced by Kenyan filmmaker Sam Soko (Softie) and the South African duo Tiny Mungwe and Don Edkins of STEPS (Social Transformation and Empowerment Projects) as part of the organization’s Generation Africa initiative, “a pan-African anthology of 25 documentary films from 16 countries in Africa, on the topic of migration.” And it tells a tale not of folks […]
by Lauren Wissot on Feb 18, 2022 -
Berlinale 2020 Dispatch 1: The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, The Calming, Maggie’s Farm
Two days into my first trip to Berlin, I haven’t quite got my bearings yet—for the physical landscape of the fest or for the sprawling program, which includes more than 340 films from 71 countries. Along with being a milestone year for the Berlinale (the 70th), this is also the 50th anniversary of Forum, the festival’s program of boundary-pushing work, and the first edition under the co-leadership of Executive Director Mariette Rissenbeek and Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian. Rissenbeek joined the fest after nearly four decades in the German film industry; Chatrian moved to Berlin from Locarno, where he’d served in […]
by Darren Hughes on Feb 24, 2020 -
“I Tried to Take a Look at These Things from a Distant Future”: Thomas Heise on his TIFF-Premiering Berlin Doc, Heimat is a Space in Time
Winner of the Caligari Film Prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Heimat is a Space in Time is German documentarian Thomas Heise’s absorbing look at 20th-century history in his homeland via his own family’s artifacts — most notably astonishingly intimate letters that sweep us from the rise of Nazism, to the Cold War division of the country, to life on the Stasi-controlled side of the Berlin Wall. Three generations of firsthand accounts, read in unobtrusive voiceover, are gracefully interwoven with family photos and archival images to create a nearly three-and-a-half-hour cinematic epic — one that unfolds in digestible parts like a […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 6, 2019 -
Berlinale 2018: Fascism, Reconciliation and Surprises
“Through images of natural turmoil the viewer gets the idea that societal events are just as unavoidable as any flood disaster. Constantly receiving outbreaks of natural violence served up as news, the spectator automatically transfers natural laws of causality to human conditions and inevitably ends up mistaking the crisis of the capitalist system for a geological tremor.” — Siegfried Kracauer, “The Weekly Newsreel” in Die neue Rundschau 42, no. 2, October 1931 This year’s Berlinale was marked by two retroactively related occasions. The first one, celebrated by a retrospective, was the centenary of the Weimar Republic, that liminal space that historically divides […]
by Celluloid Liberation Front on Feb 27, 2018 -
Berlin Critic’s Notebook 2: Bright Nights, A Fantastic Woman
Thomas Arslan’s flaccid anti-Western Gold, which screened here in Competition four years ago, spoiled what could have been a brilliant hat-trick for the Berlin School alumnus following Vacation and In the Shadows. With Bright Nights he’s back in great form, once again showcasing his flair for precise, intimately scaled dramas. Like his compatriot Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, a quick synopsis of Arslan’s film makes it sound like standard feel-good Hollywood fare: after his estranged father dies, the protagonist Michael decides to try and reconnect with his own teenage son Luis, whom he barely knows, and takes him on a road trip, embarking on a journey towards […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 16, 2017 -
Trust Fund Kids in Hollywood: Mike Ott on California Dreams
In Mike Ott’s California Dreams (which I reviewed here), five aspiring actors are shown giving auditions and later acting out scenes in a film-within-the-film. Although this nested film is supposed to be a fiction, and also looks like one thanks to the gorgeous work of cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, the script is drawn – or appears to be drawn – directly from the actors’ biographies. One of the fascinating aspects of California Dreams is that Ott never allows you to know for certain how much is real and how much is fabricated. It was therefore a pleasure to be able to […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 15, 2017 -
Berlin Critic’s Notebook #1: somniloquies, El mar la mar, California Dreams
Some lines from Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s somniloquies: “I don’t wanna see your ass, Mrs. Dangerfield.” “Welcome to Midget City. Yes, we built it from the ground up. We have our own police.” “I’ve seen the past. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! I want the future. The present is squalid!” “Kill the cunt! KILL THE CUNT!!” These are all spoken by Dion McGregor, a musician from New York described in the film’s opening titles as “the world’s most prolific sleep-talker.” Over a period of six years, McGregor’s flatmate recorded hundreds of his elaborate, vividly narrated […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 13, 2017
