Berlin International Film Festival

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    At the Berlin Film Festival, Anxious Movies for Dark Times

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    At the Berlin International Film Festival, the onscreen mood was downbeat, but the program still held some gems.The skies are typically gray and gloomy at the Berlin International Film Festival, but this year’s edition, which runs through Sunday, began with snow for days. The wintry weather gave the event — known as the Berlinale — a magical glow at first, but it wasn’t enough to keep the demons at bay. Looming over the festival were anxieties over the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as the upcoming German elections. The films also radiated an air of shame, despair and powerlessness, asking: How to trust ourselves to make the world better when we’ve already screwed up so spectacularly?Tom Tykwer’s visually dazzling, but comically misguided liberal drama, “The Light,” opened the event last week, submitting festivalgoers to 162 minutes of angst and attrition (and one too many “Bohemian Rhapsody” needle drops) about a German family spiritually cleansed by their Syrian housekeeper.For many of us on the ground, however, the first real epic-of-interest was the “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho’s science-fiction caper “Mickey 17” — a film that induces nervous laughter about society’s abysmal moral standards. In this high-concept action movie with a zany dark heart, labor exploitation hits a new low when workers, or at least their physical forms, become literally disposable. Robert Pattinson stars as one such “expendable,” a dopey spaceman whose co-workers treat him like a lab-rat, knowing that his body can be reprinted.A scene from “Mickey 17.”BerlinaleBong’s bids at timeliness are staler than usual. (Mark Ruffalo plays a grandstanding demagogue whose followers wear red caps.) But the film’s dull political edge doesn’t diminish the joy ride’s momentum, nor the flashes of genuine weirdness that keep us guessing. If, god willing, superhero movies are destined to go the way of the dodo, “Mickey 17” is a reminder that directors like Bong keep the dream of the blockbuster alive.President Trump’s ramped-up campaign of mass deportations infiltrated my viewing of Michel Franco’s “Dreams,” a competition entry that filled me with much ambivalence, but also moved and infuriated me. This intentionally provocative psychodrama by one of Mexico’s most divisive directors sees Jessica Chastain as a tightly wound philanthropist from San Francisco who has a tempestuous relationship with an undocumented ballet dancer from Mexico — whom we first see, like the survivor at the end of a brutal horror film, emerging from a van full of smuggled migrants.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watching ‘Shoah’ in Berlin, 80 Years After Auschwitz

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      A commemorative screening of the monumental documentary came as some artists are questioning whether Germany’s Holocaust remembrance culture stifles free speech.On the first Sunday of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985) — a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust — screened to a nearly full house in the auditorium of the city’s Academy of Arts.Tricia Tuttle, the festival’s new director, spoke before the film, along with a curator from Berlin’s Jewish Museum and Dominique Petithory-Lanzmann, the director’s widow. Tuttle called the screening a “triple remembrance”: This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the 40th anniversary of “Shoah,” and the centenary birthday of Lanzmann himself, who died in 2018.The mood was reverential. “Shoah” — which consists of interviews with Holocaust survivors, bystanders and perpetrators, as well as footage of the sites referenced by the speakers, such as the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps — is widely considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time. Its monumental length is key to its power; it suspends viewers in the act of witnessing humanity’s capacity for evil and its astonishing resilience, which we see washed across the subjects’ faces as they tell their stories.There’s no denying Lanzmann’s achievements or the significance of “Shoah,” yet the festival’s commemorative programming — which also includes the world premiere of “All I Had Was Nothingness,” a documentary by Guillaume Ribot that pays homage to “Shoah” — also plays out amid growing concerns that Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance is stifling the free speech of other artists.Lanzmann, the director of “Shoah,” joined the French resistance against Nazi Germany as a teenager. He appears in “Shoah” as a passionate, at times even aggressive, interlocutor.Les Films AlephLast year, the film festival, known here as the Berlinale, came under fire after filmmakers participating in the event (including the directors of “No Other Land,” a documentary currently nominated for an Oscar) were denounced by German officials and festival executives for making statements in solidarity with Palestinians.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Festival Winners Crowd New York Film Festival Main Slate Lineup

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      Top titles from Cannes and Berlin, like Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” join new work by Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.Ross’s film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.Two festival mainstays, the filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a Seoul suburb. (Hong also showed two films last year.)The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” More

