The Film Verdict: Berlinale & EFM Review Day 5

Berlinale & EFM Review Daily

Photo coutesy of Berliale

BERLINALE & EFM REVIEW DAILY COMPETITION REALITY

VERDICT: Sydney Sweeney shines in Tina Satter's captivating, word-for-word account of Reality Winner's FBI interrogation.

Kevin Jagernauth, February 19, 2023

“Why?” is the simple, yet fascinating question at the heart of Tina Satter’s debut feature Reality. Moving her critically acclaimed Off Broadway play to the big screen, the filmmaker unspools a rigorous, yet surprisingly affecting reconstruction of Reality Winner’s arrest for leaking documents to The Intercept that brought Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election to light. The adaptation a verbatim dramatization of the FBI interrogation transcript, including every cough and pause, with no extra words added Full Review

COMPETITION

PAST LIVES

VERDICT: A remarkably delicate, moving romance destined to be a major indie hit, boasting superb dialogue, terrific performances and an insightful understanding of how the what-ifs of life so often dangle around the perimeters of our lives.

Jay Weissberg, February 19, 2023

There’s a scene about threequarters of the way through Past Lives when a married couple talk in bed, he touching on his insecurities and she trying to make him comprehend that their relationship is more inviolate than he’s able to believe. The writing is superb, surprising us by how much it matches what we’re thinking while being so true to these characters. Listening to

Celine Song’s dialogue, we’re reminded by just how rare it is to hear honest adult conversations like this in film, ones that don’t shout or grandstand but burrow into the emotions in the subtlest of ways. Past Lives is a remarkably delicate debut, a romance that plays on the borders of standard love stories but brings a rich understanding of how love shifts over time, and how the what-ifs in life so often dangle Full Review

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

INGEBORG BACHMANN: JOURNEY INTO THE DESERT

PANORAMA

ORLANDO: MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

VERDICT: Debuting director Paul B. Preciado's extravagant manifesto pushes the boundaries of feminine-masculine genres as well as cinematographic ones.

Lucy Virgen, February 19, 2023

VERDICT: Margarethe von Trotta’s deeply perceptive study of Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, played by a dazzling Vicky Krieps, portrays the great writer’s struggle to combine freedom and commitment.

Deborah Young, February 19, 2023

“One of director Margarethe von Trotta’s most engaging biopics of famous women, thanks also to a magical yet believable performance by Vicky Krieps (Corsage) in the main role, Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey into the Desert (Ingeborg Bachmann: Reise in die Wüste) takes the audience on a trip inside the female psyche and the anguishing dilemma posed by male-female relationships. Although the film is set in a six-year period from 1958 to 1964, when women’s roles were much more rigidly defined than today, Bachmann’s shattering difficulty claiming her rightful space in love affairs rings a loud bell of truth.

Bowing in Berlin competition, the Match Factory release has the notable production values and sweeping locations, Bowing in Berlin competition, the Match Factory release has the notable production values and sweeping locations, from European capitals to the desert, that should drive it beyond festivals and into theaters.

Perhaps the secret behind von Trotta’s success in making the biographies of intellectual women (Rosa Luxemburg in 1986, Hildegard of Bingen in 2009, Hannah Arendt in 2012) lies in her confidence that audiences are prepared to go… Full Review

Writer and activist Paul B. Preciado is frequently asked why he doesn’t write his autobiography. “Because f***ing Virginia Woolf wrote it in 1928” is the answer Preciado gives at the beginning of Orlando, My Political Biography, his film debut. And then he adds, “and I say f***ing in a tender and full-of-admiration way.”

Orlando, My Political Biography is listed in the Berlin catalog as a documentary. Right there is where the disruptive agenda of the film begins. We see 24 persons, trans or non-binary, introduce themselves with their real names and add, “I am representing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando”, then they read from the novel. The Orlandos present themselves as if in a scripted fiction film. Full Review

VERDICT: A slick but hollow Netflix actioner about an aging professional assassin balancing work and motherhood, inspired in parts by “Killing Eve” but without the bite.

