Masafer Yatta is a community of small Palestinian villages at the south-eastern edge of the Occupied Territories. While it appears on Apple Maps (as Musafer Yatta), it’s absent from Google Maps, and only by typing in the names of some of the hamlets do they appear. This shouldn’t be surprising given that Israel has long considered these villages, and their populations, to be erasable.

Shooting on No Other Land began in 2019, when evictions were picking up speed, and it ends presciently in October 2023, shortly after Hamas atrocities were followed by Israel’s murderous juggernaut. The importance of this documentary, made by two Palestinian and two Israeli activists, is in its documentation of the Zionist plan to eliminate the Palestinian presence long before October 7th. This comes as no surprise of course, but for Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal and Yuval Abraham, the only way to combat their sense of total helplessness is by recording the ongoing appropriation of land and brutal treatment of its inhabitants.

The filming can be rough – Israeli soldiers don’t care for cameras even when those holding them declare that they’re journalists – but the editing dexterously finds a balance, no easy feat given the uncertainty of where this was going as well as the speed with which it had to have been put together in order to make the Berlinale premiere. At the center of it all is Basel Adra, a law student turned activist who can only find employment in construction on the other side of the Israeli wall. Basel is co-director/writer/editor, occasional narrator, and the weary, clear-eyed witness to army and settler incursions (often hand-in-hand). No matter the families here have title deeds to the land, which they’ve litigated for decades; long before Benjamin Netanyahu became Prime Minister, the government has been trying to push the owners out, claiming the army needs the area for military exercises.

In the summer of 2019, as some families are evicted and forced to live in caves, Basel meets Yuval Abraham, an Arabic-speaking inexperienced Israeli journalist looking to document what his country is doing. In contrast to Basel, Yuval is naïve and impatient, with a bit of a savior complex: he’s come to help the Palestinians get justice. At the start, he’s the well-meaning ally who doesn’t really understand the cavernous divide between someone who can dip in and out, returning to their comfortable homes on the other side of the Wall, and those who are trapped inside and fighting to hold on to what’s theirs. Impressively, Yuval sticks it out (he’s co-director/writer/editor), less weary than Basel who’s living the Occupation daily, but with time he becomes more realistic about the situation.

Together they document the Israeli Army’s encroaching land expropriation, such as the military’s destruction of a generator, with tragic consequences when Harun Abu Aram is shot and paralyzed from the neck down. In 2020, the villagers are told they can no longer drive in the region, then in 2021 the chicken houses are destroyed (with the animals inside), and in 2022 the school is bulldozed. None of this should have been unanticipated: early on, Basel expresses the hope that documenting these violations of international law will push the U.S. to pressure Israel and ease the Occupation, but of course the U.S. has always been fully aware of what’s happening, occasionally rapping a few knuckles while continuing to supply Israel with weapons. Towards the film’s end, when the army trashes the irrigation pipes (thus helping the ever-growing Settlements water their lawns), any illusions have long been replaced by the onslaught of reality.

The coda brings things to October 2023, when settlers feel no restraint in attacking West Bank Palestinians following Israel’s ongoing attempt to wipe out the entire population of Gaza. There is no happy ending here, no comforting ray of hope in a dark time. Only the urgent voices of people driven from their homes or killed, and the exhausted chroniclers who know they can’t give up.

Directors, screenwriters: Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham
With: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Nasser Adra, Harun Abu Aram
Producers: Fabien Greenberg, Bård Kjøge Rønning, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Cinematography: Rachel Szor
Editing: Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham
Music: Julius Pollux Rothlaender
Sound: Bård Harazi Farbu
Production companies: Yabayay Media (Palestine), Antipode Films (Norway)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama Documentary)
In Arabic, Hebrew, English
95 minutes

As a devoted couple for more than forty years, Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) and Pat (Li) have an easy-going, loving rapport with well-defined – and rather stereotyped – roles: long-haired Angie is the feminine one, warmly nurturing and uninvolved in the practicalities of quotidian life, while the equally convivial short-haired Pat handles the business side of things. They’re close with Pat’s side of the family, specifically her underachieving brother Shing (Tai Bo), his pinched wife Mei (Hui So Ying) and their twentysomething kids, Uber driver Victor (Leung Chung Hang) and disgruntled Fanny (Fish Liew Chi Yu), in a sexless marriage with Sum (Lai Chai Ming). Unlike Shing’s unfulfilled clan, Pat and Angie have an easy retirement and are unreserved in their generosity, delighting in the life they’ve built for themselves.

Then Pat dies one evening and Angie is understandably bereft. She also finds herself in a precarious position because Pat never completed a will, which means that Shing is the heir to his sister’s estate since same-sex partnerships have no legal standing in Hong Kong. Signs that Angie is being sidelined come swiftly: Mei takes over handling the funeral arrangements, insisting that her Feng Shui master Yu (Jimmy Wong Wa Wo) knows that a columbarium will appease Pat’s spirit despite Angie’s insistence that her lover wanted her ashes scattered at sea. Caving to the pressure, Angie is distressingly pushed to the back during the interment and shortly thereafter discovers that she has no right to stay in the apartment she’s lived in for the past three decades.

Once the premise is set up, the only question mark is whether nice but wishy-washy Victor will grow a pair and side with Angie against his parents and sister. Yeung makes sure to include a few necessary scenes with some of Angie and Pat’s friends, ensuring his protagonist isn’t entirely isolated and without emotional support, but the dialogue consistently rings false. Conversations are designed to inform the viewer, verbalizing the rapport between this loving couple rather than reproducing the kind of uncontrived, natural chit chat partners exchange after decades of being together, unencumbered by explanations. Au and Li are such fine actors that they still convey this couple’s depth of feeling, and Yeung is exceptionally good at working with his performers and trusting their instincts.

Hong Kong can be a difficult city to warm to, and the director with his d.o.p. Leung Ming Kai don’t try to prettify its congestion and architectural blandness, especially in relation to Shing’s brood, which nicely reinforces the freer and greener world that Angie and Pat, through their love and positive outlook on life, have built so carefully for themselves. All Shall Be Well is a nice film but Yeung himself seems too nice to make the uncongenial title as ironic as it should be, and while movies about this underserved demographic and the life-destroying awfulness of exclusionary, archaic laws are welcome additions to the LGBTQ+ cinema landscape, one wants just a little bit more to make it genuinely affecting.

Director: Ray Yeung
Screenplay: Ray Yeung, Stan Guingon
Cast: Patra Au Ga Man, Maggie Li Lin Lin, Tai Bo, Hui So Ying, Leung Chung Hang, Fish Liew Chi Yu, Li Lal Ha, Rachel Leung Yung Ting, Luna Shaw Mei Kwan, Gia Yu Yuk Wah, Lai Chai Ming, Jimmy Wong Wa Wo.
Producers: Michael J. Werner, Teresa Kwong, Sandy Yip, Chowee Leow
Executive producers: Ray Yeung, Stan Guingon
Co-producers: Denise Tang, Windaus Chan
Cinematography: Leung Ming Kai
Production designer: Albert Poon Yick Sum
Costume designer: Albert Poon Yick Sum
Editing: Lai Kwun Tung
Music: Veronica Lee
Sound: Tu Duun Chih, Chiang Yi Chen
Production companies: New Voice Film Productions (Hong Kong), Mise en Scene Film Production
World sales: Films Boutique
Venue: Berlinale (Panorama)
In Cantonese
93 minutes

Although Small Things was widely admired as a quietly devastating take-down of the Catholic Church’s power in Ireland, and Emily Watson won the Best Supporting Performance award, it signaled that this was not going to be a year of joyful movies and glamorous galas. For one thing, the well-liked team of executive director Mariette Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian, who arrived at the Berlinale in 2020 and negotiated the difficult years of the pandemic, are stepping down amid soaring costs that challenge the festival to continue operating on its current €29 million budget. They will be replaced by Tricia Tuttle, former director of the BFI London Film Festival, and their imminent departure cast an end-of-school-year atmosphere over the festival that seemed reflected in less exciting programming.

Bizarrely, it was the closing awards ceremony that created a real drama and a political flurry that has rocked the pro-Israel German government. As might be expected at a world forum like the Berlinale, there were several statements made on stage by prize-winners in support of the Palestinians under Israeli attack in Gaza.

