While world politics dominated virtually every private discussion, the festival films seemed to shy away from geopolitical controversy of the raucous type that has always, positively, characterized the Berlin festival. Pro-Palestinian protests did not upset the apple cart as they did last year, but they were occurring all around Berlin, just as Germans went to the polls to vote in a crucial election. Pro-peace activists and film workers instead organised a separate event taking place the same week as the festival, the Palinale Film Festival, “as a response to the ongoing repression of Palestine solidarity in Germany,” which also addressed broader systemic injustices.

But there were good wins for Arab cinema at the Berlinale, albeit in the side sections. Tetes Brulees by Maja Ajmia Yde Zellama got a Special Mention from the Generation 14plus jury, as did Beneath which Rivers Flow by Ali Yahya. Taking second place in the Panorama Audience Award for documentaries was the Palestinian film Yalla Parkour by Areeb Zuaiter, while third place went to the Sudanese film Khartoum by Anas Saeed.

Ukraine was also present. Falling on the third anniversary of Russia’s illegal invasion of the country, the ongoing war on Europe’s eastern borders was once again a major motif this year, amplified for all the wrong reasons by Donald’s Trump’s unhinged pandering to Putin. Two beautifully composed documentaries, Kateryna Gornostai’s competition entry Timestamp and Vitaly Manksy’s Time to the Target, each captured a year on Ukraine’s civilian home front.

While Gornostai travels all over Ukraine observing schoolteachers and children bravely keeping up a sense of normality, despite air raid sirens and drone attacks, Mansky focusses on a military band in his home city of Lviv. Both are heartbreaking but inspirational portraits of grace under pressure. Russian-born U.S. director Julia Lotkev also came to the Berlinale with My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow, an epic six-hours-plus documentary that captures Putin’s brutal assault on free speech and anti-war protest in chillingly close-up detail. All three films richly deserve more exposure after Berlin, starting with educational screenings in the Oval Office.

The winners’ circle focused attention on some of the festival’s smaller but well-liked titles, including the Norwegian relationship drama about a 15-year-old with a crush on her teacher, Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams (Drømmer). This final part of a triptych began last year in Berlin’s Panorama with Sex and continued in Venice competition with Love, the last winning Haugerud the Golden Bear.

The two Silver Bear Grand Jury and Jury prizes went to Latin American stories. Winning the first was Gabriel Mascaro’s Orwellian fantasy The Blue Trail, animated by a fiercely delightful Denise Weinberg as a 70+ woman who refuses to board the “wrinkle wagon” and be deported to an old folks’ colony. The other award went to Iván Fund’s mysterious road movie The Message, in which a young girl’s gift for communicating with animals is exploited by her guardians in a nuanced relationship film on the road in rural Argentina.

Two Chinese film had a lot of buzz with art film fans. Living the Land is an exquisitely observed portrait of ancient village life that earned director Huo Meng the Silver Bear for Best Director. Bolstered by strongly favorable word-of-mouth, the Generation Kplus Grand Prix-winner The Botanist left an indelible impression in its stunning landscapes on China’s border with Kazakhstan, where different ethnicities mingle.

Australian star Rose Byrne won the award for best actor in a leading role for her bruisingly funny performance in Mary Bronstein’s dark comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and the whole creative ensemble of The Ice Tower — the coming-of-age story based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale and directed by Lucile Hadžihalilovic — took home a prize for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.

Alas, this was not a great Berlinale edition for major-name auteurs with strong festival pedigrees. The most famous German director of the 21^st century, Tom Tykwer resoundingly missed the target with his gala opening film The Light, a stylish but shallow portrait of a Berlin family in crisis, which left critics cold. Likewise, Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s much-anticipated follow-up project to his multi-Oscar-winning modern classic Parasite, the all-star sci-fi comedy thriller Mickey 17, began strongly but soon got bogged down in a laboured muddle of illogical twists and half-baked subplots.

Even many of the prestige names in the Berlinale competition seemed to be operating on low voltage this year. Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a compact biopic of legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart. fell short of expectations. Despite fine performances, including Andrew Scott’s prize-winning turn as Richard Rogers, the wise-cracking script was let down by clunky staging and a jarringly miscast Ethan Hawke as the short, balding Hart. Meanwhile, Romanian punk provocateur Radu Jude softened his usual riotous style with the righteous but unusually conventional social drama Kontinental 25, which won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. Mexican firebrand Michel Franco also delivered a rare misfire, Dreams, a study in racial and erotic tension that was fatally lacking in both, and overshadowed by thick political messaging.

As politicians launched threats to carve up other people’s countries, the festival venues in Potsdamer Platz seemed to be undergoing their own slow erosion. With the loss of all multiplex venues in the Sony Center near the main Berlinale Palast showcase, and the CineMaxx now dedicated to press screenings of films in the official selection, titles from important sidebars like Panorama, Perspectives and Generation screened far and wide around the city. This may have given more people access to them, but it definitely made it harder for fest-goers to see them and diminished the atmosphere of festive crowds stirring up excitement as they milled around. It is not an easy problem to solve for the festival; for journalists it meant an ever-growing reliance on screeners from PRs and sales agents.

The addition of a new venue in Potsdamer Platz, the Stage Bluemax Theater, was a noble attempt to add Perspectives screening to Marlene Dietrich Platz, though the steeply terraced venue on a top floor was too structurally awkward to be well-liked.  Sadly, one of the main casualties in the area is the Dussmann bookstore, once a prime destination for DVD/Blu-ray purchases.

Back behind the camera a mere 17 years after her debut, the lo-fi “mumblecore” drama Yeast (2008) in which she co-starred alongside Greta Gerwig, Bronstein is working with a broader canvas and more juicy material this time. Byrne is flanked by a flavoursome supporting cast including rapper A$AP Rocky, comedian and chat show host Conan O’Brien, plus a small but perfectly timed cameo by Christian Slater. Producer credits include the director’s husband Ronald Bronstein and his frequent collaborator Josh Safdie, of the Safdie film-making brothers, lending some muscular indie pedigree to the mix. Making its international premiere in competition in Berlin this week, fresh from a divisive but generally well-received Sundance debut, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is scheduled for theatrical release later this year by A24.

Set in contemporary Montauk on Long Island, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a relentless emotional assault course that zigzags between Kaufman-esque bleak farce, fraught family psychodrama and magical realism, lightly spiced with hints of nightmarish body horror that never quite materialise. The comic tone here is relentlessly sour, the pacing breathless and the aesthetic choices often wilfully ugly, but all are held together by Byrne’s powerhouse performance, a high-wire act that boldly challenges audience sympathy at times.

Screaming on the inside, zombie-tired on the outside, Linda (Byrne) is a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Home alone while her seafaring husband (Slater) disappears for months on end, Linda’s primary source of anxiety is her daughter (Delaney Quinn), who suffers from an unexplained but serious eating disorder which requires her to be fed with a tube every night. The unnamed child is never seen on screen, until a fleeting final scene, but she is a near-constant audio presence, needling her mother with bratty demands and emotional blackmail. Her case is being supervised by a stern doctor (Bronstein herself) who constantly shames Linda for missing medical targets and treatment discussions, literally adding insult to injury.

Another pressure on Linda’s already frayed nerves is the giant hole that just appeared in the family apartment ceiling, flooding the floor below, a rupture that her overheated brain comes to see as a mysterious portal into another dimension. Mother and daughter are forced to relocate to a scuzzy motel for an indefinite period while their evasive, unreliable landlord allegedly handles repairs. The hotel’s amusingly surly check-in attendant Diana (Ivy Wolk) takes an instant dislike to Linda, while her suave co-worker James (a strong acting turn by A$AP Rocky, aka Mr Rihanna) adopts a more flirtatious approach. Between self-medicating sessions with booze and drugs, Linda’s work as a psychotherapist brings her into harrowing contact with an acutely depressed young mother (Danielle Macdonald) and into conflict with her own therapist (O’Brien on superbly deadpan, melancholy form).

If I Had Legs I Would Kick You is partly inspired by real events seven years ago, when Bronstein’s daughter was receiving long-term hospital treatment, obliging the pair to share an extended stay in a claustrophobic San Diego hotel. She channelled her disorientation and mounting anxiety into the bare bones of a screenplay, partly for therapeutic reasons. Finally bearing fruit, the end result is a noisy hot mess of a film full of jarring tonal shifts, unresolved subplots and sour observations on parenthood that may prove too bleak for mainstream audiences. But it is also a smart, witty, boldly original, high-energy screwball tragicomedy full of terrific performances, including a potentially game-changing career peak for Byrne.

Director, screenwriter: Mary Bronstein
Cast: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald, Delaney Quinn, A$AP Rocky, Ivy Wolk, Christian Slater, Daniel Zolghadri, Eva Kornet, Mary Bronstein
Cinematography: Christopher Messina
Editing: Lucian Johnson
Production design: Carmen Navis
Producers: Sara Murphy, Ryan Zacarias, Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Eli Bush, Conor Hannon, Richie Doyle
Production companies: Fat City (US), A24 (US), Bronxburgh (US)
World sales: A24
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
113 minutes

The film stays far away from the stereotypical image of Alexandria, dubbed “the Bride of the Mediterranean” in Egyptian tourism brochures, and takes its story into a working-class, impoverished neighborhood actually named The Settlement. It starts with the young Maro (Ziad Islam) insisting he wants to leave school and join his older brother Hossam (Adham Shoukry), who is working in the factory as a machine operator — a factory without any safety measures. How both boys got this job remains a mystery for a couple of minutes.

The backstory is that their father has died in a mysterious factory accident, and the management offers his sons the same job as compensation to avoid legal repercussions. This sets up a story that might condemn legal corruption and the lack of accountability in the workplace. Instead, Rashad focuses on his character’s attempt at redemption and reintegration into society after a rough start with drugs and dealing.

