Playlist
Flickering and pulsating, spitting and swallowing at the same time. The screen becomes a vibrating membrane; colours, shapes, beats and sounds a psychedelic whirlpool. A short, fast-paced audiovisual ode to the hypnotic power of colour and vertigo.
Driven by their desire for light and warmth, British teenagers take a trip to the Balearic Islands. They must absorb the sun and store it in their bodies to take it back to their cloud-covered kingdom. A surreal film about the real phenomenon of "balconing" which, in recent summers, has led to tragic, self-inflicted accidents particularly among young people travelling to Spain.
A small supermarket somewhere in the American backwoods. The staff come in early, drink coffee and restock the shelves. They chat about the air conditioning, would like to read poetry in peace and sometimes even get lucky on the slot machine.
In suburban housing estates in France, young people are wishing for money and success. Their dreams even clog up the air conditioning ducts until everything begins to drip. What might happen if you swallow light?
Two young women retreat to a remote holiday home. While one of them undergoes a medical abortion, the other quietly cares for her. A snake slithers around them, unnoticed.
An amateur filmmaker meets the film student who is supposed to edit his material, the focus of which is allegedly bears. A debate arises about the power of the voyeuristic gaze.
Doesn't crush also mean "to smash"? Dealing with their own obsessive crushes, Ella Rocca researches what to do about it. During the quest for a representation of their feelings, texts, images and sounds are layered on top of each other on the computer screen and become the expression of intense contemplation. Internet discoveries and a moment of intimate directness merge to provide a sense of the inner workings of infatuation.
Manthia Diawara's latest essay film, AI: African Intelligence, explores the contact zones between African rituals of possession within traditional fishing villages of the Atlantic coast of Senegal and the emergence of new technological frontiers known as Artificial Intelligence. Considering the confluence of tradition and modernity, Diawara questions how we could move from disembodied machines towards a more humane and spiritual control of algorithms. Could Africa be the context of emergence for such improbable algorithms?
Jani lives in a dystopian world of nuclear reactors and military curfews. After getting beaten up in a fight, she is telepathically contacted by a hovering lapdog whose people entrust her with a talking catfish rescued from a research laboratory. A turbulent fever dream of surreal phantasms which sees the 14-year-old getting ready to fight back and break free of her oppressively indifferent surroundings.
"Well then, if you were a cactus, where would you live?"
What happens when aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, a cactus and a sad boy bump into each other at an isolated bus station? In Sofía Auza's unconventional boy-meets-girl fairytale, Momo, dressed up as the legendary aviator, has just been released from rehab and Hugo and his cactus named Adolfo are on their way to his estranged father's funeral. Over the course of a night, the three offbeat protagonists embark on a series of adventures with the ultimate mission to find a new home for Adolfo – and eventually to heal some wounds along the way. A life-affirming parable of love, styled with fluorescent layers of dreamy colours and floaty indie-riffs that explores how sadness and happiness, doubt and belief are reverse sides of the same coin.
In Dreams, the artist's parents – Tibetan exiles – are seen sleeping on a single mattress on the floor, akin to the one they slept on when they first immigrated to the West. The image of the pair embracing on a bed floating within an open, undefined environment – as if any place could be photoshopped around them – heightens the sense of displacement and uncertainty. The work features a soft blanket made in India that is found in many Tibetan homes of the diaspora. "This blanket was one of the things my mother brought with us when we immigrated to the US from India. In this work, I wanted to return to one of my earliest and fondest memories. I wanted to remember that time of innocence." Tenzin Phuntsog
In 1952, London was engulfed in the Great Smog. As a result of industrialisation, a leaden fog settled over the entire city. The archive images from this period become letters from a desolate future.
The 1953 film Mouramani by Mamadou Touré is believed to be the first film ever made in Guinea. Interested in the conditions of its production – and the whereabouts of a film print – Thierno Souleymane Diallo sets out to find people who can tell him about the film's history and its reception. Shots of the young filmmaker himself run like a thread through the film. Equipped with a video camera, microphone and headphones, he travels through the country, sometimes on the back of a donkey, sometimes barefoot, and films everything he experiences on the road and during his conversations with archivists and those who remember the period. Increasingly, the film turns into a journey through Guinea's film history that takes him to deserted cinema halls and abandoned film archives. In the process, it alternates between observational scenes of everyday life, performative elements and re-enactments. The result is a multi-layered portrait of a country that is thought to have played a pioneering role in African cinema, but which is only slowly rediscovering the importance of films and film archives for its cultural identity and its history.
Augusto and Paulina have been together and in love for 25 years. Eight years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and his wife has since become his caretaker. As one of Chile's most prominent cultural commentators and television presenters, Augusto is no stranger to building an archive of memory, having been responsible for that herculean task following the Pinochet dictatorship and its systematic erasure of collective consciousness. Now he turns that work to his own life, trying to hold on to his identity with the help of his beloved. Day by day, the couple face this challenge head-on, adapting to the disruptions brought on by the taxing disease while relying on the tender affection and sense of humor shared between them that remains intact.