Showing how close to the surface the war in Gaza is, the Berlinale Documentary Award, as well as the Panorama Documentary Audience Award, went to a film about the destruction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, No Other Land. When two of the film’s four directors, Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, went on stage and denounced the “slaughter and massacre” of Palestinians in Gaza, calling on the German government to stop sending weapons to Israel, among those seen applauding was minister of culture Claudia Roth. The following day there was much back-pedaling by Roth and other officials like Berlin mayor Kai Wegner, who called the pro-Palestinian remarks “antisemitic” because they didn’t mention the role of Hamas in the war. One political party called for the government to suspend the festival’s financing, while Yuval Abraham received over 100 death threats on social media. The political fallout is ongoing and its long-term effect on the festival unknown.

While the Berlinale remained avidly attended, especially in the Cubix and Zoo Palast screening rooms, its central hub in Potsdamer Platz was once again a bit of a wasteland. This has been an issue since 2020, when CineStar closed its doors permanently and the Arkaden mall (now The Playce) was out of order due to renovations. This year, with the Sony Center basically reduced to a construction site (though the underground Arsenal cinema still hosted Forum screenings) and the CinemaxX still partly unusable and restricted to press screenings only, the general audience was largely absent from the main festival area, save for the three daily gala screenings in the Berlinale Palast.

The Programming Side

On the programming side, one could sense that Carlo Chatrian and his team, knowing they were on the way out, decided to be bolder than usual, at least when it came to the competition. Even just last year, titles like Architecton and Pepe would have felt more at home in the Encounters section, one of the highlights of the Chatrian era. Many members of the press wonder whether the section will survive under the incoming new management, or go the way of now-defunct sidebars like Culinary Cinema and Perspektive Deutsches Kino (despite having better attendance figures than both of them).

A glance at this year’s competition confirms that elevated genre cinema was unusually prominent this year, with major U.S. indie powerhouse A24 fielding a wide range of titles at the festival, while various U.S. and European art house auteurs took a bold sideways detour into science fiction, horror-adjacent drama and dystopian fantasy. The Silver Bear Jury Prize went to French director Bruno Dumont’s deranged but ambitious The Empire, a visually stunning blend of small-town seaside farce and epic space opera, while Sebastian Stan picked up the Best Lead Performance prize for his multi-faceted role in A Different Man, Aaron Schimberg’s darkly funny Kakfa-meets-Kaufman satire on beauty standards and ableism. A potent proto-feminist historical thriller dressed up in eerie folk-horror tropes, The Devil’s Bath by Austrian duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala also won a Silver Bear for cinematographer Martin Gschlact.

Not all these arty genre experiments hit the target, however. Italian director Piero Massini’s glum sci-fi fable Another End, starring Gael Garcia Bernal as a grieving man who takes advantage of advanced medical science to bring back his ex-lover in a different body, was an interesting idea ruined by its baffling and ponderous treatment. Johan Renck’s Netflix-bound Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler as a Czech deep-space astronaut receiving marriage guidance counselling from a giant extraterrestrial spider, also wasted a fine cast and superlative production design by taking itself far too seriously. Conclusion: Tarkovsky, Malick and Christopher Nolan are all fine directors, but their enduring influence on lesser film-making talents who ape their style is frequently disastrous.

The main jury headed by Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o were clearly drawn to a wide assortment of films, and despite some highly controversial prizes to the likes of the sexy sci-fi delirium The Empire, the confused story of a talking hippo Pepe, and a  minor-key Hong Sang-soo (A Traveller’s Needs), they found an excellent choice for the Golden Bear in Mati Diop’s thought-provoking documentary on looted cultural artefacts, Dahomey, which touched on increasingly thorny issues around the legacy of colonialism. Among the German hopefuls, Matthias Glasner’s Dying was a critical favorite until the end, and received the Best Screenplay nod. Another much-liked film was the tragi-comic Iranian rom-com My Favourite Cake, whose directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha were banned from travelling to Berlin by the Iranian authorities. The film won the Fipresci Critics’ Award for competition and the Ecumenical Award.

Short Films in Competition

The top prize for Berlinale Shorts was scooped by Francisco Lezama’s An Odd Turn, the strange tale of a museum security guard whose life takes a series of unexpected directions. Far more quotidian was Wenqian Zhang’s Remains of the Hot Day which described the lunchtime of a single family in 1990’s China, filled with snippets of detail evoking the director’s own childhood memories.

In that vein, there were several short films that engaged with documentary form or non-fiction aesthetics to interesting ends. Eva Konnemann’s That’s All from Me, which got a special mention from the jury, included a documentary-like short-with-a-short about birdwatching to further explore the themes between its two fictional protagonists. Yuyan Wang’s The Moon Also Rises used documentary footage but re-framed it within a science fiction scenario by creating a new context around what was happening. Elsewhere, Boris Dewjatkin’s City Museum / My Paradise and Gala Hernandez Lopez’s for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world employed an essayistic approach to explore the filmmaker’s experience of the urban space of Berlin and the future-gambling nature of cryptocurrency and cryogenics.

The Political Mood

In terms of the general political mood in Berlin, it was the ominous week in which Alexei Navalny, the courageous Russian dissident and leader of the opposition to Putin, was killed in an Arctic prison camp. A memorial of flowers and lamps sprang up in front of the Russian embassy on the central Unter den Linden street, next to a standing protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The festival also made a feeble effort to address the ongoing war in Gaza, planting a wooden shack on wheels, the so-called Tiny Space, in front of the Red Carpet for three days, where festival-goers were encouraged to talk about Israel and Palestine. Though the idea might have been good for opening a door, the execution was problematic and felt almost like a PR move for the benefit of the festival’s government sponsors. The urge to “talk it out”, besides assuming that the two sides of the conflict are equal, belittled how complicated the issue is, while it ignored Germany’s involvement in the conflict and the role of German institutions in silencing pro-Palestine voices (even Jewish ones)  in the press, culture, and academia.

Meanwhile, the film program continued to address the ongoing conflict in Ukraine with moving, nuanced, personal documentaries from mostly female Ukrainian directors, notably Intercepted and A Bit of a Stranger.

The Future of the Festival

Concern for the Berlinale’s future goes much deeper than whether new director Tricia Tuttle will be able to bring splashy Hollywood titles to Berlin. Major stars will certainly attract more sponsors, which is crucial given how the festival has been hemorrhaging benefactors in the past few years.

Significantly compounding the issue is that the war in Ukraine has propelled the German government to divert funds from culture to the military, threatening every institution in the culture sector that relies on federal grants. The writing was on the wall this year when festival organizers were told there was no money for the Retrospective, and while the resourceful Rainer Rother managed to put together an excellent program by tapping the fee-free riches of the Deutsches Kinemathek, it’s indicative of just how precarious state sponsorship can be when the trumpets of war are sounding nearby.  All cultural institutions are bracing themselves for significantly greater budget cuts, leading many insiders to wonder how the Berlinale will manage to maintain its position. Yes, more Hollywood names will help attract corporate backers, but can Tuttle bring in enough to halt the sense of a festival in decline? Given the tepid programming of recent years, plus the hollowing out of Potsdamer Platz and significant financial concerns, the new director has quite a task ahead of her.

GOLDEN BEAR for Best Film to:
Dahomey
by Mati Diop

SILVER BEAR – GRAND JURY PRIZE to:
A Traveller’s Needs
by Hong Sang-soo

SILVER BEAR – JURY PRIZE to:
The Empire
by Bruno Dumont

SILVER BEAR for BEST DIRECTOR to:
Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias
for the film Pepe 

SILVER BEAR for BEST LEADING PERFORMANCE to:
Sebastian Stan
for the film A Different Man

SILVER BEAR for BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE to:
Emily Watson
for the film Small Things Like These

SILVER BEAR for BEST SCREENPLAY to:
Mattias Glaser
for the film Dying

SILVER BEAR for BEST ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTION to:
Cinematography by Martin Gschlact
in the film The Devil’s Bath

ENCOUNTERS  

BEST FILM
Direct Action
by Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell

BEST DIRECTOR
Juliana Rojas
for the film Cidade: Campo

SPECIAL JURY AWARD (ex-aequo)
The Great Yawn of History
by Aliyar Rasti

Some Rain Must Fall
by Qiu Yang

BERLINALE DOCUMENTARY AWARD
No Other Land
by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor

Special mention to:
Direct Action
by Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell

GWFF BEST FIRST FEATURE
Cu Li Never Cries
by Pham Ngoc Lân

SHORT FILMS

GOLDEN BEAR for BEST SHORT FILM
An Odd Turn
By Francisco Lezama

SILVER BEAR JURY PRIZE (SHORT FILM)
Remains of the Hot Day
by Wenqian Zhang

SPECIAL MENTION
That’s All from Me
by Eva Konnemann

PANORAMA AUDIENCE AWARD
Memories of a Burning Body
by Antonella Sudasassi Furniss

PANORAMA DOCUMENTARY AUDIENCE AWARD
No Other Land
By Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor

FIPRESCI CRITICS’ AWARD – Competition
My Favorite Cake
by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha

TEDDY AWARD – Feature Film
All Shall Be Well
by Ray Yeung

Or perhaps more accurately, it is a speculative resource – a shifting imaginary to be exploited in vastly different ways. “I believe in the future,” explains the voice of Hal Finney (Joseph Grossi) a real-life player in the history of Bitcoin but here a conjuration in the dream of the film’s unnamed narrator (voiced by Olivia Delcan). Her dream imagines a future in which there has been a crypto-currency collapse and, as a result, many people have undertaken cryogenic suspension to wait out the economic catastrophe.