As a famous Egyptian saying goes, “Say, what did your grandfather leave you? Your father, and he is already dead”—a punchline reflecting the absence of the often-romanticized relationship  between a father and his children. The nightmarish reality of Hossam, a former drug dealer who is now the sole breadwinner of the family, is that he is forced to inherit his father’s work with all its burdens. That is when one of the most important characters is introduced: the factory itself.

The bleak plant where Hossam works is more than a workplace for the main characters: it is a post-apocalyptic setting with outdated machines symbolizing an endless cycle of meaningless labor. Despite this horrific image, the factory serves as the film’s central visual and thematic element, suggesting that it is not just a workplace but rather a world in itself where individuals are self-contained and trapped in a structure that will eventually outlive them. Hence, Hossam is trapped with the burden his father has left him, like the house that he has to share with his rebellious younger brother and his sick mother (Hanadi Abdel Khalek).

Hossam is not described as a typical working-class young man fighting against corrupt capitalism, an abusive police officer, or any other villain. He is a complex figure torn between destructive impulses and a sincere desire to change. We see this in his desperate attempt at normalcy, for example, when he turns his back on senior engineers demanding he score drugs for them, or in his romantic interactions with a female factory worker (Hajar Omar) and his desire for a serious relationship. One scene, in which he is crushed and tormented by his pain, shows him slowly hugging her, aching for acceptance — a moment beautifully captured on camera.

This is not the first time the filmmaker has presented the factory as a film set. His 2016 documentary Little Eagles explores social class and generational struggles through the journey of his father, who was also a factory worker. Here the cinematography (by Mahmoud Lotfi) and production design (by Yasser El Husseiny) have made the factory one of the main characters, a mute witness to the protagonist’s struggles.  The film falls squarely into a film tradition featuring socially marginalized characters, a subgenre that has deep historical significance in Arab cinema and especially in Egypt. This genre focuses on the struggles of the working class, minorities, women, and individuals who are slowly losing their significance in neo-liberal structures. Usually these characters are presented to be admired and sympathized with; they are victims even if they are perpetrators, winners even if they are losers. Here, instead, the protagonist is an uncomfortable character who is at times violent, an awkward presence who creates an uneasy flow in the story, making it difficult to sympathize with him. Yet this paradox allows the film to reach an even higher level of realism and an honest portrayal of working people, reflecting the bitter reality of millions of young Egyptians today. 

Director, screenplay: Mohamed Rashad
Cast: Adham Shoukry, Ziad Islam, Hajar Omar, Hanadi Abdel Khalek,
Mohamed Abdel Hady, Emad Ghoneim
Producer: Hala Lotfy
Co-Producers: Etienne de Ricaud, Kesmat El Sayed
Cinematography: Mahmoud Lotfi
Editing: Heba Othman
Music: Tony Overwater
Sound Design: Mohamed Salah
Production Design: Yasser El Husseiny
Casting: Adel Raouf
Production companies: Hassala Films
International sales: MAD World info@madworld.film
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Perspectives)
In Arabic
94 minutes

Kontinental ’25 opens with scruffy, penniless, mentally fragile Ion (Jude regular Gabriel Spahiu) wandering the tourist-thronged streets of Cluj, fruitlessly begging for money and casual work. A former prize-winning athlete who has fallen on hard times, he now lives in a squalid basement space in a building scheduled for imminent redevelopment into a luxury chain hotel, but he is behind on rent and facing imminent eviction. When a team of bailiffs arrive to remove him from the property, led by Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), the desperate Ion is thrown into panic and takes his own life.

In a switch of main protagonist focus, which Jude credits as a steal from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the film’s central POV then switches to Orsolya. A former lawyer with a compassionate, liberal world-view, she is understandably mortified with guilt by Ion’s death. Adding to her burden, racist media reports pick up on her Hungarian family background, framing the eviction as a callous attack on a former Romanian sporting hero. Dropping out of a family holiday to Greece, she wanders Cluj in a daze, seeking absolution from friends and family, co-workers and authority figures. Her complicity in Ion’s death, and the deeper structural forces behind it, becomes an obsession that pushes her to impulsive, risky extremes.

Kontinental ’25 is a universal parable about the steep social costs of gentrification and neo-liberal economics, in post-Communist Romania and beyond, with a more specific local angle drawing on the centuries-old ethnic tensions still animating much of central Europe. These are recurring themes for Jude, but this time he largely avoids the propulsive, explosive, formally experimental energy that defined previous stand-out works such as Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) and Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (2023). Naturalistic social-realist drama is the default tone here, although there are teasing flashes of the director’s usual gonzo mischief: a chat between Olsaya and her Hungarian mother that escalates into an angry shouting match about fascism, an arrogant foul-mouthed priest dispensing useless advice, an extended discussion about the ethics of donating to charity that is almost drowned out by electronic dance music.

The film’s title, poster artwork and basic plot outline pay winking homage to Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952), which stars Ingrid Bergman as another anguished mother thrown into soul-searching moral crisis by a tragic death. The screenplay is peppered with other quotes and allusions too, from Bertolt Brecht to rapper Ice-T, historian Tony Judt and the Wim Wenders film Perfect Days (2023). The elegant still-life montages of Cluj’s empty streets and new-build apartments that frame the story invoke something of Michelangelo Antonio’s aloof eye too: urban loneliness, human disconnection, epochal shifts in social history inscribed in architecture. There is plenty of meaty subtext to contemplate here, and some fine aesthetic touches too, but Kontinental ’25 is still Jude at his most conventional and understated. A minor film from a major film-maker.

Director, screenwriter: Radu Jude
Cast: Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanta, Oana Mardare, Serban Pavlu
Cinematography: Marius Panduru
Editing: Catalin Cristutiu
Production design: Andreea Popa
Producers: Alexandru Teodorescu, Rodrigo Teixeira
Poduction company: Saga Film (Romania)
World sales: Luxbox, Pais
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In Romanian
109 minutes

GOLDEN BEAR FOR BEST FILM
Drømmer (Dreams (Sex Love))
Directed by Dag Johan Haugerud
Produced by Yngve Sæther, Hege Hauff Hvattum

SILVER BEAR GRAND JURY PRIZE
O último azul (The Blue Trail)
Directed by Gabriel Mascaro

SILVER BEAR JURY PRIZE
El mensaje (The Message)
Directed by Iván Fund

SILVER BEAR FOR BEST DIRECTOR
Huo Meng
for Sheng xi zhi di (Living the Land)

SILVER BEAR FOR BEST LEADING PERFORMANCE
Rose Byrne
in If I Had Legs I‘d Kick You
Directed by Mary Bronstein

SILVER BEAR FOR BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE
Andrew Scott
in Blue Moon directed by Richard Linklater

SILVER BEAR FOR BEST SCREENPLAY
Radu Jude
for Kontinental ’25 directed by Radu Jude

SILVER BEAR FOR OUTSTANDING ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTION
The creative ensemble of La Tour de Glace (The Ice Tower)
Directed by Lucile Hadžihalilovic

PRIZES OF THE PERSPECTIVES JURY

BEST FIRST FEATURE AWARD
El Diablo Fuma (y guarda las cabezas de los cerillos quemados en la misma caja)
The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box)
Directed by Ernesto Martínez Bucio
Produced by Carlos Hernández Vázquez, Gabriela Gavica Marrufo, Alejandro

SPECIAL MENTION
On vous croit (We Believe You) by Charlotte Devillers, Arnaud Dufeys

BERLINALE DOCUMENTARY AWARD
Holding Liat
Directed by Brandon Kramer
Produced by Darren Aronofsky, Lance Kramer, Yoni Brook, Ari Handel, Justin A. Gonçalves

SPECIAL MENTION
La memoria de las mariposas (The Memory of Butterflies)
Directed by Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski

SPECIAL MENTION
Canone effimero
Directed by Gianluca De Serio, Massimiliano De Serio

PRIZES OF THE INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM JURY

GOLDEN BEAR FOR BEST SHORT FILM
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished
Directed by Lesley Loksi Chan

SILVER BEAR JURY PRIZE (SHORT FILM)
Futsu no seikatsu (Ordinary Life)
Directed by Yoriko Mizushiri

BERLINALE SHORTS CUPRA FILMMAKER AWARD
Quenton Miller
for Koki, Ciao

BERLIN SHORT FILM CANDIDATE FOR THE EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS
Comment ça va? (How Are You?)
Directed by Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel

GENERATION KPLUS COMPETITION

THE GRAND PRIX OF THE INTERNATIONAL JURY FOR THE BEST FILM
Zhi Wu Xue Jia (The Botanist)
Directed by Jing Yi

SPECIAL MENTION
Umibe é Iku Michi (Seaside Serendipity)
Directed by Satoko Yokohama

THE SPECIAL PRIZE OF THE INTERNATIONAL JURY FOR THE BEST SHORT FILM
Autokar
Directed by Sylwia Szki??d?

SPECIAL MENTION
Akababuru: Expresión de asombro (Akababuru: Expression of Astonishment)
Directed by Irati Dojura Landa Yagarí

PRIZES OF THE INDEPENDENT JURIES

PRIZES OF THE ECUMENICAL JURY
COMPETITION
O último azul (The Blue Trail)
by Gabriel Mascaro

PANORAMA
The Heart Is a Muscle
by Imran Hamdulay

FORUM
Holding Liat
by Brandon Kramer

PRIZES OF THE FIPRESCI JURY
COMPETITION
Drømmer (Dreams (Sex Love))
by Dag Johan Haugerud

PERSPECTIVES
Kaj ti je deklica (Little Trouble Girls)
by Urška Djuki?