Oscar-nominated director and Sundance alum Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent, 2020) returns to the festival with a film that gracefully delves into the melancholy of remembrance met with resistance, uplifted by the beautiful partnership at its core. Traversing decades of intimacy, The Eternal Memory elegantly cements Alberdi's place as one of today's most thoughtful documentarians.
Morning routines and conversations in bed, gossip and real talk. In encounters and interviews, D. Smith portrays four Black trans sex workers in New York and Georgia. The protagonists discuss their lives with relish but without any sugar-coating. The conversations that emerge are deep and passionate reflections on socio-political and social realities as well as perceptive analyses of belonging and identity within the Black community and beyond. Dramatisations and reconstructions, performative interventions and associative collages of biographical set pieces are brought together organically in haunting black-and-white images accompanied by a carefully deployed soundtrack. Dreams and memories, battles fought and crises overcome are openly addressed without skirting topics such as precarity and violence. The protagonists also tell us about their lovers, friends and families, and how these relationships are marked by taboos and fetishisation, but also by their own desires. This vibrant portrait gives them space for their uninhibited and defiant narratives and undermines white, cis-heteronormative assumptions and stigmatisations.
Jonny is tough, fearless and forthright. She picks locks with ease and seems to be able to take care of herself pretty well. She also slips rent money into her single father's pocket. Their relationship is fragile and yet strangely symbiotic. Feeling overstretched, her father decides to send Jonny to live with a distant aunt. But even in the care of the strict Hildie, the teenager cannot seem to find peace. On her 18th birthday, Jonny is given a cake baked according to a magical family recipe which triggers a radical metamorphosis. At her new school, the constant killing spree-emergency drills create a tense atmosphere and soon five girls go missing. Inexplicably fascinated by their disappearance, Jonny sets out to look for clues and a blood-soaked coming-of-age story takes its course.
Even before we meet Sofia and Louise on the maternity ward, there are sirens. The atmosphere is loud and hectic, everyone is stretched to the limit and the waters are not the only thing that are about to break. These two friends and flatmates are starting their first day as midwives together. There is barely any time for an induction. Thrown into the department's daily routine of crowded corridors, delivery rooms and monitors, Sofia and Louise have very different first days. The pressurised situation of care-giving whilst under constant stress soon begins to put a strain on their friendship.
1980 in the oil metropolis of Abadan, the largest port city in Iran. Omid, 14, is playing football with his friends when a missile hits a nearby refinery. Within a very short time, this attack by the Iraqi army plunges the city into chaos. At home, Omid catches a glimpse of his older brother getting into a transporter that is taking fighters to the front. His mother has already packed a few things and is ready to flee with the family, but Omid refuses. He and his grandfather stay behind. Too young to take up arms himself, he becomes a provider for a group of others remaining there who are now united in need. He is determined not to give up the search for his brother – and to find an escape route out of the encircled city.
Time passes by slowly on the family farm. Here, every task is predictable and every part of the day is determined by the needs of the animals and the course of nature. There is beauty and peace in this life, but when unspoken longings fill the silence, the stillness can become oppressive. For Carl, who has returned to the Danish countryside after finishing boarding school, this pressure builds slowly but surely. As an adopted child with South Korean roots, living in a predominantly white society constantly reminds him of how different he feels. His future here holds nothing new for him either. Although Carl is still searching for his place in life, his parents have no doubt that he will one day take over the farm
Leon and Felix's plan was to spend the summer together in a holiday home on the Baltic coast. They wanted to be there as friends but also to work – one on his second book, the other assembling his art portfolio. But Nadja and Devid are also there, and they bring lots of positive vibes with them. Four young people experimenting with love, even though this does not come easy to Leon. His unfinished manuscript haunts him wherever he goes, whether he is at the summerhouse or the beach. The others' good mood often causes his to plummet. A visit from his publisher is imminent. But, as the latter arrives in his nifty small car, the forest begins to blaze. It rains ash, the sky turns red, and a relationship-drama that merges physical intensity and artistic sublimation takes a turn into a new dimension.
The Adamant is a unique day-care centre. A floating structure located on the Seine in the heart of Paris, it welcomes adults suffering from mental disorders, offering the kind of care that grounds them in time and space and helps them to recover or keep up their spirits. The team running it tries to resist the deterioration and dehumanisation of psychiatry as best as they can.
One of the great documentary filmmakers working today, Nicolas Philibert's approach has everything to do with getting close to his subject. Whether it is an individual such as the orangutan of Nénette (Forum, 2010), or a group of people as in La maison de la radio (Panorama, 2013), his observation over an extended period of time is motivated by a genuine and contagious interest in all that moves within a community. The question of trust is always central to a documentary filmmaker's work and Philibert's stance is perfect in that regard, especially for those who might have reason to mistrust their fellow humans. This gentle, enlightening film invites us to join the welcoming microcosm of the Adamant. In their company we may, as one patient suggests, decide in the morning to make sure that we will have a good day.
