My Own Private Berlinale
Since we don’t know what we are looking forward to, let’s look back at this year’s Berlinale 2020. As they say here in Germany, “Rucksicht is besser”. (“Hindsight is better.”)
This year’s Berlinale was especially busy for me as I was invited to give tours and presentations to the emerging talents of the Berlinale Talents; to an Ethiopian delegation of filmmakers, to students of the London Film School and to students of the Birkbeck University of London and to a group called the Second Berlin China Executive Program comprised of young Chinese cineastes living in the diaspora including U.K., Germany, Italy and USA.
Little did we know that when we returned to our respective homes we would be forced into self-isolation. We were all very lucky that the Corona Virus did not affect anyone and for that we thank the 110 Chinese companies and individuals who had given advance notice that they would not attend. We all left the Berlinale tired but basically intact. To date, there have been no reports of infections among 10,000 of those who were at the Berlinale and EFM.
Aside from the tours and other meetings, I did get to see a few films, but very few considering I was here for the full eight days. I will recap them here with links to more in-depth discussion of topics they signal.
The originator of the Second Berlin China Executive Program workshop, Millie Zhou, had expressed how important Jia Zhang-ke is, not only as an eminent filmmaker, but as the organizer of the prestigious and substantive Pingyao Film Festival and especially as a mentor to younger filmmakers who are beginning to emerge on the international festival circuit.
It was especially interesting to go with these Chinese students after our workshop together to see his film, Yi Zhi You Dao Hai Shui Bian Lan (Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue).
The nearly two-hour doc which presents the vicissitudes of post-1949 China was “a ruminative and lyrical documentation of the slowly disappearing countryside and a profound exploration of the sense of loss that is haunting the urban population”.
This description, so well written itself, was written for me by one of the workshop participants, Zifei Wang, as part of her explanation to me of Chinese cinema today.
Read her article on current Chinese cinema as it showed in Berlin.
Zifei is currently studying Transcultural Media Studies at Heidelberg University in Germany. Previously she studied at Kyoto University. She speaks German, English, Mandarin and Japanese. She’s interested in migrant and diasporic cinema, the film festival circuit and festival distribution. Also, she would like to know more about the film value chain. This, it turns out, is crucial today as the world is forced to switch into hardcore digital modes.
For those readers interested in the work of Jia Zhang-ke, if you live in the USA, Kino Lorber is now offering the Blu-ray and DVD of his first work, the critically acclaimed doc, I Wish I Knew. This is the director’s cut of the great unseen film by the modern master Jia Zhangke, director of A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart, and Ash Is Purest White, which premiered at TIFF 2018 and was an epic romance, a story of violent love within a time frame spanning from 2001 to 2017.
The caliber of the filmmakers I met this year at the Berlinale Talents and the workshops was extremely high as exemplified by Zifei. Other equally astute, open to learning and actively preparing their future careers were filmmakers participating in IEFTA (International Emerging Film Talent)’s latest initiative with whom I am happy to say I have a long and continuing relationship.
IEFTA was conceived of several years ago by a Marco Orsini, a Puerto Rican living in Monaco who decided to use his good fortune to bring underrepresented filmmakers into the mainstream via Berlin, Cannes and Locarno. He began by bringing filmmakers from Ethiopia to Cannes where I gave them a market tour. Then he moved on to South Asia — like Bangladesh, where he is teaming up with Samia Zamir of the International Film Initiative Bangladesh who has been working as a producer with South Asian filmmakers and other largely unexposed geographic locations into the film circuit, and whom I first met in Locarno. At this Berlinale they were also working with the new Sudanese Filmmaking Association.
Filmmakers themselves, Marco and Samia have shepherded now-finished films through the process of film financing and production and are embarking upon their next initiative.
Ethiopia seems to be the most interesting developing movie making country in Africa today. Ethiopia may be recognizing that movies as a cultural force might become a prime driver of economic growth. Art in Ethiopia has always reached high levels. And the hard work of distribution is recognized increasingly in Ethiopia as an international sales force headed by Tigist Kebede of Habeshaview Distribution is in the process of being formed.
As my readers may already know, my main concern in the film business is that the filmmakers and their films make money so that they can first of all pay back their crews and benefactors. In doing so they establish their reputations as masters of the art of film and can go on to make their next films. Most filmmakers never go on to make a second film and if they do, they most often do not make a third. While the struggle to make a film never ceases, it can at least sustain an artist if it succeeds as a public art. To do that, it must find a paying audience, and that can only happen through international sales and distribution.
The noteworthy group of Ethiopian filmmakers in Berlin this year was hosted by Gobez Media, founded by Canadian-Ethiopian producer Tamara Dawit.