PANORAMA
Bajo las banderas, el sol (Under the Flags, the Sun)
by Juanjo Pereira

FORUM
La memoria de las mariposas (The Memory of Butterflies)
by Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski

TEDDY AWARDS
Best Feature Film
Lesbian Space Princess
by Emma Hough Hobbs, Leela Varghese

Best Documentary/Essay Film
Satanische Sau (Satanic Sow)
by Rosa von Praunheim

Best Short Film
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished
by Lesley Loksi Chan

Jury Award
Wenn du Angst hast nimmst du dein Herz in den Mund und lächelst
(If You Are Afraid You Put Your Heart into Your Mouth and Smile)
by Marie Luise Lehner

Special Teddy Award
to Todd Haynes

The great beauty of cinematographer Li Vanon’s lyrical imagery of the vast grasslands and rolling hills of the Xinjiang region wraps the delicate story of young love and loss in layered, highly textured shots that reinforce the connection between Arsin, played with off-handed naturalness by young actor Jahseleh Yesi, and his world out of time. It is a slow-moving film that refuses to be hurried; a story of great depth, but without surprises. Its strong aesthetics set it apart and point to Jing Yi’s unusual filmmaking talent – he became a quasi-protégé of Chinese art house star Bi Gan after they met at the Beijing Film Academy – that should earmark it for further festival dates.

It’s summer vacation in the village where Arsin lives with his grandmother, a spritely woman who milks the cow and cooks meals for him and his elder brother (Nurdaolet Jalen). The two boys are in charge of watching over a sizeable sheepfold while they read and daydream on the hilly grasslands burnt by the sun. The brother, who has had the overwhelming experience of working in Beijing but chose to return to the slower rhythms of his hometown, now finds himself caught between two worlds, one modern and full of money and opportunity to grow, the other an ancient way of life that has remained practically unchanged over the ages.

Arsin, a budding scientist who studies plants through a microscope and takes careful field notes about his discoveries, is so much a part of the landscape that it is hard to imagine him anywhere else. Though he swims and boxes with other boys, he spends most of time hanging out with Meiyu (Ren Zihan), a Chinese girl his age whose dad owns the village store. Their different ethnicities perhaps attract each other, but it is hard to say whether it’s a big deal. Certainly not for them. Arsin, whose thoughts are often expressed in an off-screen voiceover, awkwardly gets the message across when he reflects, “She may be Han Chinese, but so what?”

They play hide-and-seek in the forest, sunbathe under a striped umbrella, listen to music and dance. Each innocent encounter seems to bring them closer together, until one day Meiyu reveals she is being sent to boarding school in Shanghai. Arsin is shocked and calculates how far away she will be and how long it would take to visit her: the answer is 4,500 kilometers away and the trip would take “one month on horseback”. What is not stated is the mental distance that will soon separate them, because she is choosing modernity and he tradition.

Where The Botanist succeeds spectacularly is in evoking these traditions through little stories buried between the scenes. The film begins with a shadowy blue night sequence, recounting the legend of a man who wanted to live to be 100. He drinks from the fountain of eternal youth, but his life is unhappy and he impales his chest on a tree — but is still unable to die. Against leaves rustling in the wind, this ghostly story is heightened by artistically plucked strings, part of the film’s magical score written by top Iranian composer Peyman Yazdanian.

But these are not the only breaks in the narrative. There are moments that reach inside Arsin’s head all the way to his imagination, which may be visualized as a talking black horse that tells him about his uncle, who has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, or botanical comparisons that touch the boy’s instinct for adaptation and survival (a thistle grows thorns in place of leaves, to conserve water). The Botanist is only simple at first glance; like Arsin’s intricate drawings of his family tree, it is full of curious omissions and tantalizing connections if you look closely enough.

Director, screenwriter: Jing Yi
Producers: Shan Zuolong, Qi Ai
Cast: Jahseleh Yesi, Ren Zihan, Nurdaolet Jalen, Eramazan Sarhet, Jomajan Songhat
Cinematography: Li Vanon
Production design: Xu Yao
Costume design: Liu Lian
Editing: Liu Yaonan, Jing Yi
Music: Peyman Yazdanian
Sound design: Hao Gang
Production companies: Monologue Films (China), 28ST Films (China)
World sales: Magnify (New York)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Generation Kplus)
In Kazakh, Mandarin
96 minutes

Though far from an earth-shaker, it is one of the director’s more charming outings, refreshing in that it seems to break a bit of new ground in his 33-film oeuvre — an impressive output that has been increasing at an average of two new features a year. Fans of South Korea’s beacon of independent filmmaking – who performs every technical role himself, apart from acting – will not be disappointed.

Those who have been watching closely will also note the characters’ lopsided smiles seem to be untouched with melancholy or despair, the blue note that is almost always present somewhere in Hong Sangsoo’s work seems absent here. His stock company of actors features veterans Kwon Haehyo and Cho Yunhee as the father and mother of two single daughters in their thirties.

Though the autobiographical component is strong in all his work, here it stands out with special force, since it relates to a young poet who has rejected a privileged position in society to remain free to do what he wants. This has put him in conflict with his father, a famous attorney, and threatens to jinx his relationship with his girlfriend, who he has been dating for three years. With a pleasing touch of light comedy based on social awkwardness, embarrassment and innuendo, the story unfolds during an overnight trip to a house outside Incheon, where Ha Donghwa (played by Ha Seongguk) drives his girlfriend Junhee (Kang Soyi) to visit her parents.

Weirdly (no surprise; it’s a weird relationship), Donghwa leaves her in the driveway and prepares to return to Seoul without making contact with her family. In fact, in the three years he has known and loved Junhee, he has never met any of them. Instead, her Dad intercepts them by accident and, after taking a spin in Donghwa’s old car, invites them in. It’s a turning point for the young couple, who can’t make up their minds about getting married.

As the day progresses, all kinds of relationships will be discussed and tested: the father’s intense love for his mother, who has died and whose ashes are buried beneath a tree in the garden; the parents’ comfortable relationship that survives the passing years; the bond of understanding that exists between Junhee and Donghwa, that is perhaps not love.

The family is aware that he is the son of a rich and famous man, Attorney Ha, and that of course changes their perceptions of their potential future son-in-law. But on a visit to a Buddhist temple, Junhee’s sister Neunghee (Park Miso) quizzes Donghwa about what he does and how much he earns. He answers frankly that he shoots wedding videos and earns just enough to pay for the necessities of life. In fact, he is fiercely independent and avoids asking his father for money.

As the young man’s initial stiffness begins to melt, he feels at home with Junhee’s easy-going, guitar-strumming dad, aided by a pack of cigarettes and consumption of the local liquor. Meanwhile her mom prepares a local dish featuring one of the fine-looking chickens from the coop. Everything is going swimmingly until dinner, when Dad breaks out a huge bottle of booze and shares it with Donghwa. This is the comic-tragic turning point in most Hong Sangsoo tales and here, too, in vino veritas. The young man gets drunk and, dispensing with the formalities, shouts out his real feelings in a scene of excruciating embarrassment.

The fact is, Donghwa is a poet, and so is Junhee’s mom. The first recites a terrible poem he wrote; the second is acclaimed in her circle. But throughout the day Donghwa gives signs of being a real poet through his absorption in nature, deep thinking and the connections he makes between things, not to mention the material sacrifices he is prepared to make to be free. The mother, instead, put aside her writing when her daughters were born and spends her days at work. And you know she’s not a real poet when she advises Donghwa to sell his old car, which so individualizes him, and buy a new model for “safety”.

This all feels like there could be a sequel in the works that carries the topic forward. Donghwa, with his deep feelings and multiform personality, is shaping up to be an excellent surrogate of the filmmaker to speak about being an artist in contemporary Korean society.

The most interesting technical credit is the cinematography, which imitates Donghwa’s near-sighted view of the world by shooting entire scenes in soft focus and low resolution, signaling that his is the dominant P.O.V. in the film.

Director, screenwriter, cinematography, editing, music, sound design, producer: Hong Sangsoo
Cast: Ha Seongguk, Kwon Haehyo, Cho Yunhee, Kang Soyi, Park Miso
Production company: Jeonwonsa Film Co. (South Korea)
World sales: Finecut
Venue: Berlin Film Festival  (Competition)
In Korean
108 minutes

Moving from fiction to non-fiction following her feted coming-of-age debut Stop-Zemlia (2021), Gornostai roams far and wide across her homeland, capturing bittersweet but frequently uplifting scenes of students and teachers defiantly maintaining a sense of normality, despite the distant thump of artillery and regular air raid sirens. The only documentary in the Berlinale Competition this year, and the first Ukrainian entry in the Golden Bear race for almost three decades, Timestamp is a quietly powerful piece of work that should find plenty of play after Berlin, not least as part of the valuable historical archive of brave cinematic work chronicling the impact of Russia’s ongoing illegal invasion in real time.

Originally commissioned as a campaigning documentary for the educational NGO Osvitoria, Timestamp evolved into a more ambitious European co-production project, filmed on a grander scale in a more detached reportage style. Between April 2023 and June 2024, Gornostai and her small crew visit schools all over Ukraine. They observe bombed-out classrooms and cramped air raid shelters, but also inspirational lessons, brave teachers, sweet teenagers posing for selfies, first kisses, songs and pageants, proud parents and sunny graduation ceremonies. They visit Bucha, the site of a notorious massacre early in the war, not to dwell on tragedy but to witness a charming English language class. In Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv, where Russian occupiers were forced out in May 2022, but still the target of regular shelling, they find an entire pop-up school relocated inside the subway system.