The narrator observes the similar way they are still banking on the future, however – in both cases, people are crossing their fingers for some change to transform their fortunes. In the case of Finney, who the narrator meets in this dream, he was not just a key figure in early crypto but has also been cryogenically frozen since 2014. In its wandering essayistic meditation on these intersecting ideas, Hernandez Lopez’s film tries to wrestle with how such notions of suspended animation figure into a present in which people feel such deep uncertainty about the future.

It is through its audio narration that the film primarily does this, but Hernandez Lopez employs a dual-screen visual method that is perhaps more redolent of moving image installation than cinema presentation. Through a variety of found and created footage – from YouTube clips and archival photographs to bespoke created animation – she consistently probes at the intricacies and inconsistencies required to become in thrall to these technological promises of a better tomorrow. for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world takes you on a voyage not into the future, but into what it means and takes to bank everything on it.

Director, screenplay, editing, sound: Gala Hernandez Lopez
Cast: Olivia Delcan, Joseph Grossi
Producers: Gala Hernandez Lopez, Wuentin Brayer, Yannick Beauquis
Music: Diego Delgado
Sound design: Mathias Arrignon
Animation: Xinxin Kong
Production companies: Don Quichotte Films (France)
Venue: Berlinale (Forum Expanded)
In English
18 minutes

Chronicling a pregnant Tibetan woman’s meditative, slow-moving journey across the snow-capped Himalayas, Nepalese filmmaker Min Bahadur Bham’s second feature offers striking vistas only the widescreen could do justice. While its premise revolves around a very culture-specific polyandrous relationship, the film itself could easily be interpreted as a very universal reflection about life, love and death.

Compared to his first feature, the Venice Critics’ Week title The Black Hen, Bham’s sophomore outing is a step up in more ways than one. While his 2015 debut is a more intimate piece about the friendship of two village boys, his latest is an ambitious affair tackling the physical and emotional struggles of adults. Significantly, it is an international co-production backed by funds and resources from France, Norway, Turkey, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Qatar and the U.S.

With something as tender, immersive and accomplished as Shambhala, Bham’s standing as an emerging statesman for Nepalese cinema – and perhaps that of South Asia as a regional whole – is more or less confirmed. Featuring strong performances from his cast and the input of editor Liao Ching-sung and sound artist Tu Duu-chih – both long-time collaborators with slow-cinema specialist Hou Hsiao-hsien – Shambhala should be in the mix for the main competition awards at this year’s Berlinale.

Delivering perhaps one of most nuanced performances in competition this year, Thinley Llamo plays Pema, someone highly regarded in her community for being able to fulfil traditional expectations regarding a man and a woman. Her all-around personality is very much on show from the film’s get-go, when she agrees to a traditional polyandric marriage with three siblings. She is tenderness personified with her one true love, Tashi the eldest (Sonam Topden); amicable to the second brother Karma (Tenzin Dalha), a monk; and a rugged disciplinarian with Dawa (Karma Wangyal Gurung), a football-playing schoolboy.

Earning his living as a trader, Tashi leaves for the city on horseback soon after his marriage to do business. While he’s away, Pema becomes friendly with the unruly Dawa’s handsome and mild-mannered Nepalese schoolteacher Ram (Karma Shakya), an association which might be as pragmatic as it is unconsciously physical. That will remain a mystery, as it’s key to something that Bham has left as an ellipsis: that is, what exactly happened during a night which began with Pema and Ram talking, drinking and getting woozy.

Soon enough, Pema finds herself pregnant – a piece of good news immediately undermined by the more ominous message of Tashi’s disappearance on his way back home. Pema decides to head into the wild to look for him, thus launching – at 50 minutes, with the flash of the title card – Shambhala proper.

Having vanished very quickly in the narrative, Tashi is actually the odd man out in the marriage and merely a cipher of sorts in the narrative. The real central relationship is actually that of Pema and Karma, who accompanies her on the trip as her nominal husband. It’s hardly a surprise that their relationship will become more than just notional: Bham includes the whole relationship arc, with the pair first falling out over mishaps before slowly discovering their real selves and reconciling their bubbling emotions towards each other.

Of course, Shambhala is not some cheesy kind of romantic melodrama. The evolution of the pair’s relationship unfolds tastefully and chastely, the raciest development being Karma’s decision to abandon his monastic aspirations and become an ordinary man again. Perhaps just as importantly, Bham’s script never paints Pema into the corner and forces her to choose between the brothers: her affection for Karma hardly hinders her yearnings for Tashi, as is evident from her persistence in her journey and also her emotional shock in discovering traces of Tashi’s roller-coaster emotions towards her and his doubts about Pema’s feelings for him.

Indeed, Shambhala is a film about Pema and her discovery of her own circumstances and feelings; it’s worthy to note how she starts out the journey with company and ends it alone in quiet meditation of her own life. Aziz Jan Baki’s camerawork plays a significant role in providing imagery that befits her transitions ad transformations. In the first half, long tracking shots of Pema’s life as a wife highlight her dexterity and resilience in tackling different challenges in life. During that epic march, the static shots – cut together by editors Liao Ching-sung and Kiran Shrestha – highlight another mindset dawning on Pema.

Apart from the denouement, in which Bham decides to spell everything out in a loud family row, one that is at gladly heard but not really seen, Shambhala is an immersive affair all the way through its audacious two-hour-plus running time. The film could very well be the first step of the Nepalese filmmaker’s journey to the promised land – if he’s not there already by the time the award ceremony in Berlin comes along.

Director, producer: Min Bahadur Bham
Screenwriters: Min Bahadur Bham, Abinash Bikram Shah
Cast: Thinley Lhamo, Sonam Topden, Tenzin Dalha, Karma Wangyal Gurung
Executive producers: Debaki Rai, Liu Ching-sung, Roger Huang, Ruben Thorkildsen, Can Aygor, Salina Shakya
Director of photography: Aziz Jan Baki
Editors: Liao Ching-sung, Kiran Shrestha
Production designer: Ramlal Khadka
Music composer: Nhyoo Bajracharya
Production companies: Shooney Films, CDP, APE & Bjørn, Aaru Production, ZK Films, Yi Tiao Long Hu Bao, Bangdel and Shakya Production
World sales: Best Friend Forever
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Competition)
In Tibetan, Nepalese
150 minutes

A documentary filmmaker, Isabel Ostergaard (Charlotte Munck) is having difficulty returning to her creative work after becoming a mother. In the hope of regaining some form of inspiration, she writes to an author who reflected on her own experiences of parenthood some decades earlier, Helen During (Eleanor Forbes). The two exchange letters and then video notes before Helen suggests Isabel makes a film about bird watchers, which she duly does.

The form of the film follows the trajectory of Isabel’s own journey. When she first writes to Helen, and the latter responds, their voices are heard against a black screen. Often in the history of films without images, the lack of visual material underscores a political point, but here it is psychological – while Isabel feels blocked, the screen is too. Only upon being unlocked ever so slightly by Helen’s questions, does this shift and the second pair of messages are heard in concert with verite observational footage before culminating in a fully formed short within the short.

Through all of these, the conversations cleverly unpack the internal wranglings that Isabel has regarding motherhood and her – not quite explicitly spoken – fear that there isn’t room for both it and filmmaking within one person. Indeed, when she finally is unlocked enough to make a film about something else, it becomes about the reproductive cycles of birds and the all-consuming effort that goes into rearing young every year. That’s All from Me feels gentle enough to catch you off guard, but there is a richness to its enquiry that resonates deeply.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing, sound: Eva Konnemann
Cast: Charlotte Munck, Eleanor Forbes, Jannis Dimmlich
Production companies: Eva Konnemann Produktion (Germany)
Venue: Berlinale (Berlinale Shorts)
In English, German
23 minutes

Lishchynska, 52, was born in Mariupol and came of age in the late years of the USSR, when conformity was rigidly enforced: she was a Soviet citizen raised in a Russian-speaking household, and once the regime collapsed she promised herself to become her own woman, unshackling herself from expectations of who and what she should be. The problem is, the past has a way of reminding us that no matter how hard we try, certain shackles may be loosened but never fully severed.