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      Criticism of Israel at Berlin Film Festival Stirs Antisemitism Debate

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      The backlash to some winners’ speeches at the festival shows how polarized and fraught Germany’s culture scene has become.When Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra walked onstage at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday night, they had come to talk about more than movies.Abraham and Adra, an Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking team, had just won the festival’s award for best documentary for “No Other Land,” a movie about Palestinian resistance to Israeli campaigns in the occupied territories. It was “very hard,” Adra said, to celebrate the award “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza.”He called upon German lawmakers to “stop sending weapons to Israel,” before Abraham called for a cease-fire and an end to Israel’s occupation.The audience, which included the culture minister of Germany, Claudia Roth, applauded loudly, and there were whistles and cheers in the hall.In the days since, Abraham and Adra’s speeches have become the latest flashpoint in a long-running debate in Germany around whether public statements by filmmakers, musicians and other artists should be described as antisemitic if they don’t line up with Germany’s official stance on Israel.Scores of German journalists and politicians have denounced the speeches. On Sunday, Kai Wegner, the mayor of Berlin, said in posts on X that the filmmakers’ statements were filled with “intolerable relativization,” because they left out any mention of Hamas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dahomey’ Wins Top Prize at Berlin International Film Festival

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      The documentary, directed by Mati Diop, was awarded the Golden Bear.The top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival was given to “Dahomey,” a documentary by the French filmmaker Mati Diop about 26 looted artworks that were returned to Benin from France in 2021.The unconventional feature, narrated in part by the gravelly, imagined voice of one of the artworks, is a playful exploration of the legacy of colonialism and the interplay between history and identity in present-day Benin. It is Diop’s first feature since “Atlantics,” a drama about Senegalese migrants that won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.In Diop’s acceptance speech for the prize, known as the Golden Bear, she said that “Dahomey” was part of the “collapsing wall of silence” around the need to return artworks looted by colonial powers to their original owners. “We can either get rid of the past as an imprisoning burden,” she said, “or we can take responsibility for it.”This year’s jury was led by the Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o and included the German director Christian Petzold, whose film “Afire” won the runner-up prize at last year’s festival in Berlin, and the Spanish director Albert Serra.Ha Seong-guk and Isabelle Huppert in “A Traveler’s Needs,” directed by Hong Sang-soo.Jeonwonsa Film CompanyThis year’s runner-up prize was presented to “A Traveler’s Needs,” by the prolific Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, who also won awards at three of the last five editions of the event. His typically understated film stars Isabelle Huppert as an eccentric Frenchwoman who has a series of encounters in Seoul.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Berlin Film Festival, Reconsidering the Power of Doubt

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      At a festival that is having an identity crisis, some of the best movies suggest that lacking certainty isn’t always a bad thing.Doubt gets a bad rap. Doubt is fussy and forgetful, whereas certainty strides around, all action and achievement. As a film critic, swift, declarative certainty is a quality I’ve learned to aspire to. And at times, to fake.But this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, which runs through Sunday, has been buffeted outside and in by political turbulence and organizational shake-ups. And so perhaps because the event itself is experiencing such uncertain times, the films made me reconsider — actually, doubt — my dismissive stance on doubt.Doubt is etched on Cillian Murphy’s hollow, striking features in Tim Mielants’s grave and moving “Small Things Like These,” which opened the festival last week. Based on a novella by Claire Keegan — whose “The Quiet Girl” was adapted into an Oscar-nominated feature in 2022 — the film is set in 1985 in the town of New Ross, Ireland, which is home to one of the Magdalene laundries, the infamously abusive church-run institutions to which pregnant, unwed women and girls were sent in shame to have their babies, who were then taken from them. In this case, the chief perpetrator of the abuse is Sister Mary (a frostbitten Emily Watson), who has clearly never had a doubt in her life. But the movie is really about Murphy’s quietly anguished coal deliveryman, Bill, and his deepening crisis of conscience.It takes considerable bravery for Bill to go against the unspoken rules of a community conspiring in silence. But as a man and a family patriarch, it is an avenue available to him. In Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s sweet and funny “My Favourite Cake,” the options are different for the Tehran-based widow Mahin (Lily Farhadpour), even if her spirit, too, is chafing against an oppressive religious social order. Her instantaneous love connection with a similarly lonely taxi driver challenges Iranian conventions in this glowingly performed rom-com that turns unnecessarily dark late on, when Mahin is punished for the act of gentle rebellion that the movie otherwise celebrates.Lily Farhadpour, left, in “My Favorite Cake,” directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha.Hamid JanipourFor a more satisfying, if low-key, depiction of lonely social outcasts finding a spark of solace in each other, there is the Japanese director Sho Miyake’s lovely “All The Long Nights.” Mone Kamishiraishi plays Misa, whose debilitating, personality-altering PMS makes adhering to Japan’s rigid codes of politeness mortifyingly difficult. But the friendship she strikes up with a co-worker who is plagued with panic attacks becomes a source of mutual support: It will likely be one of the most touching platonic relationships of the moviegoing year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Film Festival in the Back of a Taxi