Amidst all this heroic resilience and stoicism, Timestamp inevitably finds sourness, anger and sadness too. In one sequence, exasperated parents protest the long-delayed opening of a new school in Zaporizhzhia, intended to replace a previous building destroyed by Russian bombs. Another moving scene captures the heartbreaking funeral parade in Romny for a beloved school principal named Tatiana, killed in another Russian air raid.

The war itself never appears on screen in Timestamp, though its wider impact is ever-present. Serving military officers deliver guest lessons in schools, but they mostly share their hopes for a peaceful future, with no hint of recruitment propaganda. The film’s title refers to part of a medical tourniquet, a vital tool to preserve blood-starved tissue. It features fleetingly in one scene, where schoolchildren are calmly learning how to stem blood from a wound, a small but depressing detail from the new normal of life in the shadow of Russian imperialist aggression.

By avoiding formal interviews or explanatory captions, Gornostai and her team inevitably get a little lost in their immersive two-hour mosaic of snapshots and subplots. Only a tiny handful of protagonists appear on screen more than once, so viewers may understandably feel overwhelmed by a sprawling ensemble cast list of teachers and students numbering in the hundreds. There is no single narrative arc here, no obvious emotional focus. All the same, Timestamp is assembled with a flowing, musical rhythm that achieves a powerful cumulative effect, like an ensemble portrait of a nation’s youth, a chorus of young people dreaming of peace in the middle of war.

Speaking of music, one of Gornostai’s strongest aesthetic choices is a specially commissioned score by Kyiv composer Alexey Shmurak, a series of luminous vocalese collages featuring three intertwined female voices. The film-makers originally suggested using a children’s choir, but time limitations meant Shmurak instead opted for a trio of professional singers: Kateryna Ryzuniak, Oleksandra Stetsiuk and Olena Tsygankova. Despite its tragic back story, Timestamp is full of beauty, compassion and joy as an act of resistance.

Director, screenwriter: Kateryna Gornostai
Cast: Olha Bryhynets, Borys Khovriak, Mykola Kolomiiets, Valeriia Hukova, Mykola Shpak
Cinematography: Oleksandr Roshchyn
Editing: Nikon Romanchenko
Music: Alexey Shmurak
Producers: Olha Bregman, Natalia Libet, Victor Shevchenko
Production company: 2Brave Productions (Ukraine)
World sales: Best Friend Forever, Brussels
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In Ukrainian
125 minutes

Writer and director Petra Volpe has worked in television, but she is best known for her 2017  film The Divine Order about a Swiss housewife who joins the fight for women’s right to vote. Late Shift, too, features women at the center of the action as nurses, doctors and surgeons, and their professionalism and dedication go beyond the call of duty.

Shot on the move and edited at the speed of an electric drill, it is simple, unpretentious, but riveting entertainment, closer in spirit to an adrenaline-packed actioner than Grey’s Anatomy. Unlike most hospital dramas, it skips the interpersonal relationship entanglements amongst the medical staff to concentrate on one character: a nurse who has to hold down her shift on a surgical ward on an understaffed night.

Volpe smartly trains her laser on the 30-something, ultra-competent nurse Floria Lind. She is a portrait in heroism who never wavers as she gallops through her shift constantly on the edge of collapse, burnout or some other disaster. Accomplished and engaging actress Leonie Benesch conveys the mental strain Floria is under behind her caring smile, at first lightly as she tries to juggle conflicting demands on her time, then later with hands that visibly tremble as they load a hypodermic needle full of painkillers for her patients.

One feels sure the story is heading for some huge mistake on Floria’s part that will have catastrophic consequences, but that would be to underestimate the message about nursing that Volpe seeks to convey. Floria does lose her cool dealing with the abusive businessman who demands a cup of peppermint tea at her busiest moment because he is a paying private patient. But above all, the errors she makes signal the strain nurses work under, and when tragedy does strike, it becomes a test of Floria’s mental resilience and faith in her own work.

On this particular day, presumably a typical one, Floria arrives at the hospital by bus She has just had a day off and taken her daughter Emma to the zoo. This is practically the only hint at her private life, apart from a phone call to Emma and a short exchange with a patient about having broken up with the girl’s dad. Otherwise, Volpe keeps the story focused on the present moment in the hospital. Whatever her personal problems, Floria keeps her mind on her work – in fact one suspects she uses its unforgiving rhythm to take her mind off her problems. The late shift begins with only two nurses instead of three, a fact that Floria takes unflinchingly like a true soldier, and whose dismaying significance becomes apparent as the story unfolds. There is just a student nurse doing the shift with them and Floria cuts her no slack.

As she is briefed about the 25 patients on the ward – it is almost at capacity – most of them seem to be recovering from cancer operations, or waiting to be operated on. She already knows a few of them, like the seedy and needy Mr. Leu, from previous encounters; others, like a fragile old woman with dementia symptoms and the obnoxious businessman, are new on the floor. Floria treats everyone with courtesy and professionality, which sometimes extends to deep compassion and caring. But despite all her ministrations, she can’t escape becoming the target of anger for some frightened patients and their worried families. She returns this injustice with a tight smile that gets tighter as the shift wears on.

All this happens at the speed of light, in which the pace is heightened by devices like a constantly moving camera and the nearly subliminal sound of a ticking clock. The editing by Hansjorg Weissbrich is so relentlessly frenetic in the first hour of the film that it seems mechanically speeded up, were it not for the patients who are moving normally. D.P. Judith Kaufmann keeps it simple with muted hospital lighting that, in other circumstances, would be calming. Not here. And Gina Keller’s stressful sound design up the ante.

Director, screenwriter: Petra Volpe
Producers: Reto Schaerli, Lukas Hobi
Cast: Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Urs Bihler, Margherita Schoch, Jurg Pluss, Alireza Bayram, Ridvan Murati, Urbain Guiguemdé
Cinematography: Judith Kaufmann
Production design: Beatrice Schultz
Editing: Hansjorg Weissbrich
Music: Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch
Sound design: Gina Keller
Production companies: Zodiac Pictures (Switzerland)
World sales: TrustNordisk
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special Gala)
In German
87 minutes

Then, seven months later, the topic switched to Love, unveiled in competition at Venice. Now, after its domestic premiere in Norway, Dreams (Drømmer), not to be confused with Michel Franco’s film of the same name, hence the addition of the other two titles between parentheses for festival screening purposes), completes the cycle as part of the Berlin competition, winning the festival’s highest honor, the Golden Bear.

The award sets a promising stage for the film’s imminent international rollout in theaters, and multiple territories already plan to release the three films close together on a monthly basis or thereabouts.

For this trilogy capper, which was originally intended to be the second installment (in as much as it matters, given the lack of plot connections between the three movies), writer/director Haugerud changes his approach a tiny bit. Whereas the previous two films dealt with adult relationships, Dreams goes all in on the subject of the first crush, as experienced through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl. That girl is Johanne, played by emerging talent Ella Øverbye who, like most of the main cast, reunites with the director after previously appearing in his 2019 film Beware of Children.

Her life changes when she meets her new teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu), with whom she initially bonds over their similar first names. Their mutual respect becomes friendship, and eventually Johanne finds herself head-over-heels in love with Johanna. Nothing inappropriate ever comes out of this, but her writings about the matter become a source of tension and self-reflection within the family, as her mother (Ane Dahl Torp) and grandmother begin remembering their own unfulfilled dreams. And there is legitimate doubt about the content of Johanne’s self-described fictionalization of the topic, especially when the thought of publication rears its head.

Whereas Sex was primarily about attraction, and Love dealt with the intricacies of relationships (and works better as the climax of a triptych where the city of Oslo itself is also a major character), Dreams falls ideally in between the two, capturing the nuances of desire and whether to act on it or not, with the crush also serving as the catalyst for Johanne’s emotional and artistic maturation. It’s (deliberately) awkward, in a very endearing way, with Øverbye’s performance conveying all the layers of adolescent sexual awakening while keeping the overall mood quite chaste, with the breeziness of summertime that Eric Rohmer injected into a Céline Sciamma-like character study.

The lead performance is also key to the film succeeding in a major area that sets it apart from its two companion pieces: the extensive use of voiceover, granting us access to Johanne’s feelings in literary form. Literate without being overwritten, it’s a new facet of Haugerud’s creative personality, and the way he directed the young actress to deliver those crucial lines makes the whole exercise a vital extension of the protagonist’s personality and not an intrusive intertextual gimmick. It’s just as much an exploration of her awkwardness as the physical work is, while also showing the genuine talent the girl exhibits in what could end up being a viable profession in the arts.

As such, while this is technically the second installment in the sequence, it is perhaps the ideal entry point for a (slightly) younger audience, the budding cinephiles approaching what remains a very arthouse-oriented overall project, despite its fairly accessible nature. Once they’ve entered Haugerud’s world through Johanne’s dreams, it will be easier to transition into the sex and love afterwards, yet again with two out of three titles fading away after all of them appear simultaneously in the opening credits of each film. For while they may function as their own units, and they very much do, it’s also interesting to view them as a (Nordically) romantic whole.

Director, screenwriter: Dag Johan Haugerud
Cast: Ella Øverbye, Selome Emnetu, Ane Dahl Torp, Anne Marit Jacobsen
Producers: Yngve Sæther, Hege Hauff Hvattum
Cinematography: Cecilie Semec
Production design: Tuva Hølmebakk
Costume design: Ida Toft
Music: Anna Berg
Sound: Yvonne Stenberg, Gisle Tveito
Production companies: Motlys
World sales: m-appeal
Venue: Berlinale (Competition)
In Norwegian
110 minutes

A playfully packaged but densely detailed documentary by Billy Shebar and David Roberts, Monk in Pieces aims to distil this kaleidoscopic career into a free-form mosaic, with mostly satisfying results. Behind the film’s lightly experimental form lies an engaging, relatable, very human story about an uncompromising female artist battling to keep her unique vision alive, despite periods of poverty and obscurity and sneering disdain from sexist male critics.