Just before the war began, Lishchynska decided to make a personal documentary about her matriarchal family and the generational differences. In the mid-1990s she had a child, Sasha, but the need to assert her independence in all ways by jettisoning the constraints of Soviet conditioning led her to pursue a career in TV production in Kyiv, leaving Sasha with her mother Valentina. The guilt this engendered – bad mother syndrome – remains a deep wound which informs the entire documentary, which is very much designed to explain why, both to herself and Sasha, she had to leave her in Mariupol.

Seen now, unselfconsciously embodying the role of doting grandmother, Valentina appears to be the ideal loving granny, but Lishchynska more than hints that the easy love between her mother and her daughter skipped the middle generation. Perhaps it was the rigidity of the communist system: though firmly of Ukrainian heritage, Valentina was part of the immediate post-WWII generation programmed to accept the Russification of the entire Soviet empire, and she transmitted this to her own daughter. Only Russian was spoken at home, and independence and individuality were discouraged. This was what Lishchynska fled when she moved to Kyiv when Sasha was five, together with the fear of being a mother.

Consequently, hairstylist Sasha is far more Russified than her mother, and although she lives in Ukrainian Mariupol, her cultural and linguistic connections are closer to Moscow than Kyiv. Days before the war starts, she comes to visit her mother in Kyiv, together with her then husband (men are barely seen and never discussed), baby daughter Stefany and Valentina, but Sasha and family race back to Mariupol at the start of the invasion. For her it’s an existential crisis she’s ill-equipped to handle: she feels Russian yet knows she’s Ukrainian despite barely speaking the language. By mid-2022 she and Stefany have found refuge with a host family in London while Lishchynska and Valentina remain in Kyiv, knowing that the family apartment in Mariupol is partly destroyed.

A Bit of a Stranger feels messy but that’s built into the situation itself: three women with disparate coping mechanisms, raised in different eras, trying to make sense of a war they never anticipated. Much of the time one wonders who’s doing the filming given how raw and intimate the situations can be – press notes explain that some footage was shot by family friends, and clearly at other times Sasha or the director are holding the camera. Also included are shots of the destruction together with the eeriness of daily life in wartime. In addition, Lishchynska incorporates home movies starting with her parents’ wedding in 1968, all nicely edited by the filmmaker and Anja Zhukova, grounding memories which may have little independence outside the images. Of the three, only Valentina doesn’t fully reveal herself, but that’s her generation and her upbringing: soldier through, don’t complain, and be grateful for what you have now.

Director: Svitlana Lishchynska
Written by: Svitlana Lishchynska
With: Svitlana Lishchynska
Producer: Anna Kapustina
Co-producers: Fredrik Lange, Anthony Muir, Kristina Börjeson
Cinematography: Petro Tsymbal, Krystyna Lizohub, Ivan Fomichenko, Vlad Dergunov, Maryna Svitlychna, Denis Strashny, Anja Zhukova, Shaun Holder, Jasleen Kaur Sethi, Jack Bradley, Jack Laurenson
Editing: Svitlana Lishchynska, Anja Zhukova
Sound: Nataliia Avramenko, Erik Clauss
Production companies: Albatros Communicós (Ukraine), ZDF (Germany), Vilda Bomben Film (Sweden), Film i Väst (Sweden)
World sales: Film Harbour
Venue: Berlinale (Panorama)
In Ukrainian, Russian
90 minutes

There are echoes of his directorial debut Love and Shukla, an intimate urban drama about the ebbs and flows of a lower middle-class couple’s relationship in the stifling environment of a big city. An international co-production backed by funds from the U.S., China, Taiwan and Indonesia and featuring a slightly more multinational production crew – the most eye-catching perhaps being composer Shigeru Umebayashi, renowned for scoring Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love – In the Belly of A Tiger deserves a roaring run through the festival circuit after its premiere in the Berlin Forum.

At the centre of Belly is a family of five – the old couple Bhagole (Lawrence Francis) and Prabhata (Poonam Tiwari), their widowed son Saharsh (Sorabh Jaiswar), and his two daughters (Jyoti and Sonali) – returning to their ancestral village on the vast plains of northern India. Having sold their land years ago to relocate to the city, where they tried and failed to better their lives, they come home to find that despair has doubled during the years. Most people can no longer sustain themselves on farming and are now earning a living at the local brick factory, where they are paid a pittance and treated as disposable material.

As Saharsh joins the queue and then the toil, he experiences first-hand the exploitation and violence prevailing at the factory – and how the workers resign themselves to their sorry fate, as if it’s some kind of self-sacrifice on their part for a future they can’t see. This is mirrored in how some react to another more visceral predator in their midst: in a desperate act akin to that shown in the ancient Japanese countryside in The Ballad of Nakayama, old men are offering themselves as fodder for a prowling tiger, in the hope that their surviving families will receive some kind of compensation from the authorities.

Inevitably, that’s what Bhagole and Prabhata consider doing, as Saharsh struggles at the factory because of his frail physical state and inability to cope with the humiliation meted out to him and his co-workers. Through static, meticulously framed shots of the dusty, barren village in daytime (nearly all of them with the factory’s smoking, phallic chimney looming ominously large in the background) and in the night (where people shuffle through dark forests and lie plastered in front of a neon-lit liquor store), their desperation is made visibly palpable. It’s hard not to be moved by a confused, drunken old man pleading with Saharsh to show him the way to his land – he doesn’t remember where it is, or maybe even whether it’s still his.

While most numb themselves with ganja and alcohol – and that includes Saharsh, whose grief for his dead wife makes him to dwell in reminiscences of their blissful past – Bhagole and Prabhata remain resilient. Echoing a colourful village play interwoven into the story, in which the Hindu deity Vishnu preaches love and salvation to humanity, the couple insist in living and doing the best they can, keeping their son and his grandchildren’s spirits up and sustaining their faith in each other.

While the villagers’ mortal conditions will perhaps hardly change – and Jatla, to his credit, doesn’t provide a feel-good ending in which people are saved and the powers-that-be get their comeuppance – the pair’s positivity wins out, in a final sequence where lotuses bloom all over the land, in one of the many visually ravishing sequences Jatla deliver with skill and eloquence.

Editor Akhmad Fesdi Anggorro, making his first foray outside his native Indonesia after years of work on award-winning festival hits such as Kamila Andini’s Berlinale 2022 competition title Nana: Before, Now and Then, manages to help Jatla keep all the narrative strands coherently together. Jatla might still need some more time and space to strike a balance between his jet-black social critique and magical-realist romance, but The Belly of a Tiger is already one impressive step towards his search for cinematic nirvana.

Director, cinematography: Siddartha Jatla
Screenwriters: Amanda Mooney, Siddarthia Jatla
Cast: Lawrence Francis, Poonam Tiwari, Sorabh Jaiswar, Jyoti, Sonali
Producers: Sarada Uma, Fang Li, Bhavana Goparaju
Editor: Akhmad Fesdi Anggorro
Music composer: Shigeru Umebayashi
Sound designer: Resool Pookutty
Production companies: Bhairavi Films, Wonder Pictures, Jeevi Films
World sales: Flash Forward Entertainment
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Forum)
In Hindi
91 minutes

The film is set almost entirely inside a prison, where Eva Hansen works as a guard (hence the original Danish title Vogter). Her daily routine is generally uneventful, the main annoyance being one inmate who occupies the shower for 20 minutes every morning. Then, one day, she requests a transfer to Central Zero, the most dangerous block in the building – the one that houses particularly violent and seemingly irredeemable prisoners.

One such inmate is the recently transferred Mikkel, aka M017. Aged 25, he’s been serving a 16-year sentence for the past five years, extended after he fatally stabbed a fellow prisoner. That prisoner was Simon Hansen, Eva’s estranged son, a detail she’s kept to herself. In fact, it’s the reason she requested the transfer, so she can get some kind of revenge. But how far is she willing to go?

Compared to The Guilty, which was set largely in one room and featured only one main actor on-screen, Möller opens up to a wider world in his second film, although the feeling of a claustrophobic single location sort of remains, since there are very few scenes here are outside the prison. He also reteams with cinematographer Jasper J. Spanning to create a similarly drab look, emphasizing the mundane qualities of the prison guards’ routine, with the conventionally flashier moments, such as a raid in the cells, depicted as jarring disruptions.

