By Ali Moosavi.
2026, a year of apolitical comments and walkouts, featured many standout selections.”
The Berlin Film Festival, or Berlinale, started with pouring rain but a storm was brewing in the press conference hall. In response to a question about the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, the International Jury President, Wim Wenders responded: “We have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics. But we are the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.” This led to a torrent of comments and actions from various artists who attacked not just Wenders, but Berlinale too. A few artists pulled out of the festival or pulled their films from the festival. As rain gave way to snow and freezing weather, an honorary Golden Bear was presented to Michelle Yeoh for “her incredible work on screen but also for her lifelong approach – filled with great dignity, integrity, and the ability and desire to build bridges between cultures.” The films as usual were spread into a number of sections.
Competition
I kicked off my festival with Yellow Letters / Gelbe Briefe, by the Turkish-German director Ilker Çatak. This is a hard-hitting sociopolitical film which in a way addressed the issue to which Wenders had made his controversial comments; can artists focus on their work and ignore politics? Aziz (Tansu Biçer) and Derya (Özgu Namal) are a husband and wife working in theatre. Aziz is a celebrated playwright and director and Derya a famous actress. Political comments that they have made on social media, have been interpreted by the security services as insulting the President and Aziz and Derya are blacklisted in the capital, Ankara. When even their landlord kicks them out of their rented apartment, they have to relocate to Istanbul, and live with Aziz’s mum. Aziz find work as a taxi driver. Ilker Çatak examines a number of sociopolitical issues while maintaining a strong narrative. On the social front, by bringing in Derya’s devout Muslim brother, a local store owner who has the right connections in the police and local political establishment, we see widely different attitudes towards art, education and ethics within members of the same family but of different intellectual and cultural backgrounds. We also see the generational differences and conflicts between Aziz and his daughter. The choices artists are forced to make between being true to their political ideals and sacrificing their art and vice versa, is examined head on when Derya receives a lucrative offer of the lead on a state TV soap, in return for her deleting her political comments from her social media pages. Having gone from the height of the theatrical world to becoming a housewife on a tight budget, the offer is extremely tempting, though it could damage her relationship with Aziz. Ilker Çatak has filmed the Ankara sequences in Berlin and the Istanbul sequences in Hamburg, to maintain freedom of shooting the script. Özgu Namal and Tansu Biçer are both magnificent in their roles and Yellow Letters befittingly received the Golden Bear for Best Film.
Perhaps the best known and admired German actress currently is Sandra Hüller. Her talents were again displayed in Markus Schleinzer’s Rose. The film is set in the 17th century and tells the story of Rose (Sandra Hüller), a woman who disguises herself as a man whom she knew and who was killed in the war. He had told her about a farm he had inherited and was hoping to live in and run it after the war. Rose is convincing in appearance as a man and gets the deeds to the farm. Complications arise when a landowner only agrees to let Rose use the water from his wells to maintain her farm if she/he marries his eldest daughter. Rose is a bitter tale, beautifully told, with the black and white photography highlighting its darkness. Hüller gives one of her best performances and was awarded the Silver Bear for the Best Leading Performance, (Berlin has no separate acting awards for different genders).
In the opening credits of Everybody Digs Bill Evans, we read that the live album Sunday at the Village Vanguard, by Bill Evans and his trio is widely considered as one of the best live jazz recordings of all time. Ten days after this performance, the trio’s bassist Scott LaFaro died in a car crash. Though I am not a jazz aficionado, I know enough to be impressed by reading that in 1959 Bill Evans was a member of Miles Davis’s sextet, which recorded Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album of all time. Grant Gee’s movie mainly deals with the period following Scott LaFaro’s death. We see Evans and his wife both shooting heroin, Evans losing all interest in music and initially staying with his older brother Harry but overstaying his welcome and relocating to Florida to stay with his parents. Everybody Digs Bill Evans, which has been adapted by Mark O’Halloran from a book by Owen Martell, is directed by Grant Lee in a subtle manner, showing the artists’ higher sensitivity to tragic events. Lee has also made the artistically correct decision to shoot it in black & white (cinematographer: Piers McBrail). Everybody Digs Bill Evans boasts strong performances from the whole of its cast, particularly the Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie as Bill Evans, Barry Ward as Harry and Bill Pulman as Evans’s father. The flashbacks fill a lot of voids in Evans’s background to help us understand his character and the choices he makes. I just wish that more of Evans’s celebrated music was used in the film. Grant Lee received the festival’s Silver Bear award for Best Director.