A fixture on the downtown New York art scene for more than 50 years, the 82-year-old Monk may not be household name, but her explorations of voice-driven, dance-heavy, physically intense performance have had an inspirational impact on the likes of Björk and David Byrne, who both appear in this documentary. Her music has also appeared on film and TV soundtracks including The Big Lebowski, True Detective and Baby Reindeer.

Fresh from its big-screen world premiere in Berlin this week, Monk in Pieces is scheduled for TV broadcast in Germany and France on the high-end arts channel Arte. As a quality docu-portrait of a prestige artist with an international reputation, it works as an accessible primer on Monk, with appeal to connoisseurs and casual fans alike. Further festival bookings, specialist theatrical and streamer deals are all solid prospects.

As it subtitle “A Concept Album” suggests, Monk in Pieces is structured as an anthology of chapters, each loosely themed around a single piece of work. This gives the film-makers freedom to jump between different styles and eras, blending archive and contemporary footage with quirky digressions, such as stop-motion animation sequences based on Monk’s 1970s dream journals. Echoing the composer’s own methods, Shebar and Roberts also make strong use of collage and montage. In one elegant super-cut assemblage, we see Monk breaking down her artistic philosophy with striking consistency and clarity across multiple interviews, often repeating the same phrases. In another witty sequence, a cluster of academics and critics each attempt to define Monk in their own terms, creating a cacophonous chorus of overlapping views, more discord than discourse.

Fortunately, Shebar and Roberts do not take a fully avant-garde approach to the documentary form. They also cover plenty of biographical detail on Monk’s childhood, from the eye problem that led her to join a Dalcroze eurhythmics programme, where she first realised that music and movement are intimately linked, to her mother’s depression following the collapse of her highly successful career as a commercial jingles singer, which convinced her that being an independent artist was a smarter long-term strategy.

But the film is more elusive about Monk’s adult private life, featuring just a thin section on her 22-year relationship with Dutch-born choreographer Mieke von Hoek, who died in 2002. She may hate being pinned down with labels and categories, but some interrogation of how her queerness, her Jewish ancestry, her embrace of Buddhism, and other cultural/political factors have informed her work could have given Monk in Pieces extra journalistic heft.

For audiences who may be unfamiliar with Monk, Shebar and Roberts interview multiple collaborators and contemporaries from across her long career including art-rock icon David Byrne, who worked with her on his idiosyncratic feature film True Stories (1986), and composer Philip Glass, who calls her a “self-contained theatre company.” Björk is also a friend and fan of Monk, having performed her work live, including a version of her mournful Gotham Lullaby on the night of the 9/11 attacks. She shares some insightful comments here, alongside gushing praise for Monk, during a shared audio conversation.

As a lively audiovisual tapestry, Monk in Pieces is hard to fault, bouncing restlessly between interviews and performance clips, all underscored by a rich soundtrack collage of Monk’s music. Archive footage of former US President Obama awarding Monk the National Medal of Arts in 2015 could have lent this story a sense of closure, but Shebar and Roberts prefer an open-ended conclusion more akin to witnessing a restless living artwork, still tuned into a vast cosmic orchestra of sound, one woman’s life as an unfinished symphony.

Directors, screenwriters: Billy Shebar, David Roberts
Cast: Meredith Monk, Björk, David Byrne, Ping Chong, John Schaefer, Lanny Harrison, Julia Wolfe
Cinematography:Jeff Hutchens, Ben Stechschulte
Editing: Sabine Krayenbühl
Music: Meredith Monk
Animation: Paul Barritt
Producers: Billy Shebar, Susan Margolin, David Roberts
Production companies: 110th Street Films (US), St. Marks Productions (US)
World sales: Cinephil, Tel Aviv
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama Dokumente)
In English
94 minutes

Like Shoah (though of course on a much smaller scale), the cumulative effect of Ribot’s painstaking work lies in the power and cold clarity of undeniable facts. He has called Shoah an “interrogation [that] forces us to ask questions. We’re not supposed to cry.” But throughout this 96-minute documentary, there were many scenes – especially those showing images of trains pulling rickety old carriages through verdant Polish forests on their way to the extermination camp of Treblinka – in which a pin could have been heard dropping in the screening room. And when the film was over, people took a very long time to rouse themselves, put on their coats and head for the exit.

To be clear, there is nothing earth-shaking here that was wrongly left out of Shoah. Compared to Lanzmann’s original edit, this is a small sampler that will hopefully reach wider audiences than those able to track down and watch the 9½ hour version, which the director worked on from 1973 to 1985. In this anniversary year, and in this frightening political moment, festival outings are assured, along with scattered arthouse release.

Ribot worked with archives on Lanzmann’s unused material, selecting striking key moments which he scanned in 4K from the original 16mm prints and then restored. Most of the scenes are familiar ones like the train chugging through the forest, and many eyewitness interviews with survivors like the SS guard Franz Suchomel, Richard Glazar who escaped from the Treblinka camp, and the barber Bomba who was forced to cut the hair of Jewish women in the gas chamber. In a moving and revealing finale, we see Claude Lanzmann in a state of emotional exhaustion rest his head on the chest of Yitzhak Zuckerman, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and who says, “Claude, if you could lick my heart, it would poison you.”

Perhaps the longest scene in the film involves a failure. After finding survivors of the camps and persuading them to drag their bitter memories in front of his camera, he decides that the film will not be complete without the testimony of a ranking member of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, or Mobile Killing Units who notoriously carried out genocide on the Jews. In previously unseen footage, Lanzmann (who has a fake passport for the occasion with a non-Jewish name) prepares for the meeting in his hotel room like a Cold War spy, strapping on a microphone-transmitter to secretly capture the confessions of the Nazi officer in his comfortable suburban home. The friendly, ordinary-looking Lanzmann makes a fearless attempt to trap the man into talking to him, all the while sending audio and video signals to a van parked outside the house. Seen from the director’s POV, it is a frightening moment that demonstrates to what lengths he was prepared to go for his film, even putting himself in danger of arrest.

Lanzmann is five years into his film — which included international, often fruitless searches for financing — when he arrives in Poland driving a rented Russian jalopy. He knows the death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmo, Sobibor, Treblinka and others)  have been torn down and he is personally convinced there is nothing there that can help him finish his project to document the mass death of Jews during the war. Ribot’s voice recites, in Lanzmann’s own words, “I wanted to film, but all I had was nothingness.” The success of Ribot’s film is to show how, out of this despair, arose a profound stimulus and a new point of view on the whole film, which today it is a valued part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.

Director, screenwriter: Guillaume Ribot
Producers: Estelle Fialon, Dominique Lanzmann
Editing: Svetlana Vaynblat
Sound design: Jean-Pierre Halbwachs, Vincent Arnardi
Production companies: Les Films du Poisson (France), Les Films Aleph (France)
World sales: MK2 Films
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special)
In French, English, German, Polish
94 minutes

Though tagged in its Berlinale description (it bowed in competition) as “supernatural”, in reality this is a road movie with precious little of the paranormal. It is summer and Anika (Anika Bootz) is a smiling innocent who is traveling around the rural countryside in Roger and Myriam’s camper. It will take the whole film to form an idea of just who these people are and how they are connected. That is basically what the film is all about.

The story is reminiscent of Paula Hernandez’s 2024 A Ravaging Wind, in which a teenage girl travels around rural Argentina with her evangelical preacher-father, feeling desperately trapped in the role of his assistant. The Message is more subtle and elusive, making the audience question its initial assumptions. Taking interpersonal communication as its theme rather than individual liberty, the screenplay by Fund and Martin Felipe Castagnet keeps characters to a minimum and nudges the viewer to gradually piece together their feelings and motivations.

The first clue to what is going on appears when a country man approaches the camper, parked near a field, holding out a large turtle. A woman appears in her regular costume of tank top and leopard print pants. Myriam (Mara Bestelli) hesitates to wake up Anika, but the man has money to offer. The state of Argentina’s runaway inflation is cleverly underlined when we learn 14,000 pesos are worth $1. The price of a “reading” by Anika is 12,000 pesos – and presumably affordable by the farmers and country dwellers who ask her to communicate with their pets, alive or dead. Meanwhile the trio steals corn from the fields for their dinner.

It seems clear that the two adults are exploiting the local pet owners’ gullibility, particularly when Myriam makes up sentimental messages from missing pets and says they were channeled by Anika. Suspicions deepen when she poses the girl in front of a kitschy Pet Cemetery sign, which she quickly puts online. Roger (Marcelo Subiotto) handles the online payments.

But this naïve scam is not the end of the story.

After miles of traveling through soulful landscapes and mesas skirting clear streams, Roger drives the trusty little camper up to a lonely psychiatric hospital in the middle of nowhere. They are taking Anika to visit her mother (emotionally played by Betania Cappato), who is a resident, and that changes every perception about a venal couple exploiting a child. Now we see the laughter and smiles the trio exchanges in the car, the attention and love Myriam and Roger shower on their ward. Her ESP with animals may be mostly imagination, but the scam seems fairly harmless and seems to make people happy. The ending embrace is simple and moving, closing the film on a note of love and peace.

Shooting in painterly black and white, with a marked preference for long shots, D.P. Gustavo Schiaffino idealizes the importance of nature for these characters, who like Roger are frequently caught relaxing while they scan the distant horizon. They seem to calmly accept that life is a journey, without a fixed destination. The clean, lonely notes of horn and trumpet solos sound the depth of their souls.