Like in the previous film, where the supporting cast consisted of voices on the phone, sound continues to play a pivotal role in conjunction with the right camera angles, especially during a tense meditation scene (Eva runs the prison’s mindfulness classes) that takes Möller’s fascination with off-camera characters to a different, yet similarly eerie place. But that is also an outlier within a movie where direct interactions and two people in frame at the same time are the most crucial ingredient from a dramaturgical standpoint.

In fact, the writing may be less tight this time around, owing to a more clichéd structure in terms of both premise and execution, but the suspense remains thanks to uniformly solid work from the actors, starting with Sidse Babett Knudsen as Eva. A prime example of Scandinavian acting royalty (mere weeks before Sons’ Berlin premiere, she received the Honorary Dragon Award in Möller’s native Gothenburg), she has always relished playing characters with moral gray areas, and throws herself into the part with unabashed gusto.

On the more emerging end of the spectrum, Sebastian Bull (who made his debut as a teenager in Thomas Vinterberg’s Submarino in 2010, and is likely to gain an increased international profile with this project) is a riveting container of bottled-up rage, eliciting fear with his energy and, just as often, via carefully planned shots of his immobile, scarred and tattooed physique. And Dar Salim, who previously worked with Knudsen in the political TV drama Borgen, takes the typically one-note role of the shouty commander of the high-security block and makes it his own, contributing to an ensemble that skillfully elevates the more basic trappings of the screenplay and keeps the tension alive until the very last, powerfully mundane shot.

Director: Gustav Möller
Screenwriters: Gustav Möller, Emil Nygaard Albertsen
Cast: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sebastian Bull, Dar Salim, Marina Bouras, Olaf Johannessen, Jacob Lohmann, Siir Tilif, Rami Zayat, Mathias Petersen
Producer: Lina Flint
Cinematography: Jasper J. Spanning
Production design: Kristina Kovacs
Costume design: Vibe Knoblauch Hededam
Music: Jon Ekstrand
Sound: Hans Christian Arnt Torp
Production companies: Nordisk Film Production
World sales: Les Films du Losange
Venue: Berlinale (Competition)
In Danish
100 minutes

Wang has concocted a wonderful deception: he has put a child at the centre of a film that is very serious about very adult issues. Which means that the film’s appearance at the Generation Kplus section of the 2024 Berlinale is, uhm, interesting. But appearing in Berlin will cover Above the Dust in the gold dust that other venues find irresistible. The film’s “scandalous” lack of a Dragon Seal (the public screening permit issued by the Chinese authorities) and its maker’s storied festival life only add to its appeal.

In this story, which Wang has adapted from a short story by Li Shijiang, a huge part of the hero’s obsession is fueled by mates who taunt him with their own water guns and he’s unable to join their robust play outdoors. But his frustration is turned inwards, towards his own struggling family. His mother can’t understand his angst. His father, who works in the city and is rarely seen, keeps promising to bring him the water gun but claims to forget whenever he returns home.

Instead, Wo Tu finds an unlikely source of help in his dying grandfather. On his deathbed, the old man promises to help once he becomes a ghost, a weird promise that a child’s logic absorbs wholly. In excitement, the boy informs his peers of what goodies his relation’s impending demise might bring. Well, the old man does die and thus begins Wo Tu’s misadventures in dreamland. These misadventures become intense enough to affect his waking life.

The story splinters in other directions. Wo Tu’s mother (Berlinale best actress winner Yong Mei, subdued, phenomenal) has reveries of her own and comes to believe there’s a lode of value buried in their land, a quirk which connects her ancestral supplications to her child’s sleep-time visitations. There is a latent suggestion that a child’s dreams and an adult’s neurosis aren’t dissimilar in times of privation.

There is also the bigger picture of Chinese urban migration, historical politics and its effect on the country’s population. We get some lessons in this regard from scenes showing Wo Tu with his grandfather, a hothead who rebelled against his own father in ways that come to affect subsequent generations. Mao’s Great Leap Forward gets a mention.

All this suggests that Sinophiles will have a richer viewing experience. Wang, after all, is handling decades-spanning intricate material, even if his film appears light on the surface.

That intricacy and some of what it says about Chinese politics has been noticed by the Chinese government and perhaps explains why the film hadn’t received the Dragon Seal before Berlin. Wang may again be in the sort of trouble he and a few others faced decades ago.

So, yes, China will have its say on whether its people will see this film legally in their country. The country will probably also announce the director’s punishment sometime soon. In the meantime, Wang and his collaborators should be pleased. They have made a film that deserves to be a strong contender for whatever awards it is eligible for. Ruben Van Der Hammen’s editing is skillful, Lv Dong’s production design is outstanding, Wang’s dialogue writing is fat-free, and all of the major performances are superb.

But will these save Wang from receiving punishment from his government? Maybe not. As one of his characters admonishes another: “Don’t hold anymore fantasies”.

The problem with Tunisian-American Meryem Joobeur’s feature debut, competing for the Golden Bear, isn’t that the drama is kept deliberately opaque, but that it’s so confused about what it wants to say. Set in a seaside Tunisian village, the film tells of a farming family whose two older sons run off to join Daesh; when one returns with a pregnant wife, the mother desperately tries to protect them. Shot with sensorial Malickian (visual and aural) sweep while pandering to the West’s fear of women in niqabs, Who Do I Belong To? toys with the audience’s perception yet gives them nothing but beautiful visuals and a maddeningly unformed central thesis disguised as impressionistic ambiguity.

Standouts here are relative newcomer Vincent Gonneville’s cinematography – he’s also worked with Joobeur on her shorts – and a fine mixed cast of professionals and amateurs. When Aicha (Salha Nasraoui) and Brahim (Mohamed Hassine Grayaa) attend a village wedding, they have no idea their two older sons Mehdi (Malek Mechergui) and Amine (Chaker Mechergui) have left home to become Daesh fighters in Syria. Aicha tries to hide it from her youngest son Adam (Rayen Mechergui) but he knows and the family is shattered, with mutual recriminations between husband and wife. Brahim throws himself into his work raising sheep and goats, while Aicha’s depression is all-consuming until one day when Medhi suddenly turns up with his niqab-wearing pregnant wife Reem (Dea Liane).

Had Joobeur done something with this woman apart from turning her into some kind of mysterious wraith, the film could have been an involving if unoriginal tale of a family unable to understand how their sons could have become terrorists. Instead, Reem is made into a mute cipher with wellsprings of pain visible in her eyeshadowed eyes whose smudges never change, though the meaningless plot twist at the end ostensibly explains why. There’s something almost Christological about her, exemplified when Aicha reaches out to feel her stomach and Mehdi says “don’t touch her,” like Jesus telling Mary Madgalene “Noli me tangere.” Is the wound in Aicha’s hand that won’t heal also meant as some kind of stigmata? There’s nothing Christian here and yet these confused notes crop up, further clouding the storyline, like when Reeme finds a broken sandal on the beach – why does Joobeur try to invest this moment with such consequence? Although we’re told Reem is not Muslim, her presumably Yazidi heritage isn’t mentioned at all, which erases the Yazidi genocide by not naming it.

A brooding depression settles over everyone except for Adam, who’s the one bright spot in the whole film. Reem starts roaming at night, her ghostly presence clad in an aubergine-colored burqa causing the farm animals to loudly bleat as if Nosferatu was wandering in their midst. At the same time, men in the village start to go missing and a frightened Adam asks family friend and local policeman Bilal (Adam Bessa, Harka) if he can stay at his place.

Blood imagery recurs throughout the film from the moment Aicha imagines blood in a coffee cup, to her own wound and on to crimson shrubs that add to the sense of dread without any satisfying payoff apart from their intrinsic beauty. This is one of the main problems with Who Do I Belong To?, overloaded with pregnant pauses accompanied by fine-looking images testifying to talent wasted on an ill-thought-out script. Why introduce a brief voiceover from Brahim seventy minutes into the film and then drop it just as quickly? The film’s division into chapters was likely meant to give it structure, yet this too feels random, and a flashback to what happened to Reem in Raqqa adds an unnecessary element of explicit violence.

Focusing on the performances alone fortunately helps mitigate some of the film’s significant issues, though the charismatic Bessa is wasted in a role that feels almost like an afterthought. Nasraoui’s commitment is total and her despair is affecting, made more so by the frequency of close-ups, but her character has no development. Equally impressive are the Mechergui brothers, shepherds discovered by Joobeur when scouting for her Oscar-nominated short Brotherhood, itself a kind of try-out for her feature; though non-professionals when first cast, their control and balanced intensity, as well as the younger boy Rayen’s palpable charm, at least testify to the success of the workshop process. If only the script had been equally shepherded.

