Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian announcing this year’s Competition & Encounters line up on Monday
While many of us may be concentrating on the awards announcements, the Berlin Film Festival reminds us where it all starts from, and why these worldwide events are so important. Dare I say, more than the awards…
Read More
Filmmaker Mani Haghigi and Berlinale Director Dieter Kosslick
Photo courtesy of Berlinale
Thankfully, at this year's Berlinale, there are a couple of films in Competition which go against everything that a "competition film" should be. Whatever that definition is. I applaud the festival organizers for having had the courage to show them, and their continued support of indie voices.
One such film is Mani Haghigi's 'Pig' ('Khook') a wild colorful, humorous, dark and fresh ride through the Iranian film industry. Now wild and colorful, with women protagonists who run the show is hardly a definition one would typically associate with Iranian cinema and yet Haghigi manages it all.
Read More
Lav Diaz at the press conference for 'Season of the Devil' held during the 68th Berlinale
Photo courtesy of the Berlinale
When I sat with the maestro Lav Diaz for our interview for his Competition film 'Season of the Devil', he pointed to the film critics, the journalists who write about cinema, as an integral part of the filmmaking process. And I agree wholeheartedly with the genius that is Diaz, a man who, in this age of everything fast and immediate, still makes films that lull us into watching them for four and a half hours! He teaches us how to watch his cinema, and I believe as film writers, we hold a responsibility to teach audiences to find those films.
Read More
A still featuring Noel Sto. Domingo from Lav Diaz' 'Season of the Devil'
Photo © Giovanni D. Onofrio
The 21st century version of the all-American question "where were you when JFK was assassinated?" is "what were you doing when the planes hit the World Trade Center?"
Some of us watched the towers disintegrate before our very eyes, our landscape changed forever, and it's a vision, a feeling we will carry inside our hearts for as long as we live. The smell throughout downtown Manhattan, the lines of demarcation -- complete with checkpoints -- between the northern and southern parts of the city but also the newfound sense of camaraderie we bestowed upon each other to merely get from day to day, is also what I remember from those days.
Read More
Milán Csordás in a still from 'Genesis'
Photo © Genesis Production
There are several films this year at the Berlinale that explore the theme of family. Or rather, set out to redefine it. In 'Daughter of Mine', Laura Bispuri asks, cinematically, just who our mother is -- the woman who physically brings us into this world, or the person who rears us? For most of us they are both within one person, but in rare cases, it's not.
Also present during this 68th edition of the Berlin Film Festival is a sub current of childhood, attempting to view this chaotic, pretty damn ugly world of ours at the moment through a child's eye view. Wes Anderson kicked that off in style with the opening film 'Isle of Dogs' and now I keep finding myself looking at what I watch from his "I don't want to grow up" POV.
Read More
Valeria Golino and Alba Rohrwacher in Laura Bispuri's 'Daughter of Mine'
© Vivo film / Colorado Film / Match Factory Productions / Bord Cadre Films
From the fabulous women of 'Daughter of Mine' to a wondrous man, my early Sunday morning at Berlinale was spent in the company of Elia Suleiman, the Palestinian filmmaker extraordinaire and Artistic Advisor of the Doha Film Institute.
Read More
Courtesy of the Berlinale
This year, at Berlinale, the annual film festival held in Berlin, there is media chatter of a red carpet that should have been black in honor of the #MeToo movement. In my country a black carpet means someone died so I wonder, do we want to open a film festival, a festive event by definition, with a gloom and doom parade of stars on a drab black piece of carpeting? Isn't it enough that we woke up on its inauguration day to the news of yet one more totally avoidable shooting in the US?
Read More