Director, editing: Ivan Fund
Screenwriters: Ivan Fund, Martin Felipe Castagnet
Producers: Ivan Fund, Laura Mara Tablon, Gustavo Schiaffino
Cast:  Mara Bestelli, Marcelo Subiotto, Anika Bootz, Betania Cappato
Cinematography: Gustavo Schiaffino
Production design: Adrian Suarez
Costume design: Betania Cappato
Music: Mauro Mourelos
Sound: Leandro De Loredo, Omar Mustafa
Production companies: Rita Cine (Argentina), Insomnia Films (Argentina) in association with Amore Cine (Spain), Blurr Stories (Spain), Panes Contenidos (Spain), Animista Cine (Uruguay)
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In Spanish
91 minutes

The bad news for Bond cultists is there is no narrative pay-off – no coherent storyline – in this tasty treat for psychiatrists, Surrealists and experimental film lovers, making the True Colours release a very niche item, but certainly a festival best-seller. It has been the boldest choice so far in Berlin competition and its crazy tilted universe is well worth sampling.

The film is a series of constructed scenes that weave back and forth over a handful of archetypal characters, who all seem just slightly off their original model. The anchor is “John Diman”, an aging man of leisure who lives in a luxury seaside hotel in solitary retirement. He is elegantly impersonated by Italian actor Fabio Testi, always attired in a white suit and hat that was, so say the filmmakers, inspired by Dirk Bogarde’s character in Death in Venice. Despite these Mediterranean associations, there is a strong suggestion that John is actually 007 in his later years: a bored old man with a lived-in face and no friends, who has difficulty paying his hotel bill. The sight of a girl in a bikini who has a diamond stud in one nipple starts the old codger down memory lane, when he was an all-powerful secret agent who drove a silver sports car with machine gun headlights and had women at his feet.

Amid a blizzard of tilted images on psychedelic backdrops, many of them women’s dismembered body parts, the youthful square-jawed face of Yannick Renier now takes center stage. He is complimented by his bosses for the brilliant conclusion of his last mission and sent out on a new one to protect a billionaire oil tycoon (suave Belgian actor Koen De Bouw) worth a fortune in diamonds. Working with him is a smart female agent (Céline Camara in an amusing send-up of a Bond girl) who uses her silver-sequined dress as a lethal weapon (this has to be seen to be believed).

But John Diman has yet another identity: that of an insecure actor who fears he is going to be replaced by a younger, tougher rival. This is nicely illustrated in a film-within-the-film moment when John straddles a woman chained to a bed and starts torturing her for information — only for the director to yell Cut! Later, in his producer’s office/the billionaire’s living room/the film set, he is dismayed to repeatedly discover an entire ad campaign for the next film in the series, starring the other actor as the spy.

The timeframe being stuck in the binary, pre-feminist days, Cattet and Forzani pile on the unnecessary violence against the women in the film, beating them up, cutting them with diamonds, tearing off their faces (to reveal new faces and identities underneath the torn skin, Mission: Impossible style.) Recurrent visual memes are a piece of a women’s mouth and a diamond-encrusted eye that turn up in unexpected places, all very dreamlike and surreal.

The killer scene involves a female Diabolik clone known as Serpentik (played by a succession of actors including the delightful Barbara Hellemans), who drives John and other men mad by refusing to tell them who she is behind her black mask and cat suit.  Walking into a bar in her stiletto-heeled boots, she fearlessly takes on half a dozen armed men and a lot of punishment, always bouncing back like the cartoon character she is.

John’s climactic encounter occurs in his Fabio Testi self, who is obsessed with a villa high over the water and a mysterious blonde (Maria De Medeiros) who watches him from her terrace. Is she friend or foe? he wonders. Their final confrontation after a high-speed chase on hairpin curves over the Côte d’Azur puts a final confusing spin on the characters and the story.

Working with exceptional visual artists led by cinematographer Manu Dacosse and production designer Laurie Colson, the directors turn artistic pastiche into a fun ride through pop art, at least for those who don’t get carsick.  Acclaimed comic book illustrator Emanuele Barison, who has worked for Disney and Diabolik, provides a lot of the inspiration.

Directors, screenwriters:  Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani
Producer: Pierre Foulon
Cast: Fabio Testi, Yannick Renier, Koen De Bouw, Maria De Medeiros, Thi Mai Nguyen, Céline Camara, Kezia Quental, Sylvia Camarda, Sophie Mousel, Hervé Sogne, Manon Bleuchot
Cinematography: Manu Dacosse
Production design: Laurie Colson
Costume design: Jackye Fauconnier
Editing: Bernard Beets
Sound editing: Dan Bruylandt
Production company: Kozak Films
World sales: True Colours
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In French, Italian, English
87 minutes

What Marielle Knows begins with an attention-grabbing slow-motion close-up of a pre-teen schoolgirl being slapped in the face. This is Marielle (Laeni Geiseler), and the blow soon proves to have far-reaching consequences. Later that same day, we witness Marielle’s mother Julia (Julia Jentsch) spicing up her dull office routine with some heavy flirtation, sharing an illicit cigarette and graphic fantasy sex talk with her married co-worker Max (Mehmet Atesçi), apparently a regular workplace perk for both of them. Meanwhile, Julia’s publisher husband Tobias (Felix Kramer) is battling quarrelsome team members who question his pretentious cover design ideas, a mutiny led by his younger rival Sören (Moritz Treuenfels), their mutual loathing thinly veiled behind glib professional jargon about positive feedback.

That evening, with the family reunited at home, Marielle shares some bombshell news. The slap from her classmate, triggered by a petty name-calling spat, appears to have awakened bizarre telepathic powers in her brain. She can now remotely hear and see everything her parents are doing, in real time, including their flirty transgression and humiliating workplace battles. As a sulky, pitiless, judgmental pre-teen, she is also appalled by their imperfect behaviour, angrily calling out their self-flattering lies and dissembling half-truths.

Julia and Tobias initially react with denial and disbelief, convinced Marielle must be pulling some smart technological trick. But when the true chilling horror sinks in, that their daughter really is monitoring every word and deed, they become acutely self-conscious and begin to stage-manage their lives with her surveillance in mind. In one gloriously funny sequence, the pair switch to speaking French to block Marielle from following their conversation.

Hambalek treats his magical-realist premise with a light touch, recognising its function as a useful plot device rather than a quasi-scientific phenomenon that requires a contrived stab at logical explanation. The default tone here is gleefully dark satire, but with a creeping undertow of paranoid anxiety. Inevitably, pretending to be perfect parents has a destabilising effect on Julia and Tobias, who swing between strained role-playing, guilty confessionals, anguished soul-searching, and surrendering to their repressed inner urges. Sex and violence soon come crashing through their outer veneer of middle-class respectability.

What Marielle Knows satirises some familiar targets: the routine hypocrisy of western bourgeois life, the frosty ambivalence some parents privately feel towards their children, the secrets and lies that keep marriages together. But Hambalek avoids taking the easy path of sneering mockery, instead inviting empathy for these flawed but forgivable adults and (especially) their traumatised daughter, whose sudden psychic gift is more burden than blessing. “I should just die,” she tells her parents tearfully, “then you can do what you want again.”

Crisp, concise and contained, What Marielle Knows barely strikes a wrong note in its slender runtime. That said, more exploration of Marielle’s own emotional hinterland would have been welcome, particularly during the second act, when she virtually vanishes off-screen. Some speculation on the wider socio-political impact of children developing telepathic powers might also have been fun, though that would arguably be a very different film.

Formally, What Marielle Knows is a modestly scaled chamber drama at heart, mostly shot in a handful of real interior locations using a fairly standard hand-held aesthetic. Recurring, dreamlike, heavily tinted slow-motion close-ups of Marielle add a welcome hint of mind-bending supernatural weirdness, while sporadic flurries of vibrant orchestral music sit well with the film’s brisk, witty, coolly acerbic tone.

Director, screenwriter: Frédéric Hambalek
Cast: Julia Jentsch, Felix Kramer, Laeni Geiseler, Mehmet Ate?çi, Moritz Treuenfels
Cinematography: Alexander Griesser
Editing: Anne Fabini
Production design: Bartholomäus Martin Kleppek
Producers: Philipp Worm, Tobias Walker
Production company: Walker & Worm (Germany)
World sales: Lucky Number
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In German
86 minutes

German writer-director Jan-Ole Gerster scored a modest sleeper hit with his prize-wining debut feature Oh Boy (2012), aka A Coffee in Berlin, and picked up critical plaudits for his second, Lara (2019). Working for the first time with a largely British cast, and mostly English-language dialogue, his third has more mainstream crossover potential than either of its predecessors, even if the twisty screenplay ultimately fails to deliver the full-blooded genre pay-off it initially seems to promise. Following its gala world premiere at the Berlinale this week, Islands is set for a domestic cinema release in May.

Sam Riley (Control, Maleficent) plays Tom, a long-time British resident on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, where he coaches tennis to the guests at a second-rank resort hotel. In his forties, with no partner or children, Tom still lives like a rootless young bachelor: drinking too much, partying too hard, and occasionally having causal sex hook-ups with tourists. From the outside, he seems to be enjoying a fantasy life of endless sunshine and unlimited hedonism, with zero commitments and zero problems. No regrets, he ritually tells himself, although he is clearly coasting on past glories, with an air of quiet desperation behind his brittle bravado.

Tom is initially resistant when a younger English couple, Anne (Stacy Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing), enlist him to give their seven-year-old son Anton (Dylan Torrell) tennis lessons. Reformed ravers who now find their lives stifled by parenthood and a dysfunctional marriage, the pair latch onto Tom for different reasons. After a brazenly flirtatious Anne persuades him to act as an unofficial tour guide to the island, Dave drags Tom out on a vodka-soaked nightclub crawl that ends very badly.