Director, screenwriter: Meryam Joobeur
Cast: Salha Nasraoui, Mohamed Hassine Grayaa, Malek Mechergui, Adam Bessa, Dea Liane, Rayen Mechergui, Chaker Mechergui
Producers: Nadim Cheikhrouha, Sarra Ben Hassen, Annick Blanc, Maria Gracia Turgeon, Meryam Joobeur
Co-producers: Vincent Dupuis, Victor Lech, Baptiste Leroy, Ramsis Mahfoudh,
Dyveke Bjørkly Graver, Andrea Berentsen Ottmar
Cinematography: Vincent Gonneville
Production designer: Mohamed Ilyes Dargouth
Costume designer: Salah Barka
Editing: Maxime Mathis, Meryam Joobeur
Music: Peter Venne
Sound: Aymen Labidi, Gwennolé Le Borgne
Production companies: Tanit Films (France), Midi La Nuit (Canada), Instinct Bleu (Tunisia), 1888 Films (France), Godolphin Films (Tunisia), Eye Eye Pictures (Norway)
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: Berlinale (International competition)
In Arabic
117 minutes

An acute and sudden form of heart failure brought on by extreme emotional distress, the condition echoes the circumstances in which Mr. Ham (voiced by Len Jakobsen) finds himself. “Here on one side there is a beautiful sunrise,” he tries to explain to his doctor, “and then there’s a war.” Plagued by a fundamental heartache as a result of the world’s overwhelming contradictions, he is seeking a heart removal that will separate him from his pain.

Such inconsistencies are central to the human condition, but Tako Tsubo seems to tap into the exaggerated nature of these cognitive dissonances in the hyper-connected modern world. The description of beauty and horror side by side could just as easily be the consecutive images scrolled past on social media and there are occasions when only a surgical intervention seems like it can combat the sorrowfulness.

Pedroza’s hand-drawn animation emphasises the marks that life leaves on us with the way that the movement of objects is coloured over, mostly erasing their former position, but not quite. It creates visual echoes that follow the characters and their actions, meaning that what they say and do feels like it remains on screen long after the fact. In the same moment as its characters seek to dislocate themselves from bodily manifestations of their ailments, Sorgo and Pedroza remind us of the lingering past through the visible fingerprints of the film’s physical creation.

Directors: Fanny Sorgo, Eva Pedroza
Cast: Len Jakobsen, Anne Kulbatzki, Benjamin Martin
Producers: Eva Pedroza,
Screenplay: Fanny Sorgo
Animation: Eva Pedroza
Music: Mary Ocher
Sound design: Christian Obermaier
Production companies: Fondazione MAST (Italy)
Venue: Berlinale (Berlinale Shorts)
In English, Arabic
17 minutes

Featuring one of the most engagingly modern heroines in Berlin this year, and a tale of great originality and timeliness, Black Tea should have been another landmark in the director’s career. But its pleasures are continually interrupted by awkward editing and narration that jump confusingly between characters and countries, stories and moods. It also suffers from a lack of reference points that would guide audiences through where they are, what is happening onscreen, and whether a scene is to be considered dream or reality or some new kind of modernist storytelling. Urgent re-editing and a few explanatory intertitles would go a long way towards focusing the story on its main characters and their stories.

In an opening scene set in the hot, bright sunshine of an unspecified African country, multiple couples in bridal finery are gathered to get married. It is instantly clear that something is wrong with Aya (Nina Mélo) and her husband-to-be Toussaint; an angry quarrel on the verge of explosion over who knows what. When it is their turn to tie the knot, he says “I do” (loud applause from the assembled guests) and she says “no” (stunned shock).

Cue the first confusing transition that takes us from Africa to China. Aya marches emotionally down the crowded streets of a market, shedding her bridal costume piece by piece until she’s in a bright street dress. There are many Asian faces in the market along with the Africans we would expect – in fact (as we piece together much later) Aya has moved to Guangzhou, a Chinese metropolis north of Hong Kong, and she now works in an upscale tea supply shop owned by the divorced Mr. Cai (Chang Han). How long has she been part of the African diaspora and living in the colorful, friendly neighborhood the locals call “Chocolate City”? Is it a surprise that Aya speaks fluent Mandarin? Or that she has a fantastic sense of smell and an instinctive feeling for fine tea blends? And how long has she been making trips to the cellar with Cai, where he initiates the young woman into the traditional art of the tea ceremony, a complex affair not devoid of erotic undertones?

Their relationship remains a bit of a mystery throughout, but it seems to be progressing in the direction of love and marriage each time he invites her to the back room of an atmospheric tea house, where they can talk freely. On one occasion he talks about his ex-wife, Ying (Wu Ke-Xi), the mother of Li-Ben, who works in the store with his dad. On another he shows Aya a picture of his daughter Eva, who moved to Cape Verde twenty years prior with her mother. Aya urges him to get in touch with the girl, which he appears to do, but the Cape Verde scene is so unreal that Cai probably dreamed it.

Other narrative detours further derail the main train. Aya knows a lot of people in the neighborhood, and each one seems to have a story worth telling: a Chinese girl who sells suitcases across the street can’t find a husband; an African girl who suddenly pops up is sadly heading back home, having achieved none of her dreams in Guangzhou, and so on.

Sissako brings the film back on track in a climactic moment-of-truth scene set in Cai’s refined apartment. He and Aya are happily relaxing in the bedroom with a glass of wine when the doorbell rings and he suddenly remembers he’s hosting Li-Ben’s birthday dinner. Aya has bought the boy a gift but she’s not invited, because his racist grandparents are coming over with Ying and “they might not accept you,” he says in embarrassment. It’s a devastating side of Cai’s personality she had never seen before and she takes it on the chin. Perhaps she should have married her faithless Toussaint after all?

Although many of the characters in Black Tea seem put there to make a point about something, or to typify life in the mixed-race pockets of China, the two leads escape this pigeon-holing. As the 30-ish Aya, French actress Nina Mélo rises to the refinement the role demands, both as a student of tea and a courageous expatriate and independent woman who chooses her partners carefully, the way Cai picks tea leaves on a glorious trip to his plantation. Her friends keep calling her a “good woman” for her warm heart, selflessness and respect towards other people’s feelings. That is why she is able to offer good advice to them. Yet in the end, she is left with her own massive disillusionment with men.

Both Chang Han and Wu Ke-Xi are established actors from Taiwan, where the film was largely shot on location. Aged for the role, Chang Han expresses a winning inner grace and stillness – which unfortunately doesn’t preclude his cowardly reaction to a difficult social situation. As his ex Ying, Wu Ke-Xi portrays a woman of dignity and principles, much like Aya, who she might be friends with if the situation had been different.

Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
Screenwriters: Kessen Fatoumata Tall, Abderrahmane Sissako
Producers: David Gauquié, Julien Derys, Denis Freyd, Kessen Fatoumata Tall, Jean-Luc Ormières, Charles S. Cohen
Cast: Nina Mélo, Chang Han, Wu Ke-Xi, Michael Chang
Cinematography: Aymerick Pilarski
Production design: Véronique Sacrez
Costume design:
Editing: Nadia Ben Rachid
Music: Armand Amar
Sound: Nicolas Leroy, Loic Collignon
Sound design: Carlo Thoss
Production companies: Cinéfrance Studios (France), Archipel 35 (France), Dune Vision (Mauritania)
World sales: Gaumont
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In Mandarin, French, English, Portuguese
111 minutes

Iranian filmmaker Aliyar Rasti’s allegorical The Great Yawn of History ponders these questions in his rigorous realist fairy tale that follows two men on a journey that they might never come back from, but from which they’ll be forever changed.

The film opens with a setup that could be ripped from the pages of the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson. Beitollah (Mohammad Aghebati) writes his name, address, and an advertisement for a job on $100 bills and casually scatters them around the city. When a group of young men show up at his door with the bills in hand, he promptly conducts interviews with each of them for the unspecified job, asking questions ranging from their background to whether or not they believe in miracles. It’s the meek Shoja (Amirhossein Hosseini), who declares he believes in nothing that gets the gig, but there’s a stipulation: it will involve a long journey for an indeterminate period of time. Unbeknownst to Beitollah, Shoja is broke and unhoused, and he’s content not to ask too many questions. So it’s only when they’re on the train headed into the Iranian countryside that Shoja learns the unbelievable task they’ll embark on: they will search for a cave that Beitollah has seen in his recurring dreams that he believes contains a stash of gold coins. It will be Shoja’s job to enter the cave and retrieve the coins that they’ll split between them evenly.