The events in A Voix Basse / In a Whisper (see top image), written and directed by Leyla Bouzid, take place in Tunisia. Lilia (Eya Bouteraa), a young Tunisian girl who lives in France, has returned to her Homeland to attend the funeral of her uncle Daly, who has died in mysterious circumstances. Accompanying her on this trip is her lover Alice (Marion Barbeau). However, as Lilia is aware of her family’s conservative views on LGBTQ relations, specially her mum (Hiam Abbas), Alice is kept out of sight in a hotel while Lilia stays in the family home. When Alice unexpectedly shows up to offer her condolences to Lilia’s family, she is presented as Lilia’s flat mate, but suspicions grow. When police start looking into possible homosexual connections with Daly’s death and inform Lilia that homosexuality is outlawed in Tunisia, Lilia loses her cool. Leyla Bouzid’s film is a cinematic cry and protest against the restrictions on human relationships, specially between the LGBTQ people. The uncle’s death serves both as another case of such relationships being carried out in secret in fear of the authorities and also as a narrative device. A Voix Basse / In a Whisper is an admirable and heartfelt effort but doesn’t quite hit its mark.
One of the countries whose films have rarely disappointed me is Türkiye. I had been impressed by Emin Alper’s Burning Days (2022) which was shown in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. Therefore, it was with some anticipation that I approached Emin Alper’s Kurtulus / Salvation. It is set in the Turkish countryside and is the striking tale of two tribes and two brothers. The Bezaris are rich landowners who own all the farmland in a village. When troubles started with terrorists or separatists fighting the government, they fled from their farms and left in temporary custody of the Hezarons, a tribe of poor farmers, to look after and plowand in return pocket the money received from selling the farm products. The Hezarons also helped the government by taking up arms and fighting the terrorists. After the defeat of the terrorists, the Bezaris have come back to reclaim their farms, much to the displeasure of the Hezarons.
The two central characters in the film are two brothers in the Hezarons tribe. Mesut, the elder, has been away fighting the terrorists. His younger brother, Ferit, has been the head or Sheikh of the Hezrons tribe. Mesut’s wife used to be the maid of the Bezaris’ chief. Rumors of her having provided more than maid duties to the chief, together with strange dreams that Mesut has about his wife’s infidelity, despite her pleads of innocence, flame an unstoppable fire within Mesut, which puts him in direct confrontation against his brother. Like Burning Days, Salvation displays Alper’s strong visual sense and his flair for storytelling. He is also an expert in manufacturing and maintaining tension. Salvation successfully mixes the real with the surreal and imaginary and boasts a superb performance by Caner Cindoruk as Mesut. Deservedly, Salvation received the Silver Bear for the Grand Jury Prize.
The Loneliest Man in Town, directed by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, belongs to the Roy Andersson school of deadpan surrealist comedy. It is one of those documentaries where the line between real and staged is blurred. We follow the daily life of Viennese blues singer Aloise Koch, aka Al Cook as he is being rather forcibly evicted from a building where he is the last remaining tenant. The nature of the eviction notices is quite hilarious, with a “heavy”. employed by the property developers helping himself into Al Cook’s apartment, lying semi naked on his sofa, helping himself with Al’s food and gently passing the message to take the money and leave or you’ll be seeing a lot more of me. Al is an Elvis devotee and plays the guitar. In the most touching sequences of the film Al hooks up with an old girlfriend who, when they were both very young, had dumped him. The Loneliest Man in Town is funny, sad, touching and entirely beguiling.
The indigenous Australian director, Warwick Thornton’s latest film, Wolfram, continues his focus on the plight and history of Australia’s Aboriginal people. Wolfram is a slow burn western set in the 1930’s Australia, and a kind of a sequel to Thornton’s great 2017 movie, Sweet Country, with a few characters in that film appearing in his new movie. Again, Thornton focuses on the abuse of the indigenous people, specially children, as he did in his 2023 film, The New Boy. Here we have Aboriginal children, bought or stolen by white Australians to be used as their slaves. At the heart of the film is a revenge story infused with racial tensions. As with any Warwick Thornton film, Wolfram showcases strong performances by the whole cast and eye catching, atmospheric cinematography. The latter is to be expected as Thornton is a very capable cinematographer and photographs his films, including this one. The only criticism of Wolfram I would make is that it is a little too slow burn and could have done with a slightly faster pace.