The next morning, Dave has vanished without trace, having possibly tumbled into the sea in a drunken haze. As anxiety turns to panic, Anne calls in the police, but she soon becomes oddly flippant about the strong likelihood her husband may be dead. Even as officers trawl the coastline looking for a body, she sips Martinis, basks in the blazing sun, and anoints Tom as unofficial stepdad to Anton.

Gesrster keeps us guessing about his central mystery, playing with the grammar of film noir, dropping ominous hints, chasing red herrings. Are we witnessing a suicide story? A murder mystery? A tragic accident? An innocent man targeted by malign psychopaths in the classic tradition of Hitchcock or Highsmith? Do Tom and Anne have a secret shared past that his booze-pickled memory has erased? The erotic tension between them certainly suggests ulterior motives at play, while the mounting body of evidence around Dave’s disappearance is soon ringing alarm bells.

But just as Islands seems to shift into horror-on-holiday mode, Gerster takes a detour into more nuanced psychological terrain, ruminating on alienation, midlife angst and missed opportunities. In his press notes, the director cites Edward Hopper and Anton Chekhov as influences on the film’s lonesome, yearning mood. While some may feel short-changed by this low-voltage finale, other will appreciate subtle emotional shading instead of tragic melodrama.

Spanning  more than two hours, Islands rambles a little too much in its mid-section, and leaves a few plot threads unresolved. But Fuerteventura’s rugged coastline, desert sandscapes and radiant sunsets are all gifts to Gerster and his team, lending the film a naturally widescreen visual grandeur. With his rangy, dishevelled, rock-star-handsome looks, Riley is also a key feature of the film’s elemental canvas. Playing a man of few words, his performance is impressively introverted, conveying hidden wounds with haunted looks and defensive body language. Dascha Dauenhauer’s flowing orchestral score adds another classy, timeless touch.

Director: Jan-Ole Gerster
Screenwriters: Jan-Ole Gerster, Blaz Kutin, Lawrie Doran
Cast: Sam Riley, Stacy Martin, Jack Farthing, Dylan Torrell, Pep Ambròs, Bruna Cusí, Ramiro Blas, Ahmed Boulane, Fatima Adoum
Cinematography: Juan Sarmiento
Editing: Matthew Newman, Antje Zynga
Music: Dascha Dauenhauer
Producers: Jonas Katzenstein, Maximilian Leo
Pruduction company: Augenschein Filmproduktion
World sales: Protagonist
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special Gala)
In English, Spanish
123 minutes

Mickey 17 boasts dazzling visuals, blockbuster dimensions and a stellar international cast headlined by Robert Pattinson, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Ackie and Steven Yeung. Typically for Bong, it fizzes with energy and touches on deeper sociopolitical themes. But it also suffers from many of the same blind spots as the director’s previous English-language work, weighed down by too much strained slapstick humour, lost-in-translation dialogue, exaggerated caricatures and superfluous subplots. It feels loud, starry and critic-proof enough to attract big audiences, but devotees of Parasite will be disappointed. If that film was Bong for adults, this is Bong for adolescent fanboys. Following its Berlin film festival premiere, it opens in Korea on February 28, followed by an international roll-out through March and April.

Based on Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey 7, this is Bong’s first non-original adaptation since Snowpiercer (2013), a troubled production with which it shares some stylistic and thematic parallels. Both are satirical dystopian thrillers about tightly enclosed future societies run on strictly hierarchical class lines by authoritarian leaders, with the lower orders portrayed as disposable grunts and the rulers as decadent sociopaths.

Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, a hapless shlub on the run from an all-powerful, notoriously sadistic gangster. Figuring his only survival option is to leave Earth altogether, he signs up to work as an “expendable” on a deep-space colonising mission to the far-away planet Niflheim. The work entails Mickey becoming a human lab rat on the ship, consenting to be repeatedly killed in a series of medical experiments and high-risk tasks, only to be revived again through a special “printer” which reconstructs his body, mind and digitally stored memories from scratch. This in an inspired premise, and these opening scenes are the strongest in the film, playing on the same kind of existential concerns as left-field classics like Groundhog Day (1993), Moon (2009) or Edge of Tomorrow (2014).

Mickey finds love on the spaceship in the form of Nasha (Ackie), a super-hot Intergalactic Pixie Dream Girl. But he also falls foul of the colonising mission’s vainglorious leader Marshall (Ruffalo), a failed politician with a fascistic messiah complex, and his wife Ylfa (Collette) an unhinged Lady Macbeth obsessed with culinary sauce ingredients. While Collette’s shrill performance recalls Tilda Swinton’s gargoyle diva in Snowpiercer, this grotesque power couple are clearly modelled on Donald and Melania Trump. Alas, Mickey 17 was filmed long before the felon-in-chief scored his shock second election victory, and these scathing jabs feel more bitterly ironic than prophetic. Both performances are also pitched at maximum dastardly clown level, and thus never feel remotely menacing, more like over-the-top stage villains designed to draw Pavlovian boos and hisses.

Once the colonising mission arrives on snowy Niflheim, Bong slackens the suspense lever a little too far. Mickey has a close encounter with the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, slithering gastropods clothed in armadillo-like skins, who look ferocious but prove to be surprisingly benign. Left for dead in an icy ravine, he returns to the ship to find he has already been reprinted as Mickey 18 (Pattinson again), a more ruthless doppelganger who instantly becomes his mortal enemy due to some pointlessly contrived back story about “multiples” being strictly illegal. Meanwhile, Nasha shrugs off the danger and proposes a kinky threesome with both Mickeys. Almost as if she were the fantasy creation of a male screenwriter.

Mickey 17 is rich in classy ingredients: a starry ensemble cast doing their best with cartoonish roles, world-class production design, luscious cinematography and high-end visual effects, particularly the superbly finessed scenes featuring double helpings of Pattinson. But its final act is fatally low on tension or narrative logic, lost in a knotty tangle of random subplots and wildly implausible twists. Marshall hatches a genocidal scheme to exterminate the harmless extra-terrestrials, for reasons Bong never really makes clear, aside from Ylfa viewing them as potential sauce ingredients. Meanwhile, former friends becomes enemies and vice versa, key characters stumble into dumb traps, crucial messages are relayed using coded terms for sexual positions, and audience patience is tested to the limit. Bong is a modern cinematic master, but this maximalist muddle gives full vent to both his strengths and his flaws.

Director, screenwriter: Bong Joon-ho, based on the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo, Holliday Grainger, Anamaria Vartolomei, Thomas Turgoose, Tim Key, Cameron Britton
Cinematography: Darius Khondji
Editing: Yang Jinmo
Music: Jung Jaeil
Sound design: Tae Young Choi
Production design: Fiona Crombie
Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Bong Joon Ho, Dooho Choi
Production companies: Plan B Entertainment (US), Offscreen (Korea), Kate STreet Pictures (US)
World sales: Warners
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special)
In English
137 minutes

Revolving around a secretive movie star’s seduction of a runaway teenager on and off the set of a cinematic adaptation of The Snow Queen, Hadžihalilovic transforms a sliver of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale into a slow-moving and stone-cold nightmare. Despite a solid performance from newcomer Clara Pacini and suitably ominous imagery, the Berlinale competition entry is too rugged and forbidding to grant the auteur the festival acclaim she received for her previous film, Earwig.

In hindsight, The Snow Queen could easily be considered a proto-feminist text. Turning the Prince Charming formula on its head, the fairytale features a young woman’s emergence into mature adulthood through her heroic search and rescue of her soulmate with donors and helpers who are nearly entirely female. This would seem fertile ground, then, for a filmmaker whose first film is a sharp allegory about grooming in a patriarchal society. But bar an attempt to highlight women’s contributions to predominantly male realms – the work of female assistant directors, make-up artists and continuity supervisors are very much seen and heard here – The Ice Tower isn’t that kind of film.

Using only a small part of the source material – that is, the meeting between young Gerda and the Snow Queen – Hadžihalilovic and co-writer Geoff Cox have fashioned something akin to a cross between Nosferatu and Sunset Boulevard/All About Eve with a narrative playing at half speed and the ennui dialed up to 11. In fact, with its story revolving around a film shoot, on-screen nods to other classics (the protagonist Jeanne’s resemblance to her burnt-at-the-stake namesake; a very visible glimpse of a poster of The Red Shoes) and a near-comical cameo from an almost unrecognisable Gaspar Noé, Hadžihalilovic’s latest outing is more a metatextual exercise than anything else.

While cinephiles might revel in all this, The Ice Tower ends up being a cold and forbidding affair. Bolstered by Jonathan Ricquebourg’s camerawork, the film’s first 15 minutes offer riveting imagery aplenty, as we see the protagonist descend snow-capped alpine slopes and venture into a small wintry town with its dimly lit, mysterious marble-clad arcades. But the aura soon gives way to lethargy as the action unfolds in the film shoot within the film, despite the best efforts of Cotillard and Pacini to inject frisson into their budding push-pull relationship.

In her first leading role, Pacini plays Jeanne, the eldest of a group of orphans from a far-flung foster home in the French Alps in the 1970s. Fleeing an impoverished lifestyle that seems to have remain unchanged since Andersen’s times in the 19^th century, the teenager finds herself homeless and terrified by the menacing presence of the men in town. Seeking food and somewhere warm to sleep, she breaks into a building and dozes off, waking up to find herself in the midst of the shoot of a Snow Queen movie.

Recruited by a sympathetic production assistant as an extra, Jeanne – who has rechristened herself as Bianca (“white”), the name of the owner of a handbag she picked up on the street – quickly captures the attention of Cristina van der Berg (Cotillard), the production’s tantrum-throwing, drug-taking star. Taking the teenager under her wing, the diva schemes to help her young charge climb the ranks in the shoot. At first delighted to have found a kindred spirit and a surrogate mother, Jeanne gradually discovers the price to pay for the frosty Queen Bee’s protection and bestowment of prestige.