Unfolding somewhere between a reverse Waiting for Godot and a Biblical parable, Rasti’s patient screenplay sends Beitollah and Shoja drifting through rice fields, up steep rocky slopes, and through desert sands as each prophetic cave proves to be an illusion. Along the way they encounter farmers, orphans, and chiselers trying to squirm a cut of their gold but none provide any moral or spiritual insights. So Beitollah and Shojah soldier on, and it’s only when they become lost and isolated, that the central concerns of Rasti’s film begin to rise to the surface.

“Don’t I deserve the thing I don’t deserve?” Beitollah asks to an uncomprehending Shoja. The film posits a country of people anxious for deliverance to a better future, even though it doesn’t seem possible by just doing your best. Beitollah laments he’s worked his whole life to prove to people he’s capable, and now, wandering across Iran with a stranger, it seems he’s done the opposite. But the picture is also a portrait of two lonely people; Beitollah talks of a wife we never see while Shoja reveals he was raised in an orphanage, and speaks of parents living in Germany who may or may not exist. The father Shoja seeks and the family Beitollah could build might be staring each other in the face, but it seems they are too close to see it.

The cinematography by Soroush Alizadeh presents a vision of Iran both beautiful and desolate, bustling and quiet. Rasti’s film never quite becomes fully involving, revolving around an episodic structure that, once it’s established, sticks its characters within a narrow, yet focused narrative. The tension is less about what will happen to Beitollah and Shoja, than what Rasti will do to resolve their fate. But The Great Yawn of History is nonetheless thoughtful and even if Beitollah believes that he’s “wasted my life in dreams and fantasies,” perhaps it’s even an worse way to live to give up on them entirely.

Director, screenwriter, producer: Aliyar Rasti
Cast: Mohammad Aghebati, Amirhossein Hosseini, Saber Abar, Mahin Sadri, Mehrdad Ziaie, Ramin Alizadeh
Cinematography: Soroush Alizadeh
Production design: Faraz Modiri
Costume design: Elham Moein
Editing: Mohammad Najarian
Music: Ava Rasti
Sound: Vahid Razavian
Production companies: Para-Doxa (Iran)
World sales: Heretic
Venue: Berlinale (Encounters)
In Farsi
93 minutes

The fate of bleach-pedalling street vendors in Tangier might not seem like the obvious choice for a measured and thought-provoking documentary about global economics. However, in the hands of filmmaker Hicham Gardaf, this largely unassuming profession becomes a symbol of something more significant – the things that we sacrifice on the altar of commercialism and, more hopefully, how their endurance allows us to see minor routes to resistance against the all-consuming tide.

The film initially follows the figure of the vendor as he first traverses the arid landscape and then the edge lands and industrial centres of the city carrying a vast array of empty plastic bottles on his back. He resembles the profile of a balloon seller, surrounded by a cloud of his wares. Gardaf’s camera remains relatively distant, observing this strange sight without comment, but hinting through the choice of shots and locations about the city’s transformation. After this, a more conventional interview takes place in which a seller explains his daily routine, and the role he plays for local businesses.

One of the film’s defining features is the way it addresses sound. The chanting call of the bleach seller becomes a consistent refrain and, in a voiceover later in the film, is cited by Gardaf as being a key element of the audio background of the place, a hole that will be left gaping when the trade dies off. Listening, he says, is a fundamental part of sight – the ears lead the eyes to look. His use of this repeating call evokes its position of nostalgia for Gardaf and creates a direct tether to the past that is in danger of disappearing. For as long as it doesn’t, the inhabitants of Tangier can be reminded of a simpler time.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Hicham Gardaf
Cast: Khalid Mousmi, Abdellah Ben Messaoud, Fatima Benabbou
Sound design: Hannan Jones
Production companies: Fondazione MAST (Italy)
Venue: Berlinale (Forum Expanded)
In English, Arabic
17 minutes

This small footnote speaks volumes about what Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Ngoc Lan’s first feature is about. Bowing in the Berlinale’s Panorama sidebar, Cu Li Never Cries is about a clash of mindsets of people from different generations with their own long-gone traumas and current concerns, and how this schism plays out in a country where the past never leaves and the future seems to never come.

Unlike Jia Zhangke or Zhang Dalei across the border in China, Lan doesn’t offer that much commentary about the fallout of his country’s transformation from a socialist bastion into a hyper-charged market economy.

In Cu Li Never Cries, history and politics are instead deployed to highlight personal struggles, with the divergent experiences and worldviews of his two leads – the first a long-retired hydroelectrical plant worker old enough to have arthritis and a dead husband, and the second a child-like kindergarten teacher awaiting marriage – simply narrative devices to depict the uncertainties they have about their private lives.

Revolving around a retiree’s struggle to contend with her bereavement and her pregnant niece’s rocky preparations for marriage, Cu Li Never Cries is filmed in crisp monochrome and is imbued with moments of magical realism. With its swerving tracking shots through empty downtown alleyways and nocturnal forests, spying on the presence of a small loris as a pet or a glitterball used as home décor, Lan’s feature teases lyrical beauty from its seemingly quotidian storyline.

With this film, Lan – who trained as an urban planner before switching his career to filmmaking – joins a new cohort of Vietnamese filmmakers such as Pham Thien An (Inside the Yellow Cocoon) who have captured the attention of foreign producers and film funds with their new brand of cinema. Melancholic and meandering, Cu Li Never Cries will draw inevitable comparisons with Lav Diaz’s work, something which may appeal to festival programmers.

The story begins with a woman, Nguyen (Chau), who returns to Hanoi to find chaos at home. She has been abroad to collect the ashes and the pet loris (the “Cu Li” in the title) of her estranged husband, who she met when she moved to communist East Germany as a migrant worker (“Cu Li” = coolie in Vietnamese) during the Cold War. Her niece, the kindergarten teacher Van (Ha Phuong), is unravelling because of the shambolic preparations for her upcoming wedding, something not helped by a pregnancy she’s trying to keep secret from her aunt.

Van is also disgruntled by the utter incompetence of her fiancé Quang (Xuan An), who spends most of his time either dabbling with impractical things or hanging out with his slacker friends. For the boys, marriage is just an inevitable a part of life like birth or death: “What’s the point of wandering around alone on Earth?”

Van and Quang represent a generation of young people who have seemingly lost the impetus to aspire to something meaningful in life. The young man’s habit of invariably describing the most mundane happenings as a “fairy tale”, be it a shop that closed before it’s supposed to or a chance meeting with an ordinary acquaintance, reveals how ideals and dreams have lost their currency in a world where people just want to get by.

This is in contrast to the older Nguyen, whose nostalgia for her days as a model worker is less a wish to return to the good old Socialist days, than memories of how she once clamored for something bigger and better – whether in the shape of a mythical workers’ paradise, or a more comfortable life as the Communist system hit the buffers in 1990. Such reminisces lead her to attend old-school dancing sessions in a drinking hall, and finally a trip to her hometown to visit her former comrades.

At the centre of Cu Li is Chau, who is remarkable as someone trying her utmost to carry on despite her deteriorating physical condition. But the power of her performance also rests with the screenplay Lan co-wrote with Nghiem Quynh Trung and also the latter’s production design. The contradictions in Hanoi’s urban landscape – where overloaded, rickety bicycles sputter their ways beneath mega-flyovers – are in a way reflective of Nguyen’s own existence in a world where “the forgotten became familiar, and the familiar became foreign”.

Director: Pham Ngoc Lan
Screenwriters: Pham Ngoc Lan, Nghiem Quynh Trang
Cast: Minh Chau, Ha Phuong, Xuan An, Hoang Ha
Producers: Nigiem Quynh Trang, Tran Thi Bich Ngoc
Executive producers: Su Ting Teh, Giang Le
Directors of photography: Vu Hoang Trieu, Nguyen Vinh Phuc, Nguyen Phan Linh Dan
Editor: Julie Béziau
Production designer: Nghiem Quynh Trang
Music producer: Tran Kim Ngoc
Production companies: Cadence Studio, An Nam Productions
World sales: Square Eyes
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
In Vietnamese
92 minutes

In Wang’s short film One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean, she sought to use the editing of internet videos to evoke the wavelike deluge of online content. Here, there is a similar attempt to wrestle with a temporal anomaly, this time in a world somewhere between documentary and fiction where two people remain ensconced in their home at the inception of a new era – when day and night will no longer be distinguishable. As the man and woman go about their ritualistic behaviours, The Moon Also Rises creates a kind of mesmerising rhythmic statis.