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      The TaxiFilmFest is partly a protest over the miserable state of Berlin’s taxi industry. But it’s also a celebration of the cab’s iconic place in the urban cultural landscape.Some of international cinema’s biggest names gathered on Tuesday night at the Berlin International Film Festival as the event honored Martin Scorsese with a lifetime achievement award. Before accepting his trophy, Scorsese listened as the German director Wim Wenders gave a laudatory speech to an audience including celebrities and local dignitaries.Just around the corner, parked in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, a group of Berlin’s taxi drivers crammed into the back of a worn-out taxi van to watch a double-feature capped by Scorsese’s 1976 movie “Taxi Driver.”Klaus Meier, who has been driving a cab in Berlin since 1985, handed out bottles of soda and beer, popping the caps with the blade of a pocketknife. Irene Jaxtheimer, who runs a taxi company, passed around homemade popcorn. A generator outside the cab powered a modest television, a DVD player and a small electric heater.The unconventional screening, just outside a centerpiece event for one of Europe’s most prestigious film festivals, was part of the makeshift TaxiFilmFest. Running through Sunday, it is partly a protest over the miserable state of the taxi industry these days and partly a counterfestival to celebrate the taxi cab’s iconic place in the urban cultural landscape.It’s also in objection to an exclusive partnership deal between the festival, known locally as the Berlinale, and the ride-hailing giant Uber to ferry filmmakers between the city’s movie theaters during the event. The deep-pocketed Silicon Valley company has drawn the ire of traditional cabdrivers the world over, and the protesters who packed in for the TaxiFilmFest screenings were railing against what they see as a too lightly regulated rival.Beeping horns from the busy street outside — some of them coming from sleek black Uber vehicles emblazoned with the Berlinale logo — blended with the street scenes from “Taxi Driver” playing on the tinny television speakers. “Ah, I really miss those mechanical fare boxes!” Meier said as the fares ticked away in the onscreen cab of the movie’s unhinged antihero, Travis Bickle, who drives around mid-’70s New York with growing hatred and menace.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Berlin Film Festival, Tension Onscreen and Behind the Scenes

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      The final edition overseen by a pair of once celebrated festival directors starts Thursday. Their successor will face financial headwinds and political hurdles.When Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian took over the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019, many hoped it would mark a new beginning for the festival, one of the most important in world cinema and the largest by audience numbers.Under its previous leadership, some argued, the event had grown bloated and unglamorous compared with competitors like Cannes and Venice. They hoped the pair would reinvigorate the Berlinale, as the festival is known, by streamlining its offerings and attracting more high-profile movies.Five years later, the directors are departing under a cloud of controversy, and many will be debating their legacy at this year’s edition, which begins on Thursday.Rissenbeek, who oversees the Berlinale’s finances, announced last March that she would be retiring after this year’s festival. And in the summer, Germany’s culture minister, Claudia Roth, said that the festival would return to the leadership of a single figure, eliminating Chatrian’s position as artistic director.That decision spurred pushback: Over 400 filmmakers and artists, including the directors Martin Scorsese and Claire Denis, signed an open letter in September praising Chatrian and calling his dismissal “harmful, unprofessional and immoral.” Others have argued that Chatrian’s removal was justified, and that the pair never fulfilled their early promise.In December, Roth announced that Tricia Tuttle, an American who has previously helmed the London Film Festival, would take over the Berlinale after this year’s edition. She will inherit a sprawling program as well as financial challenges and a perilous political backdrop.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      French Documentary ‘On the Adamant’ Wins Top Prize at Berlin Film Festival