In a small, peaceful town on Japan's southern island of Kyushu, 17-year-old Suzume has lived with her aunt ever since she lost her mother as a little girl. One day on her way to school, she meets a mysterious young man named Souta who is in search of a door. She follows him into the mountains and finds a dilapidated old door standing alone among ruins. On an impulse, Suzume turns the handle, and at once sets free all the calamities the portal was meant to contain. All around Japan other doors open, threatening a population unaware of the looming danger. Together, Suzume and Souta set out on a journey to close them all again.
Written and directed by anime auteur Makoto Shinkai, this epic adventure takes us across the length and breadth of Japan, venturing outside metropolitan hubs to seek doors of disaster in the abandoned infrastructures of depopulated rural areas. As we follow this young woman in her frantic search, we realise that she is also engaged in a personal quest for maturity and freedom. An intimate portrait that is also a study of a vulnerable yet combative nation, Suzume is a sign of resilience at a time when Mother Earth is sending humankind evidence of her fury.
A young mother runs across a mountain meadow with her children and they save a sheep from drowning. A girl cares for her elderly grandmother so tenderly that you want to cry while another practices being a teacher with just the right tone of voice, her dolls lined up before her as willing pupils. The fathers are mostly absent: as construction workers or tradesmen, they rarely share their daily lives with their families. In El Eco, a remote village in northern Mexico, life consists of the most elementary things. Being a child here is an intense experience from day one, involving nature, animals and people. But also love, intimacy, illness and death. And education – at least for the younger generation.
Tatiana Huezo has made a name for herself as a sensitive and poetic documentarian (e.g. Tempestad, Forum, 2016). Accompanying three families in her new work, the notion of meandering becomes an informing principle as she brilliantly weaves a host of faces and gestures into a kaleidoscope of unpretentiousness. Almost incidentally, she portrays the care-working matriarchy in a country notorious for its innumerable kidnappings of women and girls. A tender film that celebrates the grace of animals and the children of this earth alike.
Stefan, a Romanian construction worker living in Brussels, is on the verge of moving back home. He cooks up a big pot of soup with leftovers in his fridge as a goodbye gift for friends and family. As he is about to leave, he meets a young Belgian-Chinese woman who is working in a little restaurant while researching her doctorate on mosses. Her attention to the near-invisible stops him in his tracks.
A hunter-gatherer of beauty in urban landscapes, Bas Devos knows how to tell stories through images. Berlinale audiences beheld this talent in his films Violet (Generation, 2014) and Hellhole (Panorama, 2019). In Here, the Belgian filmmaker's ability to register the invisible and the untold performs many a small c. Unfolding in beautiful tableaux in 4:3 format, his work features characters in whose presence we want to feel the here and now, just as they do. Observing his central duo, played by the radiant Stefan Gota and Liyo Gong, as they discover each other, Devos' gaze is as moving as it is delicate. And what more solid way for a bond to grow between two people than with their feet firmly rooted in Mother Nature's soft carpeting? It is more fragile than cement, but it is our true terrain.
Yakha is 17 and loves roaming about the fields with her friend Madina. Her home is a village in Chechnya where she lives with her mother and little brother. She is self-composed by nature and knows what she wants, but is also open to life – which begins to take shape in the form of certain cultural and social concepts. Madina wants to get married; Yakha's older sister wants a divorce. Her mother is against it – after all, she herself managed to persevere. Together they visit the grave of their father who died in the second Chechen war.
This debut film by Malika Musaeva impresses with its stylistically and narratively unobtrusive cinematic impressionism that succeeds in balancing the main character's carefree youthfulness and inner maturity. Yakha's complex emotional world is conveyed primarily in terms of atmosphere, via looks and gestures, landscapes and movements in the air. The deep rift between tradition and modernity, and between gendered reality and self-determination, is all the more forcefully revealed. A film about what it means to be and live as a young woman. And about melancholy.
In the near future, there are no more animals or plants on Earth and the remaining humans are living under a plastic dome. The price for their continuing survival is very high: at the age of 50, they are implanted with a special seed that turns them into a tree which will provide oxygen and food for the community. A young man, Stefan, accepts this system – until the day his wife Nóra decides to give up her life and undergo voluntary implantation. Driven by his love for her, Stefan decides to break the rules of society in order to save her.
Animation duo Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó created their dystopian epic using rotoscoping techniques. The screenplay was developed with contributions from geologists, botanists and meteorologists, thus providing its fantasy-laden story with a solid, scientific grounding. A deeply moving eco-fantasy that deals head-on with the climate apocalypse threatening life on Earth, Műanyag égbolt is a film imbued with the melancholy of those most aware of how close humankind is to extinction. Although, as is the case for the couple at the centre of this beguiling love story, this burden is lightened by their keen sense of the world's beauty.
A young actor decides to give up acting and make a short film. The small crew comprising the actor himself, the cameraman and the female lead arrive on rocky, windswept Jeju Island. In search of an idea, the young actor explores the surroundings, waits for the right light to emerge and watches the horizon from the coast. One day he catches a glimpse of a figure amid the rocks at the bottom of a cliff, and this prompts him to take the plunge and exchange a few words. Thanks to this conversation, and a love song written years earlier, he finally has a story to tell.