Tamara introduced me to director Abraham Gezahagne, director Hiwot Getaneh (a woman, btw), and the Senior Producer of Area 51 Films, Mehret Madefro. The other Ethiopian members of the group were unable to get their visas from Germany in time to attend the tour of EFM at the Martin Gropius Bau.
Mehret Madefro is probably the top producer in Ethiopia today. We had originally met in 2014 at Sundance where her film, Difret directed by Zeresenay Mehari, won for Best Drama in World Cinema. In 2018 TIFF showed Sweetness in the Belly also by the same director, Zeresenay Mehari. She is now working on that same director, Zeresenay Mehari‘s next film. Mahret is also working on the next film of Yared Zelek whose film, Lamb, was released in US by iTunes and which I was lucky to have seen in 2015 Ajyal Youth Film Festival in Doha after it premiered in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard. And keep your eyes open for Hiwot Getaneh, whose short film A Fool God played in the Berlinale’s Generation Kplus section. She will soon announce a new feature.
Look Mehret Madefro up on IMDb and you will see how many features, docs and TV series she is working on right now. One of her features will be represented by Films Boutique who will be selling it internationally. (I have a feeling it is a film by Hiwot Getaneh, but I may be wrong.) That international sales agent brings great prestige to whatever it represents.
Read my previous blog about Yared Zelek’s 2016 film Lamb.
Among the few other movies I made a point of seeing, was my favorite German director Christopher Petzold’s newest film Undine.
Check out the blog on Undine here.
I also caught three women-directed films. I’ll give brief thoughts here on two of them:
Agnieszka Holland’s film in Competition, Charlatan, is one of her best recent movies. That might be in part due to the writer, Marek Epstein, a young Prague actor. There were unanswered and open-ended parts to the characterization of this real-life historical figure; the contradictions in his character added to the mysterious revelation of a man with no compassion for those nearest to him and yet an unstoppable need to use his talent to heal any and all who came to him. His partner seemed to be a more sculptured characterization of a loving, fun, handsome and loyal man who in the end even had a social conscience. In the end, it was around his conscionable act that the story pivots.
Sally Potter’s drama The Roads Not Taken was a big yawn. I have not been a fan of Sally Potter’s since Orlando. I disliked the male lead in The Tango Lesson immensely and likewise, find a physically and emotionally inarticulate Javier Bardem really awful to watch as he plays a self-centered man whose regrets have regrets have regrets and who loses. And it is all about him. Though when he finally eeks out words telling his long-suffering-trying-to-make-connections-to-him daughter that he came back for her and she is so grateful that — somehow, in the end — connected me emotionally to the movie. Maybe that only speaks to the talent of Elle Fanning, but to have to slog out the whole film to get to that point…puleeezzz!
Anne Fontaine’s Night Shift was very satisfying and it made me wonder why she has not received greater acclaim abroad. I ask you, my readers, friends and fans, to go to a longer blog about women directors from France where I explore this further.
See blog on Anne Fontaine and my discovery (and hypothesis) about French women directors.
Agreeing with me about the strength of Anne Fontaine’s film were international sales company Celsius’ Thierry Wase-Bailey and Henriette Wollmann. For Thierry, his favorite film, which I regret not seeing, was The Assistant by Kitty Green, a Sundance film. See the trailer here, it looks scary! For Henriette it was the Panorama film Mogul Mowgli by Bassam Tariq which was the FIPRESCI Prize Winner. About a British Pakistani rapper, who, on the cusp of his first world tour, is struck down by an illness that threatens to derail his big break, the FIPRESCI jury states,
It is a story that gives a second chance to deal with the problem of personal maturation, through the feeling of belonging to a community represented by the family. The first was through music and escaping from the cultural demands of the environment. The stylistic approach is varied: surreal-symbolic and realistic. The use of music and its insertion in the narrative is well justified and provides meaning, it is not only illustrative. It is a promising debut of great maturity. The performance is outstanding.
Other films I wanted to see and missed were Kelly Reichardt's The First Cow (Telluride and New York Film Festivals) and the Teddy award-nominated film by Josephine Decker, Shirley (Sundance FF), about the writer Shirley Jackson who wrote the spooky short story “The Lottery” in 1948. Published in New Yorker, it brought in hate mail and lots of subscription cancellations.