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      Christian Petzold’s “Afire” took the runner-up award at this year’s Berlinale, where geopolitical crises in Europe and Iran loomed large.The top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, the Golden Bear, was awarded to “On the Adamant,” a French documentary about a floating barge in central Paris that offers care to people with mental disorders.The immersive feature, filmed by the documentarian Nicolas Philibert over several months, follows the patients of the facility as they create music and artwork that often reflect their personal stories. The festival’s top award is rarely given to a documentary, and in his acceptance speech, a clearly surprised Philibert asked the jury members if they were “crazy.”He said that he had made the film in part to reverse the “stigmatizing” views many have of people with mental health issues, and that his film aimed to erase the distinction between patients and caregivers. “What unites us is a feeling of common humanity,” he said.This year’s jury was led by the American actress Kristen Stewart and included the Spanish director Carla Simón, whose “Alcarràs” took the top award last year, and the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani.The runner-up prize went to “Afire” by the German director Christian Petzold, a fixture of the festival. The dry comedy centers on an acerbic novelist ensconced in a vacation home who is forced to reckon with his self-image amid an encroaching forest fire. A special jury prize was given to the Portuguese filmmaker João Canijo’s “Bad Living,” a drama about a group of women running a decaying hotel.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.The best director award went to Philippe Garrel, a veteran French filmmaker, for “The Plough,” a drama about a family of puppeteers that stars three of his real-life children. The gender-neutral award for best performance was given to Sofía Otero, a first-time actor, who played an 8-year-old grappling with gender identity in “20,000 Species of Bees.” The tearful speech by Otero, the youngest to win the award, left many in the audience crying.The award for best screenplay was given to Angela Schanelec’s “Music,” an elliptical retelling of the myth of Oedipus, and the award for best supporting performance went to Thea Ehre, who played a transgender ex-convict working with a police investigator in Christoph Hochhäusler’s “Till the End of the Night.”Although the Berlinale has long been the most political of the major international festivals, this year’s edition was especially touched by world events. Two previous winners of the Golden Bear — the Iranian directors Jafar Panahi, whose film “Taxi Tehran” won in 2015, and Mohammad Rasoulof, whose film “There Is No Evil” won in 2020 — were imprisoned in recent months for opposing the Iranian government. (Both were eventually released.) During the festival’s glossy opening gala, Farahani, who is herself exiled from Iran, drew a lengthy standing ovation for a rousing speech in which she called for Europe to stand on the “right side of history” by supporting Iranian protesters.This year’s festival also featured several films about Ukraine, including “Iron Butterflies,” about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, and “Superpower,” a documentary by the actor and director Sean Penn that includes an interview with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, filmed the night of the Russian invasion. Appearing at the opening gala via video link, Zelensky praised the Berlinale for its “principle of openness, equality and dialogue without borders.” Although Russian filmmakers were allowed at this year’s festival, films that had been financed by the Russian government were banned.After two years of pandemic disruptions and restrictions, this year’s festival — one of the largest in the world by audience numbers — was a return to sold-out theaters, industry parties and red-carpet glamour. The attendees included Anne Hathaway, whose absurdist comedy “She Came to Me” opened the festival, and Steven Spielberg, who was on hand to accept an honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement.This year’s competition lineup was heavy on German directors and notably broad in tone and scope. It included two animated features — “Suzume” from Japan and “Art College 1994” from China — as well as “BlackBerry,” a Canadian comedy about the inventors of the eponymous hand-held device, and “Manodrome,” a violent drama about one man’s crisis of masculinity starring Jesse Eisenberg.Some of the buzzier titles screened outside of competition, such as “Passages,” an erotic drama featuring the German actor Franz Rogowski, a Berlinale favorite. Sydney Sweeney, who stars in the American TV series “Euphoria,” also drew acclaim for her performance in “Reality,” a drama about Reality Winner, the intelligence contractor who leaked classified reports to the press in 2017.German critics have largely praised organizers this year for balancing a focus on global events with artistic ambition and glitz. Alongside screenings, the festival included several explicitly political events, including a protest on the red carpet on Friday to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Several of the award winners also acknowledged the political context in their speeches, including Canijo, who ended his with a Ukrainian rallying cry, “Slava Ukraini,” or “Glory to Ukraine.” More