The central question in Canadian writer-director Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’s Nina Roza is where is home? Which is the place one can call homeland and what is our connection to it? The addressee in this question are the immigrants. In the film Mihail (Galin Stoev), a Canadian who emigrated from Bulgaria, and works as an art expert, is asked by an art gallery to travel to Bulgaria and determine if art works, purportedly by a nine-year-old girl, are genuine and not done by others. If genuine, the gallery is interested in bringing the girl to Canada and support her and her family in Canada, in exchange for exclusive rights to her work. We see that Mihail is reluctant to visit his birthplace. In fact, he seems to be eager to cut all ties with Bulgaria, in contrast to his wife and daughter who are keen to learn Bulgarian and listen to Bulgarian music. Of course, Mihail accepts the proposition, otherwise there will be no movie! As soon as he arrives in Bulgaria and the taxi driver plays old songs in the car, in this case Joe Dassin’s evocative seventies song Et sit u n’existais pas, we witness the transformative power of music. Mihail feels as he is a stranger in a familiar land. A visit to his sister, whom he hasn’t seen in decades, brings the question of belonging and homeland to the fore. Mihail is then faced with a greater dilemma: if he certifies the little girl’s paintings as genuine, he will give the girl and her family an enviable opportunity to have a comfortable life in Canada, yet the little girl loves Bulgaria and feels that she belongs there and does not want to move. The script treats this dilemma intelligently and thoughtfully. It was therefore no surprise that Nina Roza was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay.
Berlinale Special
When you have John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Espositio, plus a delicious cameo by Jamie Lee Curtis in a movie, chances are that you won’t go much wrong. That proves to be the case with Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. John Turturro is Harry, the eponymous protagonist. His “earnings” go towards taking care of his comatose wife. Steve Buscemi is Ben, the friendly pawnbroker Harry uses to fence his takings. Giancarlo Espositio is a friendly cop. The film takes off when among Harry’s stolen loot is a flash disc, which happens to belong to one of Big Apple’s crime families. They want that back and have access to sophisticated equipment and friends in all places to be able to track down where Harry lives. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a throwback to the kind of movies that were regularly made in the seventies. It is a sharp and delightful character study with equal mixes of tension, humour and sadness. A movie that one just sits backs and enjoys the performances and the dialogue.
Though Gore Verbinski is primarily known for directing a few of the entries in the blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, I have been a fan of some of his other films such as The Mexican (2001) and Rango (2011), with the latter clearly inspired by Sergio Leone movies. Interestingly Verbinski has stated his love of Leone films but has also stated that the movies which inspired his latest offering, and his first film in ten years, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, are Dog Day Afternoon (1972), Akira (1988) and Repo Man (1984). Equally interesting is Verbinski’s revelation that no major studio would back his new movie despite his movies making billions of dollars. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a wacky comedy-fantasy with a great concept. Sam Rockwell is a man who claims to have come from the future. He holds the customers in a diner hostage, a la Dog Day Afternoon, until he assembles a team who agree to join his mission of fighting the domination of smart phones, social media and AI. We see in flashbacks the background to the team members and how each of them was adversely affected by virtual reality and social media. The team that Sam Rockwell’s character has assembled, as played by Juno Temple, Michael Pena, Asim Chaudry, Haley Lu Richardson and Zazie Beetz are all good fun with great background stories. I felt that there was a little bit oof repetition and the film could do with a little trimming of its 134 minutes running time, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has plenty of inspired and hilarious moments which are well worth catching.
After appearing in several trashy films, Russell Crowe seems to be making a serious comeback to proper acting in decent movies, starting with Nuremberg last year and now with The Weight. He has a supporting role in the latter as Clancy, the chief of a labour camp during the Great Depression, where some prisoners are sent to do hard manual work. Among the prisoners is Murphy (Ethan Hawke), whose small daughter may be put up for adoption if his prison stay extends beyond six months. Clancy however has a proposal for him: assemble a team with three other trusted prisoners and safely transfer gold bars from a mine to a safe place before either the government or greedy miners take them. We follow Murphy and his team on this hazardous mission, which has many twists and turns. The Weight is a solid, old-fashioned movie, which director Padraic McKinley has filled with sustained tension and a gripping story.
