Berlinale
Nick Hasted
Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony.Johanne’s lengthy voiceover relates her romantic awakening first by a French novel then her new French teacher, the felicitously named Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Johanne emotionally shoots up fast as she feels Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Emma Mackey might have had her breakthrough role as a teenage tough cookie in Netflix's hit Series Sex Education (2019-20223), but there is also a disarming softness in her; a balanced mix of femininity and subtly fierce determination that made her the perfect choice as Emily Brontë in Frances O'Connor's 2022 biopic about the author’s journey to womanhood.In the same year, the French-British actor starred in Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot mysteries. She is currently filming a fantasy drama with JJ Abrams. But what pushes Mackey back into the centre of Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Andreas Dresen directs socially engaged realist films that invariably relay personal and political messages; the result can be tough but is usually tender at heart.His Dogme 95-influenced Grill Point (2002), winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin, follows two couples in crisis. Cloud 9 (2008) and Stopped on Track (2011), both Cannes prize-winners, addressed sex in old age and dying respectively. Gundermann (2018) is a biopic of the East German singer-songwriter and Stasi informant Gerhard Gundermann. The real-life Guantánamo drama Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W Bush (2022) depicts the eponymous Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Crossing is a remarkable step forward for Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin. There are elements that build on his acclaimed 2019 Tbilisi drama And Then We Danced, but his new film is rich with a new complexity, as well as a redolent melancholy, a loose road-movie that speaks with considerable profundity of the overlapping worlds in which it is set.The journey in question is from Batumi, the main seaport city of southwest Georgia, to Istanbul, where the greater part of the story unfolds, although narrative in itself is of less importance, Akin’s emphasis instead being on observational Read more ...
Saskia Baron
On the Adamant is an endearing documentary by the French director Nicolas Philibert, best known here for his 2003 film, Être et Avoir, a portrait of a single-room school in the Auvergne.This time around, Philbert has placed his camera on the Adamant, a purpose-built barge permanently moored on the Seine in Paris. It’s a drop in centre for city dwellers battling with mental illness – a place where sessions of art therapy, communal cooking and mediated group discussions help troubled people from falling further into despair. Philbert’s style is to eschew Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Burhan Qurbani isn’t the first director to bring Alfred Döblin’s seminal 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, to the screen. First, there was the Weimar Republic era adaptation that Döblin himself worked on. Fifty years later, Rainer Werner Fassbinder brought us his 15-hour television opus. Both kept to the story’s original setting, focusing on a recently released convict caught in the swirl of the criminal underground and the groundswell of Nazism and Hitler’s ascent to power. Director Burhan Qurbani, who is of Afghan heritage and born in Germany, eschews the historical setting Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
As journalists and critics were enjoying the unseasonably balmy weather in Berlin at the 69th Film Festival, all were wondering – where are all the good films? Surely outgoing festival director Dieter Kosslick would want to conclude his 18-year tenure by going out on a bang? Apparently not.Berlin has never had the glitzy attraction of Cannes or the Oscar-hungry titles of Venice and Toronto. Still, journalists and critics have flocked to the German capital each year. This is because Berlin is a festival where you expect to find challenging, demanding, and revitalising cinema. Cinema that gets Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (Testrol es lelekrol) opens on a scene of cold. It’s beautiful, a winter forest landscape, deserted except for two deer: a huge stag and a small doe react to one another in the snow, a tentative interaction of eyes and noses, nothing more. There’s a tenderness to what we see, the vulnerability of the female set against the power of the antlered male, but also a sense of somehow icy withdrawal.Enyedi is too subtle a director to treat this opening scene as a metaphor for what follows, the human dimension of her film, although its story is Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It takes real skill to make a film about a desperate Syrian refugee and a dour middle-aged Finn reinventing himself and turn it into the warmest, most life-enhancing film I’ve seen this year. But Aki Kaurismäki has form, he’s been making movies which defy genres – are they absurdist or social realist, tragic or comic? – for 30 years now. His films do well at festivals – The Other Side of Hope won Berlinale's Silver Bear for best director this year – and regularly find their way onto the indie circuit but they never make it in the multiplex: you’ll need to be quick to catch this one on a big Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Taxi Tehran is Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s third film since the 2010 prohibition that, among other restrictions, forbade him from working in cinema for 20 years. While its very existence may count as an achievement in itself, much more importantly it’s also a lovingly cheeky riposte to those who have restricted his freedom of thought (and movement), as well as a reflection on narrative and how it is created.First there was This Is Not a Film from 2011, in which the director’s house arrest was reflected in the enclosed internal space of his home-filming. There was at least a change of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Any consideration of Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain will inevitably be through the prism of how it was made, and the director’s current position in his native country. It’s his second work, after This Is Not a Film from 2011, to be made despite the 2010 prohibition from the Iranian authorities that (along with a range of other curtailments of his freedom) the director should not engage in cinema for a period of 20 years.It’s rather more ambitious – though not in terms of its setting, the interiors of a single house on the shore of the Caspian – than the relatively simple Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Fair exchange? German humour, perhaps? We send Her Maj off to the Fatherland for a State Visit, and the Embassy of the Federal Republic in London reciprocates by bringing us the popular singing phenomenon – “national institution”, as he was described in last night's introductory speech – Max Raabe, for an early celebration of 25 years of German reunification. The 52-year-old Raabe, with his boyish looks, slicked-back hair, impeccably suited in white tie and tails, is Germany's leading custodian of the songs of the Weimar era. He is quite some phenomenon in his home country, where he performs Read more ...