Jay Weissberg, February 19, 2023

“Killing is simple. Compared to raising a kid, that is.” That’s the tag line for Kill Boksoon, and it’s meant to be funny of course, but more of that kind of humor would have gone a long way in this splashy yet superficial two hour plus assassin romp coming to Netflix in March following its heavily touted Berlinale premiere. Inevitable comparisons with Killing

Eve won’t do Byun Sung-hyun’s actioner any favors, though lead Jeon Do-yeon (Secret Sunshine) is a pleasure as always as the titular hit woman having difficulty balancing her high-pressure career with being a single mom – like so many working women. The action sequences are well-done if not exactly thrilling, but the whole shebang is awfully predictable, and while director-writer Byun (The Merciless) toys with interesting notions of ethics and “doing the right thing,” that’s all just perfunctory window dressing. Netflix will likely have a hit, but Kill Boksoon won’t linger in the synapses.

Things kick off well with the opening sequence, where a waitress-clad Gil Boksoon (Jeon) does battle at night on a deserted highway flyover with a snarky Korean yakuza (Kim Seung-o). She’s the top assassin for the most powerful killing agency, MK, but she’s been in the business a long time, having been recruited by Cha Min-kyu (Sul Kyung-gu) when she was a teen living with her abusive father, and there’s pressure for her to retire. Problem is, she’s the best, and she still enjoys her work.

Full Review

BERLINALE SHORTS JILL, UNCREDITED

recognising the face or name of actress Jill Goldston. A background artist par excellence, she has made a career out of blending in. Now, director Anthony Ing has created a moving portrait of a star whose best work occurs just beyond the limelight. Goldston’s roles have ranged across all manner of titles, from British television series like Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75), Bergerac (1981-91) and Peep Show (2003-15) to films ranging from Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (1973) and John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) to Flash Gordon (1980) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). Jill, Uncredited premiered at the London Film Festival and now competes in the Berlinale Shorts competition.

VERDICT: This thoughtful compilation film draws our gaze to something unregistered across decades of British cinema and television - the face of a particular extra, Jill Goldston. Ben Nicholson, February 19, 2023

Though she made appearances in more than two thousand projects across a fifty-year career in film and television, you would be forgiven for not

Ing’s film is a work of delicate excavation and thoughtful compilation, sifting through what must have been thousands of hours of footage to find the sequences – and sometimes just blink-and-you’llmiss-them instants – in which Goldston steps onto the screen. Often, Ing slows these clips down, either allowing the viewer eye time to find Goldston’s face Full Review

PANORAMA SILVER HAZE

Dirty God, for another loose-limbed, British slice-of-life tale. This time around, Knight plays a rough-andtumble young woman who finds out she might be a lesbian whilst she’s still trying to get over a fire that physically scarred her for life 15 years earlier. Part coming-of-age tale, part revenge drama, this odd concoction works best when it just observes its characters and is in the moment with them. In terms of narrative, it’s somewhat messy, as there is either too much or not enough going on to form a cohesive story. The film premiered in Berlin’s Panorama strand.

VERDICT: Dutch director Sacha Polak and British actress Vicky Knight reunite for an even looserlimbed slice-of-life story after their 'Dirty God,' which opened Rotterdam in 2019.

Boyd van Hoeij, February 19, 2023

For Silver Haze, Dutch director Sacha Polak (Hemel, Zurich) reunites with Vicky Knight, the star of her previous film, Rotterdam opener and Sundance title

Franky (Knight) comes from a lower working-class background that’s only slightly warmer than some of the families portrayed in Ken Loach’s work, though perhaps they only feel a little warmer because cinematographer Tibor Dingelstad, a Dutchman like Polak, manages to capture the sunlight creeping into the otherwise often dark homes.