The Blood Countess / Die Blutgräfin is a satire on vampires. Isabelle Huppert is Countess Bathory, an ageless Hungarian vampire in Vienna, who is always looking for fresh blood in the fashionable parties that she and the Austrian aristocracy attend. The Blood Countess is stylishly directed by the veteran German director Ulrike Ottinger and has gorgeous costumes, eye-catching production design and, above all, Isabelle Huppert who I consider, if not the best, then certainly among the very best actresses working today. For me though, the humour was a little bit too dry and passed me by.
Perspectives
In A Prayer for the Dying, the talented British actor-singer Johnny Flynn is the sherif in a small town at a time just after the American Civil War. The spread of a contagious, deadly epidemic into his territory makes him face the biggest challenge of his life. Acting on advice from the local doctor (John C. Reilly), he is faced with making tough and unpopular decisions in order to save lives and this puts him in direct confrontation with many locals. Director Dara Van Dusen and his cinematographer Kate McCullough have covered the screen with colours of sand, dust and many shots resemble paintings in an art gallery. The evocative visuals and the strong performances stand out in a film in which everything seems perfect for the story. A Prayer for the Dying has all the ingredients of becoming a minor classic.
The Red Hangar / Hangar Rojo can proudly stand alongside classics of political cinema such as those made by Costa Gavras and Gilo Pontecorvo. It is based on real people and events and deals with the US engineered 1973 coup in Chile which toppled the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. Captain Jorge Silva (an admirably subtle performance by Nicolás Zárate), faithful to the Allende government, is caught up in the coup and finds himself helpless as the coup is taking place. His former boss, Colonel Jahn (a chilling performance by Boris Quercia), who has a score to settle with Captain Silva who got him fired from the army as a plotter against government a few years before, is one of the coup leaders. Though we may have seen the brutal torture and executions of those opposed to the coup in films such as Missing (1982), they still bring a chill to our bones. The Red Hangar is Chilean director Juan Pablo Sallato’s debut feature film. It has been filmed in black and white and not one second of its brisk 83 minutes is wasted. For me, The Red Hangar was one of the highlights of this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
Panorama
I Understand Your Displeasure / Ich Verstehe Ihren Unmut focuses on the issue of Germany’s immigrant/refugee workers, and workers in low paid jobs in general. Heike (Sabine Thalau) works as a manager for a cleaning contractor. In order to meet their heavy workload, she subcontracts some of their orders to a contractor whose workforce are mainly immigrants. Even though Heike is a manager, she steals items from their storage place, such as cleaning liquids, to maintain her simple lifestyle, which is complicated by her ex-husband who lives with her and steals from her. When Heike makes it as though one of the immigrant workers, a poor single father, had been stealing and fires him, things get out of control. Director Kilian Armando Friedrich uses handheld camera closely following Heike and has often two or three people talking simultaneously to create a documentary style look for the film. I Understand Your Displeasure is a hard-hitting film which makes many pertinent points about the plight of low paid workers, specially immigrants in today’s Europe.
Another film which has migrant workers at its center, this time in Spain, is Ian de Rosa’s feature film debut Iván & Hadoum. Iván (Silver Chicón) and Hadoum (Herminia la Loh) both work in an industrial greenhouse fruit picking business. Iván is a local boy while Hadoum is a Moroccan migrant. An incident at work where Hadoum is injured puts her against her employers. The owners want to sell the fruit warehouse and Iván has been promised a promotion if the sale goes through swiftly. But Hadoum’s actions have put a spanner in the works. Meanwhile Iván has fallen in love with Hadoum. This is not a conventional love story as Iván is a trans. Iván is faced with a very difficult and life-changing choice. His family are pushing him to forget about Hadoum as the promotion would greatly improve their lifestyle, but his heart is set on Hadoum. When Iván’s mother questions his feelings for an immigrant girl, Iván answers: She’s the girl who’s not ashamed to be with me. Iván & Hadoum is an impressive debut by Ian de Rosa who also wrote the screenplay. He has fashioned a delicate love story, in which the lovers have to fight xenophobia and misogyny. Beatriz Sastre’s cinematography is one of the film’s major assets.