This effect is managed by a robotic voice that seems to be ever-present in the rooms of their homes, providing a variety of scientific information and wellness guidance and a smooth artificial register that seems calibrated to reduce stress. It’s also this ephemeral intelligence that gives the science fiction context of the pair’s situation to the audience alongside two news reports about the initiative.

The television warns of potential amnesia caused by observing the new mechanical moons, but the lines between past and future – as well as fiction and reality – are already so unclear as to be indecipherable. As the man sits and watches a spectacular fish in an aquarium, both lit only by a neon light, it is questionable who is the captive. “Time is just a feeling,” the voice intones. In Wang’s eerie hermetic world, robbed of any sense of external chronology, it seems to be just that.

Director, screenplay, cinematography: Yuyan Wang
Producers: Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff
Editing: Clement Pinteaux
Sound design: Nicholas Verhaeghe
Production companies: Petit Chaos
Venue: Berlinale (Berlinale Shorts)
In Mandarin
24 minutes

In one admirable scene in Nelson Makengo’s documentary Rising Up at Night, bowing in the Berlin Panorama, the residents are attempting to celebrate New Year’s. As midnight approaches, children gather in astonishment around a Congolese street vendor dressed up as Santa Claus in a white-skinned mask, to sell colorful flashlights. An insane reality that the director captures.

In 2021, with 17 million inhabitants, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa, suffered major power cuts amid negligence from the government. Darkness is the official tone in the film, whether we like it or not. Makengo attempts to find beauty and aesthetics in the dark, shooting by the light of his camera and sometimes by the light of flashlights carried by his leads. It must have been challenging to capture all these details and beautiful shots with so little light. The result is a series of portraits of his subjects who, despite the tragedy they are facing, never give up.

At intervals we see light, and Makengo connects these visually bright moments to times where people are marching to take action or heading to buy a new generator. One scene is lit by dawn piercing a bluish sky, and features children going to school, despite the uncertainty of tomorrow. It’s clear that the fight of the people of Kinshasa is not going to end anytime soon.

The crisis takes place amid state and government corruption, but Makengo does not engage directly in attacking the government. His cameras don’t follow the politicians, or film protesters calling for the resignation of a minister or an official. But one scene says it all. Roaming the dark, muddy, flooded streets, residents listen to news on the radio that president Felix Tshisekedi has vowed to increase the capacity of the Inga 3 Hydropower Project from 4800 megawatts to 7500 megawatts. Announced in 2013 at a cost of $14 billion, the project aimed to deliver power primarily for export to South Africa and power mines in eastern Congo. However, the project had its share of controversy and suffered from kickbacks and regional disputes.

Gender roles, the expected and imposed ones, are well-illustrated. Unemployed young men expect their mothers to pay for new generators and electrical equipment; the men will guard it. That’s why Makengo dedicates more interviews and facetime to his female subjects, despite the fact that the three main leads are men. The women loudly voice their opinions and concerns: the darkness allows rapists to target their daughters. The darkness lets elderly women fall into holes and face severe injuries. The floods damage their houses and prevent their children from going to school. They also don’t trust the men to collect the money to buy the equipment necessary to restore electricity, as discrepancies appear.

The three men he films differ in their coping mechanisms and reactions to the crisis, and this is a point for Makengo who shows the complexity of this impoverished society, emphasizing the array of different personalities in Africa.

For example, Kudi is rallying the inhabitants of the Kisenso neighborhood to gather funds for a new power cable. Meanwhile, atop Mount Mangengenge, a site overlooking the city, Pastor Gédéon preaches about the illumination of Christ. Davido, on the other hand, is on a quest to find shelter after his home was flooded, and tries to blow off steam by working out with friends.

Kudi and Gédéon are shown as opposites, but no sides are taken. The first takes physical action, which is of course subject to either success or failure. Gédéon fires up his congregation, praying for Jesus to guide the Congolese leaders to do what is right and fix society’s problems on behalf of God.

Makengo captures the “societal dialogues” that many governments and parliaments in Africa promise to hold. But in the Kisenso neighborhood, the dire crisis pushes the residents to seriously engage in dialogue and take things into their own hands, as they know they have been abandoned by their so-called elected leaders.

As rebel operations mount in eastern Congo, led by armed Tutsi groups affiliated with Rwanda, the already fragile infrastructure of small cities and villages risk destruction, repeating the same tragic reality that Rising Up at Night is trying so brilliantly to show.

Director, screenwriter: Nelson Makengo
Editing: Inneke Van Waeyenberghe
Producers: Rosa Spaliviero, Dada Kahindo Siku
Co-Producers: Florian Schewe, Michel K. Zongo, Marie Logie, Samuel Feller, Isabelle Christiaens
Music: Bao Sissoko, Wouter Vandenabeele
Sound: Moimi Wezam
Production companies: Twenty Nine Studio & Production, Mutotu Productions, Film Five, Diam Auguste Orts, Magellan Films, RTBF
World sales: Square Eyes
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
In Lingola
96 minutes

Karpovych is based in Montreal, but returned to her native Ukraine just weeks before Putin’s invasion in February 2022, with plans to work on another project. Strong hints of the imminent conflict already hung heavy in the air, and the war became Karpovych’s main focus after Russian tanks crossed the border. She began assembling audio material that was freely available on the official YouTube channels of the Ukrainian security service, pairing these clips with coolly observed video vignettes of everyday life in war-ravaged Ukraine. Intercepted is by turns sickening, visually striking and strangely life-affirming in its depiction of an entire nation’s resilience against Putin’s bloodthirsty imperialist thuggery. Further festival bookings are likely after Berlin, while adventurous buyers should take an interest in a work that could just as easily screen in an art gallery as a cinema.

Intercepted shows us melancholy vistas of shattered apartments, ransacked houses, abandoned classrooms, bomb-cratered roads, the wreckage of a burned-out aircraft, makeshift mass graves, and more. Sparing use of sombre, ambient music underscores this gloomy mood. But we also also see children playing in the street, teenagers skateboarding beneath sturdy concrete monuments, cattle serenely moving across sunny farmland, friends and families stoically enjoying their lives. The Ukrainian flag is a recurring motif, a small but heartening symbol of survival. Karpovych cites Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Chantal Akerman’s Sud (1999) and Ognjen Glavonic’s Depth Two (2016) as influences, all films which calmly survey landscapes haunted by murderous horror. There are also echoes here of artfully poised, contemplative documentarians like James Benning and Nikolaus Geyrhalter.

By contrast, the accompanying Russian audio clips are ragged and abrasive, full of fear and aggression, all spiked with racist and homophobic slurs towards Ukrainians. Putin’s absurd “Nazi” claim is tossed around casually, with bitter irony, given how closely the dehumanising insults used by the invaders echo the genocidal language of actual wartime Nazi propaganda. Many invaders boast about perpetrating casual murder, torture and sexual assault on Ukrainians, military and civilians, women and children alike. “We were given the order to kill everyone we see,” one reports. Reaction from partners and loved ones back home is often brutally blasé: “beat them into kebabs, barbecue them all.”

But behind all this heartless macho bloodlust, some soldiers express doubt, cynicism and even agonising guilt about their actions. One young conscript warns his family back home that Kremlin conspiracy theories about NATO bases in Ukraine are “fucking bullshit, don’t believe what they show you there.” Another protests about the wholesale slaughter of his comrades, with battlefield deaths reported as heart attacks so the government can shirk compensation payments. Many curse military commanders and lying politicians for sending them to their deaths alongside convicts and mercenaries, who have orders to shoot anyone retreating. The quality of consumer goods in Ukraine is another recurring theme, and looting civilian homes commonplace. “A Russian wouldn’t be a Russian if they didn’t steal something”, one proud mother cackles.

Some may dismiss Intercepted as propaganda, but such both-sides equivocation is a bourgeois indulgence for those of us lucky enough not to live next door to a mass-murdering dictator. While Karpovych’s message is emphatically pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia, there is enough objective reportage from the conflict now for even the most critical thinker to conclude there is only one aggressor in this ongoing tragedy, and only one side committing large-scale war crimes. While the damage suffered by Ukraine is horrific, the lingering wounds Russia has inflicted on itself can not be discounted. As one fatalistic soldier tells his wife, shortly before he is sent into a battle he is unlikely to survive, “make sure our son doesn’t join the army.”

Director, screenwriter: Oksana Karpovych
Cinematography: Christopher Nunn
Editing: Charlotte Tourres
Music: NFNR
Sound design: Alex Lane
Producers: Giacomo Nudi, Rocío B. Fuentes
Production companies: Les films Cosmos (Canada), Moon Man (Ukraine)
World sales: Lightdox, France
Venue: Berlinale (Forum)
In Russian, Ukrainian
95 minutes