Franky has a boyfriend who loves her but she doesn’t seem particularly interested in him. Instead, she’s focused, even a decade and a half after the fact, on the woman she holds responsible for the fire that disfigured a part of her face and body. Full Review

PANORAMA BETWEEN REVOLUTIONS

the last 15 years, Between Revolutions draws solely on archive images filmed in Iran and Romania in the 1970s and 1980s. Over this exciting and eclectic mix of newsreel footage and official propaganda material, the letters between the two protagonists are heard through voiceovers, with their correspondence punctuated by poetry from literary icons Nina Cassian and Forugh Farrokhzad. In fact, a quote from the former graces the beginning of the film: “You need imagination in order for a future to happen.”

VERDICT: Vlad Petri’s visually captivating yet structurally slippery found-footage film reflects on the suppression faced by young, idealistic Romanian and Iranian women under self-avowed “revolutionary” regimes.

Clarence Tsui, February 19, 2023

What should revolutionaries think and do when they see their good revolutions go bad? That’s the question at the centre of Between Revolutions, in which two young women – one Iranian, the other Romanian – engage in a decade-long exchange of letters documenting the despair and dangers of watching seemingly progressive social movements mutate into something as nightmarish as the regimes they set out to topple.

The latest offering from filmmaker Vlad Petri, now making only his second feature in a career spanning

Between Revolutions, indeed, is about past revolutionaries lamenting their spurned futures. With what’s happening in Iran today, however, Petri’s film remains powerfully relevant. Its visual pièce de resistance, the sequence of Iranian women protesting against the onset of a conservative theocracy in the face of an officially-backed horde of heckling men, could very well have been something plucked out of the here and now, though it’s actually from four decades ago. In sync with the socio-cultural zeitgeist of the day, the film was greeted with overt enthusiasm at its premiere in Berlin, where it unspooled as part of the Forum program.

The film should also travel well, given the interest among festival programmers for found-footage cinema, a sub-genre of documentaries which has now established itself on the circuit thanks to the efforts of none other than Petri’s compatriot Radu Jude. In fact, Petri’s approach to Between Revolutions mirrors that of Jude’s in more ways than one. Just like in the latter’s Uppercase Print, which premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2020, Petri has dug deep into the unsealed Communist-era secret police files for material on which to construct a narrative. He teamed up with a renowned contemporary Romanian writer, Lavinia Braniste, who penned the fictional yet incredibly moving letters between the two protagonists.

But what worked for Jude’s found-footage cinema, and for this type of film in general, is how montagemakers generate new meanings out of the fount of existent source material at their disposal. While Petri definitely deserves heaps of credit for unearthing and bringing such captivating images vividly back to life, he doesn’t exactly probe the material enough to make them work beyond the emotions they yield.

The director has also trodden lightly on the Romanian side of the story, with reflections about the patriarchal nature of Romanian society not as visible and palpable as that for Iran. Full Review

Alaa Karkouti at the Arab Film Center in Berlin

MARLENE CHOI INTERVIEW

Korean-born Danish filmmaker Malene Choi talks to The Film Verdict about her fiction debut 'The Quiet Migration', premiering in the Panorama section.

The Film Verdict: The original Danish title of your new film, Stille Liv, translates as “quiet life”. Why is it called The Quiet Migration in English?

Malene Choi: The international title came first, as we were developing the script at screenwriting labs. I thought it was an apt description of what transnational adoption is. We then had to choose a different title for the Danish market because the literal translation of the English one didn’t sound good. That said, my publicist in Denmark isn’t really happy with either of them, because one sounds too political, and the other doesn’t really say much about the movie, even in an arthouse context.

TFV: Speaking of politics, what’s it like to have a movie that deals with nationalism and identity premiering in Germany, which has its own complicated history in that regard?

MC: I’ll definitely be interested in addressing the topic of racism at the post-screening Q&As, and how it can come from unexpected places, as seen in the film and based on my personal experience. I must admit I don’t know much about Germany’s current record with far-right movements. In Denmark, their rise is cyclical, it comes and goes

TFV: On the subject of identity, do you view the film as a Danish story dealing with Korean culture, or a Korean film set in Denmark?