One of the gems in the Panorama section came from Paraguay. The Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi whose previous film, The Heiresses (2018) had won him Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for Best Director, has returned with Narciso, a tragic and poignant sociopolitical story set in Paraguay in the late 50’s. This is a time when one of South America’s longest ruling and most ruthless dictators, Alfredo Stroessner ruled with an iron fist. The movie starts with a burned body and a voiceover: Suddenly a dark cloud covered the moonlight. I could not see anyone and I asked myself, is this the end? A flashback takes us back a year to a travelling radio show which presents Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a Radio play, performed live with actors in makeup and custom and mixed with local music and songs. When Narciso (Diro Romero) joins the radio troupe, he introduces rock n roil music of Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Little Richard and others which makes the program wildly popular among the young, for whom Narciso becomes an object of affection and love. But Narciso also becomes an object of love, lust and desire by the radio’s manager Lulu (Manuel Cuenca) and Wesson (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), an official in the US Embassy. Any such gay relationships are abhorred and banned by the conservative Paraguayan government. These relationships do not go unnoticed, not least by Lulu’s wife. Graffities such as Faggots out! Are written on the radio studio and the secret police moves to arrest any “inverts”. The voiceover we hear at the beginning is repeated in the end: The darkness was absolute. The fear was already a part of us. Then I asked, is this the end? Someone moved towards me. I could not make out his face in the shadows. Is this the end? And he said to me, no, this is only the beginning.
The issue of people living in the west, being the victims of scams generated from African countries has been the basis for the story of a few movies recently. The latest one is Paradise, Canadian director Jérémy Comte’s feature film debut. The film is divided into three parts titled, The Boat, The Captain and The Fire. We see a ship burning in the sea and a boat rescuing a badly burnt man from the fire. With flashback we see the background of one of the main characters in the story, Kojo (Daniel Atsu Hukporti) an African who becomes involved in scams targeting western people. There is also Chantal (Evelyne de la Chenelière), a single mother living in Canada with her son Tony (Joey Boivin Desmeules). When Chantal becomes the victim of one of these scams, Tony sets off to Africa to recover his mother’s scammed money. Such an ambition, laudable though it is, for a young man is foolhardy. Paradise is a cautionary tale about a misfortune which has affected many people in the internet age. It is a clever and effective mix of real and imaginary with some images that stay in the mind. A very impressive feature film debut for Jérémy Comte.
Iranian Mahnaz Mohammadi’s previous film, Son-Mother was her impressive feature film debut. She has been imprisoned a number of times in Iran for her political activities. Her new film, Roya is at least partly based on her personal experiences in prison. In the first part of the film, we see everything from POV of Roya (Melisa Sözen) as she is told only to look down as she is dragged from her cell to be interrogated. The torture she experiences during the interrogation is psychological rather than physical. It starts with screams of the women prisoners as she is being taken to the interrogation room and then by the interrogator pressurising her to sign a confession and agree to make a televised confession and express shame and regret over her actions. They show her what they say is photographic evidence that while she was in prison, her best friend (Maryam Palizban) was having an affair with Roya’s partner. They also tell her that her ordeal has caused the death of her father. This turns out to be false as the person who has died is Roya’s sister. Roya is given three days leave to attend her funeral. Mohammadi shows that Roya’s time outside is no better than inside the prison. It starts at the funeral where a man tells her that the authorities have told him that her imprisoned daughter’s release depends on Roya making the televised confession and he tells Roya that he holds her responsible if anything happens to his daughter. Roya cannot rest or sleep at home and is hallucnating. When back in the prison, we see Roya from the viewpoint of the prison staff. Roya is not a straightforward narrative film. Deliberately so, as Mohammadi told me, adding that she wants her audience to make their own assessment and fill the gaps. The Turkish actress Melisa Sözen (Winter Sleep), who has no dialogue in the film, is totally believable as the psychologically tormented Roya. Roya is not an easy watch, but Mohammadi doesn’t want it to be. She wants us to experience for 92 minutes a little of what she has gone through.
Forum
In Cesarean Weekend by the Iranian director Mohammad Shirvani a group of young men and women spend time in a seaside villa and around the pool discussing relationships. Two of the boys also chat to their fathers about generational differences. Though this might seem run of the mill stuff, the thing which makes this film stand out is that in no Iranian film made inside Iran you would see girls semi naked and boys and girls kissing. Shirvani is also an accomplished documentary maker and has used many of his documentary techniques in this film, which he told me he considers a hybrid of fiction and documentary.
Ali Moosavi has worked in documentary television and has written for Film Magazine (Iran), Cine-Eye (London), and Film International (Sweden).
The post Imperfect Storms: Berlinale 2026 appeared first on FilmInt.nu.
from FilmInt.nu https://ift.tt/IDce6un