One day I finally caught one of the King Vidor films in his Retrospective. Street Scene was obviously adapted from a play. It all takes place on the stoops of a New York City brownstone one sweltering summer day. As the tenants interact, their ethnic mix, their prejudices ranging from anti-immigrant to antisemitic and the dramas of each family are revealed …I leave the rest of the coverage of this great King Vidor Retrospective as written by my friend and colleague, Alex Deleon, soon to be a legend among us cinephiles, once word of his book gets out..actually his book Looking for Fassbinder and Finding Divine is two books in one, one of his pilgrim’s progress through moviedom from 1975 to 2002 when he attended an amazing array of world film festivals, and the other, a great survey of Yiddish films.
Check out Alex Deleon’s blog on the King Vidor Retrospective here.
After watching the beautifully constructed Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Street Scene, whose ending is a shock, I went to see a Romanian doc because it was by Radu Jude (Aferim!, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians). Knowing almost nothing about it, I found The Exit of the Trains was a documentary essay of the first big massacre of the Jews in Romania in 1941.
Now that we are onto Jewish topics, a film I really want to see is Persian Lessons by Vadim Perelman. Screening not in Competition but as a Special…it brought raves from everyone. Persian Lessons’ world premiere came days after a racially motivated, right-wing extremist mass shooting in the German city of Hanau which left nine dead. Writing this today in light of the current number of dead by COVID 19, there is another irony of sorts…
This Russian-German-Belarus feature, set in 1942 Persian Lessons tells the story of a young Belgian man who is arrested by the SS alongside other Jews and sent to a concentration camp in Germany. He narrowly avoids execution by swearing to the guards that he is not Jewish, but Persian. This lie temporarily saves him, but then he is assigned to teach Farsi to the officer in charge of the camp’s kitchen, who dreams of opening a restaurant in Iran once the war is over. By inventing a language he doesn’t know, word by word, an unusual relationship between the two men begins to incite jealousy and suspicion. Persian Lessons is said to achieve that rare feat of maintaining a fine balance between a respectful account of the horrors of the Shoah, and a sense of irony that may be one of the keys to surviving such madness.
I am happy to see it was picked up for us by Cohen Media. International Sales Agent (ISA) Memento also sold it to Australia (Rialto), Czech Republic (Film Europe), Ex-Yugoslavia (MCF Megacom), Germany and Austria (Alamode), Israel (Lev Cinemas/ Shani), Italy (Academy), South Africa (Forefront Media) and Spain (Avalon).
For more on what is happening on the Jewish front in Berlin, always a fertile ground for Jewish Film Festival programmers who gather yearly at the invitation of Nicola Galliner, founder and director of the Jewish Film Festival of Berlin Brandenberg, CLICK HERE AND READ THE BLOG.
And while we are approaching a geopolitical hotspot with the mention of Jewish which seems to cause an instant reaction toward thinking “Israel, Mideast…”
Let’s talk about what’s happening in Berlin with films from MENA (Middle East North Africa, also labeled “Arab”). Twenty-four Arab films and filmmakers made it to the 70th Berlinale this year. About 8 were directed by women. READ MORE HERE.
Academy award-nominated director Hany Abu Asaad’s upcoming feminist spy thriller Huda’s Salon based on real events about a woman who runs a network of informers out of a hair salon in Bethlehem. It will be produced by H & A Production with Film Clinic. In addition, MAD Solutions and Lagoonie Film Production are co-producers and will distribute the film together in the MENA region. ISA Memento will oversee international sales.
Marco Orsini’s documentary, the thrilling story of two Egyptian world class sports stars’ disastrous sailing competition to bring attention to the migrants at sea, Beyond the Raging Sea, is set for a wide theatrical release across the MENA region via #MADSolutions and VOX Cinemas.
Also in the EFM were Blue Elephant 2: Dark Whispers directed by Marwan Hamed from Egypt which grossed $6 million at the Egyptian box office and will be sold internationally by MAD, and Between Heaven and Earth directed by Najwa Najjar from Palestine.
The Teddy Awards — the most outstanding queer film prize in the world — is a socially engaged, political honor presented to films and people who communicate queer themes on a broad social platform, thereby contributing to tolerance, acceptance, solidarity and equality in society.
Winning for Best Feature Film was Futur Drei (No Hard Feelings) by Faraz Shariat. Watch the trailer here.
The Teddy Jury Award went Taiwan’s Rizi (Days) directed by Tsai Ming-Liang of Taiwan.
The Activist Award Winner went to Welcome to Chechnya, directed by David France. You can read more about the movie on the TEDDY blog and below you can watch The Teddy interview with David France.
Best Doc/ Essay Film Prize went to Si c’était de l’amour (If It Were Love) by Patric Chiha.
Best Short Film went to Playback. Ensayo de una despedida (Playback) von Agustina Comedi.