MC: The former, because only a small section of the film takes place in South Korea. My previous film [2018’s The Return, a documentary about Koreanborn Danish adoptees rediscovering their roots] was shot entirely in Seoul, so that felt more Korean.

– Max Borg

Full Interview

TFV Critic Stehpen Dalton flashes his creds

CAPTAIN ITALIA Working for Italian Cinema Globally

Roberto Stabile is the man behind ANICA’s renewed drive to revive and expand Italy’s international film markets, from bringing new luster to the historical relations with the movie industry in France to cracking new markets open in China and other southeast Asian nations. As head of ANICA’s international relations, Stabile is one of the key figures at EFM’s Italian pavilion. He has also been in charge of the cinema and audiovisual department of the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Special International Projects at Cinecittà since 2022. His efforts have been rewarded with improved sales numbers, and a more permanent presence through dedicated offices in important film markets worldwide, including Berlin, Buenos Aires, Hanoi, Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, Miami, Moscow, New York, Paris, Rio De Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, and Toronto. Here, The Film Verdict talks to him about the current state of the Italian cinema and audiovisual industry.

TFV: ANICA stats on the international distribution of Italian films show a perfect pyramid that reaches its peak in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and then goes into free fall. What would it take to get back to those numbers?

Roberto: It’s a pyramid that starts in the postwar years when there was great optimism in Italy and a strong desire to tell stories. That desire to talk about wartime sufferings exhausted itself in the 80s, and from then on, Italy started making films that did well at the box office, mostly comedies and genre films. Meanwhile, the profits helped fund the production of art house movies. After the 80s, perhaps because of certain laws that were not well thought-out, we started to see a downward trend. Many of the films that were being produced didn’t consider what the general public wanted, but were instead a means of self-expression for the movie director. In the peak years, we produced spaghetti westerns and B-movies that are still enjoying strong sales. Not many national film industries can live off old productions like Italian cinema does.

Interview with Roberto Stabile, Head of Special Projects of Directorate General of Cinema & Audiovisual-Ministry of Culture at Cinecittà.

FV: What were the effects of the pandemic on the industry?

Roberto: We must make a distinction here between the movie theatres and production. The pandemic turned out to be an opportunity by sparking a marked increase in demand for audiovisual material – maybe even an “excessive” consumption. As a result, there wasn’t a crisis in the production world. In Rome, the production sector flourished with many new sets. The movie theatres, on the other hand, suffered a lot. Post pandemic, we have lost the habit of going to the movies. We are still wary of strangers. I must say though that the measures taken by the Italian government greatly helped the audiovisual sector. For example, the redundancy funds, the financial aid to cover the losses, or the tax credits. We ended up even producing too much. It’s a good thing to spend money, but it’s also a good thing to not rush things. Much like good wine, production shouldn’t be rushed. I think financial aid must be divided in two parts: one part should be automatically allocated to funds that allow everyone to be creative; the other part should go to important productions.

TFV: Speaking of the movie the-atre crisis, what do you think the solution is?

Roberto: The movie theatres must obviously be protected. Nothing compares to watching a movie in a theatre. But in order to compete with the increasingly sophisticated home theatres, they must offer all sorts of novel technologies and comfortable settings. Yet, it’s not possible to keep all the theatres open when they are operating at 40% capacity. We must carry out a research and help the ones that we think can survive and assist those that can’t survive to gradually convert to other uses. In the digital era, for instance, we have fewer newsstands. That’s normal. We don’t keep them open as venerable monuments. The same should apply to movie theatres. We must help them, but at the same time show them possible alternatives if we think they can’t make it. We can’t stop the owner of a theatre that’s not doing well from using the structure for other purposes. We must help them through the red tape so they can convert to other uses. But we must also be careful not to encourage those who can improve their theatre to give up on it.

