Berlinale Bloggers 2022
Back on the screen

The Berlinale Bears have been awarded – six out of eight prizes went to female filmmakers. It’s yet another example of how the festival is leading the way this year.

Korean director Hong Sangsoo won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival, with “The Novelist’s Film”. Hong Sangsoo’s experimentation with new film techniques left the cinema audience spellbound – and it wasn’t just because of his cinematic approach.

Judge Josephine Praetorius-Camusot's legal routine starts to unravel when a museum exhibit awakens from a long slumber: Hans List, a composer from the Paris Commune, bears an uncanny resemblance to her. "An anarchic comedy on the origin of German criminal law,” goes the tag line to Max Linz' Berlinale Forum contribution “L’Etat et Moi”.

“Fogaréu”, Flávia Neves's debut feature, reveals a history of violence buried in Brazil's colonial past – and resurgent today. The filmmaker talks about how the film came about in an interview.

The Brazilian film “Três Tigres Tristes” (English: Three Tidy Tigers Tied a Tie Tighter) and the Argentinian “La edad media” (The Middle Ages) deal with the pandemic, while the Portuguese-Brazilian co-production “Mato seco em chamas” (Dry Ground Burning) presents a harrowing panorama of contemporary Brazilian politics.

A brilliant performance by actors in Andreas Dresen’s “Rabiye Kurnaz gegen George W. Bush” takes us back to the case of Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz.

Two documentaries, “Bettina” and “Sorry Comrade”, tell stories about the post-war divide between East and West Germany.

Nic, Leo, Andrea and Raff are four young trans people from different backgrounds and with different personalities and plans. Nicolò Bassetti’s documentary film “Nel mio nome” (Into My Name), produced by Elliot Page, follows the four of them over a two-year period and tells their story.

A sentimental film with the hard-to-pronounce title “A E I O U – Das schnelle Alphabet der Liebe” features in the Competition section at the Berlinale. It’s another film about romantic relationships in which the power balance leans more towards the woman – simply because she’s considerably older than the man.

Isabelle Stever’s Berlinale entry, “Grand Jeté”, is a film about a subject that is offensive, even taboo, to people all over the world: incest – in this case, between mother and son.
 

From science fiction farce to long-term documentary: three German films are dedicated to life in a tower block

The Berlinale is set to go ahead as an in-presence event in the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, despite rising infection rates. That casts a shadow over the anticipation of a promising festival programme.