While promoting Innocence in 2004, Hadžihalilovic declined repeatedly to explain the film’s obscure narrative, saying how she would prefer to leave it to the audience to read what they like into the story. It’s something the director won’t have to contend with this time round, as she has offered something that doesn’t really have that much room for interpretation. Rather than being some coded critique about the fascination with youth in showbusiness and society, or an allegory about society’s cannibalism and exploitation of the young, The Ice Tower is simply about a fatal attraction gone awfully wrong. Beyond the chilly and admittedly glittery surface, there’s insufficient feeling to engage or perturb the viewer – something the best of fairytales should always do.

Director: Lucile Hadžihalilovic
Screenwriters: Lucile Hadžihalilovic, Geoff Cox
Producer: Muriel Merlin
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl, Gaspar Noe
Director of photography: Jonathan Ricquebourg
Editors: Nassim Gordji Tehrani
Production designer: Julia Irriabarria
Sound designers: Ken Yasumoto, Etienne Haug
Production companies: 3B Productions
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Competition)
In French
118 minutes

Set in a near future where those over 75 are rounded up in “wrinkle wagons” and forcibly deported to remote colonies for the elderly, The Blue Trail (O ultimo azul) explores current attitudes toward the weakest members of Brazilian society behind a shield of fantasy. Following in the sci-fi/fantasy footsteps of the director’s last two films, Neon Bull and Divine Love, Mascaro and co-screenwriter Tibério Azul once again choose the path of heightened reality to attack social inequality.  The film’s strong stance in favor of personal freedom, against ageism and for the power of women should help audiences forgive a general lack of narrative excitement.

The opening scenes have a Big-Brother-is-watching  tone that is chilling as well as mocking. Tereza, a 77-year-old factory worker with long gray locks, returns home to her wooden shanty on a tributary of the Amazon to find giant golden laurels nailed festively over her door. They are followed by the presentation of a gold medal, again a government homage to celebrate her venerable age. The next day she is dismissed from her job and briefly told to report to the municipal authorities with her daughter. There she is ordered to a transport area for relocation to a retirement community.

Tereza, who raised kids as a single mom and worked two jobs all her life, feels fine and doesn’t want to go to the colonies from which no one ever returns. But everyone appears to be in cahoots against her. Her daughter is to receive a monthly check to ensure her cooperation, the police will make sure she gets on the bus, she can no longer buy bus or plane tickets without her daughter’s authorization, and snitches are everywhere in case she tries to hide. It looks like retirement prison is her only option. But Tereza is much smarter and cooler than she first appears.

Veteran actress Denise Weinberg brings a grouchy, down-to-earth appeal to the role of the rebellious woman society wants to forget, making Tereza’s spontaneous resistance plausible and worth a cheer. When handed a thick pack of diapers she doesn’t need by a social worker, she uses them to pull a fast one over the bus driver and disappears into the night. Her ability to think fast and keep a straight face saves her time and again as she goes on the run, seeking a last fling of freedom before she’s put out to pasture.

She would like to fly on an airplane, for instance. As this wish bubbles to the surface of consciousness, Tereza sets off to make it happen.

Brazil’s Amazon region makes a visually and symbolically impactful backdrop to the rest of the film. Unable to travel in normal ways, she bribes a young man with a river boat, Cadu (star Rodrigo Santoro), to take her upriver to a field of ultra-light planes, but things start to go south even before they get there. Santoro is hard to recognize in his unwashed, unkempt state as a broken-hearted river bum, but he springs to life after tripping on the blue slime of a rare snail, said to reveal the future to adepts.

Tereza’s other notable meeting is with “the Nun”, a happy-go-lucky elderly woman who owns her own river boat and earns a good living selling digital Bibles to the simple folk along the river (she herself, she tells Tereza, doesn’t believe in God). Her big reveal, however, is how she has “bought” a certificate that keeps her out of the old folks’ colonies; as she explains, the rich don’t follow the same rules as the poor. Miriam Socarras is sheer genius in this laid-back role.

Working with a new D.P., Guillermo Garza, Mascaro pulls away from the hot psychedelic neons that so strongly characterize Neon Bull and Divine Love, replacing their abstraction with the luscious greens of nature and watery hues of the mighty Amazon. Banishing the predictable panorama shots (apart from some stunning overhead shots of the serpentine river), he selects a homey square frame to bring human beings closer together. The ironic beat of Memo Guerra’s sassy music score adds character.

Director: Gabriel Mascaro
Screenwriter: Gabriel Mascaro, Tibério Azul
Producers: Rachel Daisy Ellis, Sandino Saravia Vinay
Cast: Denise Weinberg, Rodrigo Santoro, Miriam Socarras, Adanilo
Cinematography: Guillermo Garza
Production design: Dayse Barreto
Editing: Omar Guzman, Sebastian Sepulveda
Music: Memo Guerra
Sound design: Maria Alejandra Rojas, Arturo Salazar
Production companies: Desvia (Brazil), Cinevinay (Mexico) in association with Quijote Films (Chile), Viking Film (Netherlands)
World sales: Lucky Number (France)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In Portuguese
86 minutes

The show in question was keyboard maestro Keith Jarrett’s largely improvised solo piano performance at Cologne Opera House in January 1975, a high-risk late-night event organised by precocious 18-year-old promoter Vera Brandes. It was almost cancelled in a perfect storm of crossed wires and technical problems, but later went down in history as a much-loved high watermark of contemporary music. Punctuated with Jarrett’s ecstatic sighs and impassioned groans, the live recording later became both the biggest-selling solo jazz album and solo piano album of all time, with sales of four million and counting.

The real Jarrett declined to co-operate on Köln 75, denying the film-makers use of his music. Partially paralysed following a series of strokes, the notoriously exacting 79-year-old has virtually disowned his most celebrated hit album over the decades. Fluk largely sidesteps this problem by training his focus on Brandes, a spirited young proto-feminist battling against parental disapproval and industry sexism to carve herself a place in the German music scene. The end result is a big-hearted film, a little heavy-handed in places but full of charm, celebrating not just the power of music but also the giddy idealism of youth. World premiering at the Berlinale, it is set for German theatrical release next month. The album’s 50th anniversary, which is also being celebrated in an upcoming documentary, should help give this likeable underdog yarn a boost with audiences beyond the jazz cognoscenti.

Multiple accounts of these events have already entered jazz folklore, but Köln 75 distils the essentials, drawing on first-hand input from Brandes herself. After an exhausting overnight car journey from Switzerland, the cash-strapped Jarrett (John Magaro) and his laconic tour manager Manfred Eicher (Alexander Scheer) turn up at Cologne opera house to find a smaller, inferior, partially broken rehearsal piano on stage instead of the full-sized Bösendorfer Imperial they were promised. When they threaten to cancel the show, Brandes snaps into panic mode, trying to hire a replacement piano at short notice, then calling in a pair of emergency technicians to fix the smaller instrument. After much tough-talking and arm-twisting, Jarrett grudgingly agrees to play, partly because a sound engineer was already booked to record it for possible album release. Against the odds, his emotionally charged hour-long performance becomes a sold-out triumph, scoring him a huge hit and helping to establish Brandes as a major player on the German music scene.

Rich in colourful period detail, Köln 75 boasts strong production design, even if it sometimes falls into the common biopic trap of repainting the past in broad strokes as a soapy historical pageant. Magaro does a respectful imitation of Jarrett, nervy and world-weary, but the emotional heart of this story is Emde’s fizzing screen energy as the young Brandes. Alongside her budding career as a promoter, the film also chronicles her fractious relationship with her stern father (Ulrich Tukur), a straight-laced dentist perpetually disappointed at his daughter’s disreputable “jazz bunny” image. Fluk also explores her wider bohemian 1970s milieu of soft drugs, wild parties, political activism, permissive sex and jealous lovers. “What happened to you?” a medic asks after a violent boyfriend leaves her bruised. “The patriarchy,” she quips.

The most impressive formal flourishes in Köln 75 are pure fabrications – or should that be improvisations? Always an enjoyably impish presence on screen, Michael Chernus (Severance, A Complete Unknown) plays a wry chorus role as fictionalised jazz journalist Michael Watts, who essentially stalks Jarrett on his European tour dates, pestering him for an interview that never quite comes together. There are echoes of Cameron Crowe’s sentimental rock chronicle Almost Famous (2000) in these comedic scenes, but Chernus/Watts is most engaging when he breaks the fourth wall to address viewers directly with mini-lectures on musical technique and history. In one bravura sequence, framed as a single mobile shot, he breaks down the evolution of jazz as a kind of Zen journey from structured maximalism to free-form minimalism.

Fluk’s parting shot is a sweet coda featuring the real Brandes alongide her two screen doubles, Emde and Susanne Wolff, who plays her at 50 in a handful of time-jumping scenes. Now 68, Brandes has built a formidable career since her teenage breakthrough, from concert promoter to record producer, label boss, academic and music therapist. Brief, carefully framed archive clips of the real Jarrett playing with Miles Davis and other jazz legends add an extra layer of docu-drama meta-realism.

Director, screenwriter: Ido Fluk
Cast: Mala Emde, John Magaro, Michael Chernus, Alexander Scheer, Ulrich Tukur, Jördis Triebel, Susanne Wolff, Enno Trebs, Shirin Lilly Eissa, Leo Meier
Cinematography: Jens Harant
Editing: Anja Siemens
Music: Hubert Walkowski
Sound design: Frederik van de Moortel
Production design: Jutta Freyer
Producers: Sol Bondy, Fred Burle
Production company: One Two Films (Germany)
World sales: Bankside Films, London
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Special Gala)
In German, English
116 minutes