TFV: Historically, Italian and French cinemas have often been very close to each other. Is this still the case?

-Caren Davidkhianan

Full interview, click here

International Jury | Press Conference Highlights | Berlinale 2023

SCREENING GUIDE

Acquisition begins with a TFV Review

Monday, 20 February Select Screenings One Last Evening

Tuesday, 21 February Select Screenings Under The Fig Trees

VERDICT: A couple’s farewell dinner in Hanover descends into chaos in this pandem icera portrait, with a political sting in its tail, of an anxious, divided generation.

15:00 Virtual Cinema 10 Beta Cinema

Pretty Red Dress

VERDICT: In this vibrant debut feature from Dionne Edwards, a troubled London family learn to express their true selves with a little help from Tina Turner and a fabulous frock.

18:30 Gropius Bau Cinema

Protagonist Pictures

VERDICT: A gently appealing choral work from Tunisia with a strong understanding of rhythm and balance that marks a strong first feature for documentary-trained Erige Sehiri.

9:15 CinemaxX 13

Luxbox

Breaking Social (Swedish Film Institute)

10:00 Gropius Bau Cinema

All I Can Do

(Transfax Film Production Ltd.) 11:40

Virtual Cinema 15

Hit Big

(Charades) 12:30 CinemaxX 17

A Boy’s Life

(Cinephil) 12:50 CinemaxX 6

For Complete Screening Guide, click here

SCREENING GUIDE

Acquisition begins with a TFV Review

Tuesday, 21 February Select Screenings

A Far Shore

VERDICT: The life and loves of 18th century Czech opera composer Josef Myslivecek, and his dazzling Italian career and fall into obscurity, are lovingly and authentically re-constructed in Petr Vaclav’s sumptuous peri-od production.

09:30 Virtual Cinema 14 Loco Films

Narcosis

VERDICT: rare fictionalized look at a Nigerian sex worker in Italy that celebrates its subject, flaws and all, with a spirited central performance and a laudable sensitivity des-tined to find welcoming arms worldwide.

14:15 Arsenal Cinema 2 True Colours

Casanova’s Return (Rai Com)

10:30 Virtual Cinema 6

Daughter of Rage (Best Friend Forever)

13:00 CinemaxX 16

Autobiography

(AlphaViolet) 13:10 CinemaxX 12

Driving Mum (alief)

14:15 dffb Cinema

My Paper Dolls (Rai Com)

14:40 Virtual Cinema 10

Suddenly

(Vigo Film) 14:45 CinemaxX 16

My Worst Enemy

(AndanaFilms) 15:00 CinemaxX 5

Charlotte Salomon, Life and the Maiden (Cinephil)

16:10 Virtual Cinema 5

Chaaw

(Eric Orr Story Productions) 16:15

CinemaxX 7

Anti-Squat (Best Friend Forever)

16:30 Virtual Cinema 10

For Complete Screening Guide, click here

100 Years of Disney Animation: A Shorts Celebration

Monday, Feb 20 15:00

Haus der Berliner Festspiele

Walt Disney once famously said he hoped “that we never lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.”

Even before the introduction of Mickey Mouse, it was, in fact, all started by a short film.

Join two-time Academy Award winner and Walt Disney Animation Studios president Clark Spencer as he shares his favourite shorts from the beloved studios’ 100 years of filmmaking. Enjoy rare treats from the earliest days of animation through the introduction of sound and Mickey Mouse over the decades to some of today’s most popular short films.

Experience how Walt Disney and his artists experimented with new animation technology and techniques – a tradition within the short form which continues to this day at the studios that bear his name.

Program includes:

Cinderella (Laugh-o-gram; 1922)

Alice’s Wonderland (1923)

Trolley Troubles (1927)

Steamboat Willie (1928)

Thru the Mirror (1936)

Clock Cleaners (1937)

The Old Mill (1937)

Trailer Horn (1950)

Paperman (2012)

Going Home (2021)

Reflect (2022)