Surprises from the Berlinale: a talking Colombian hippopotamus and the suffering of Irish sinners

This is an Irish-Belgian adaptation of the popular novel by Claire Keegan, who grew up Catholic, which in this case is significant because the film deals with the troubled past of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Probably, Milants’ modest film would not have been chosen to open the Berlinale if it were not for the presence of Cillian Murphy, who rose to Olympus.

In 2002, The Magdalene Sisters, a powerful film by Scottish director and actor Peter Mullan about the same orphanages that existed in Ireland since the 18th century and ceased to exist only in the mid-1990s, received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. There, unfortunate sinners were kept in terrible conditions, who were mercilessly exploited and humiliated.

Traditionally. At the main festival point of the Berlinale Palast, posters of visiting filmmakers are hung. The collection is updated every day as premieres appear. Photographs cover all the walls of the Berlin Festival Palace. You can go down several flights of stairs, looking at the autograph gallery. The first posters are already ready – for Cillian Murphy, Emily Watson, who played the role of the abbess of the monastery in “Such Little Things,” other participants in the film, as well as members of a very interesting jury.

On the first day of the festival, a stormy press conference was held by the jury of the main competition, headed by the dark-skinned beauty and native of Mexico, Kenyan actress, producer, director and writer, winner of an Oscar for her supporting role in the film “12 Years a Slave” Lupita Nyong’o.

The jury also included: German director Christian Petzold, Hong Kong actress and director Anne Hui, Italian actress and director Trinka Jasmine, American actor and director Brady Corbit, Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko and Spanish director Albert Serra. The latter two are constantly considered as opponents and are watching with interest how their relationship will develop, since Serra once expressed his sympathy for Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. However, Oksana Zabuzhko has already given her colleague on the jury her book about relations between Ukraine and Russia in Italian translation.

At the meeting with journalists, the atmosphere was tense, as some uncomfortable questions remained unanswered, or the reaction to them was too emotional. And the conversation concerned sensitive political topics, such as what was happening in the Gaza Strip, the invitation to the opening ceremony of representatives of the far-right German party and the subsequent refusal to accept them, but only after publicizing this fact. In the evening, the theme continued on the star track, where people appeared to protest against this situation. Model Papis Loveday – a half-naked chocolate handsome man in pink ladies’ gloves – came out with a sign that read: “No to racism” and the name of the above-mentioned anti-migrant party.

In the main competition, 20 films were entered, which will be evaluated by the jury. Among them is the autobiographical “Frozen Time” by French director Olivier Assayas, who turned to the pandemic period and his own experience of quarantine. A certain director (and in fact Assayas himself) with his wife, his brother, a music critic, and his wife spend days of forced confinement together. “Empire” was filmed by another French classic, Bruno Dumont, who prefers to live and film in Belgium. South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s “Needs of a Traveler” stars French star Isabelle Huppert for the third time. They worked together in Claire’s Cell and In Another Country.

The program also included: “Black Tea” by the French-Moorish director Abderrahmane Sissako, who graduated from the workshop of Marlen Khutsiev at VGIK in the 1980s, “From Hilda with Love” by the German director Andreas Dresen, “Death” by the German director Matthias Glasner with Lars Eidinger, who played Nicholas II in “Matilda” by Alexei Uchitel, “The Kitchen” by the Mexican Alonso Ruizpalacios, which takes place in one of the restaurants in New York, the French-Italian “The Other End” by Piero Messina about the resurrection of a wife in the body of another woman, where the role of the husband was played by Gael Garcia Bernal.

“My Favorite Cake” by Bekhtashu Sanaihi and Miriam Moghaddam (Iran-Sweden-Germany-France) tells about the late love of an elderly resident of Tehran. The Iranian authorities did not allow the directors to come to the festival. The Berlinale management, in turn, called for the return of their passports and not to interfere with their visit to Berlin.

The hero of the Dominican film “Pepe” by Nelson Carlos de Los Santos Arias was a hippopotamus who lived and died untimely in the private zoo of a Colombian drug lord. The hippopotamus comprehends what happened and talks about it from the screen. How can one not recall the Norwegian film “Gunda” by the outstanding Russian documentarian Viktor Kosakovsky, shown at the Berlinale in 2020. Her heroine was a pig with a fine mental organization.

Film by Victor Kosakovsky “Long live the Antipodes!” opened the Venice Film Festival in 2011. In 2018, the premiere of his “Watercolor” took place there, where for the first time in the history of cinema there were not 24 frames per second, but 96. However, technical capabilities did not allow showing the film about different states of water in its original form. Now Victor, who has lived in Spain for a long time and did not receive money from the state for his films, will present “Architecton”, a co-production of Germany and France, in the main competition of the Berlinale. It is about the vulnerability of architecture during modern cataclysms. The first show will take place on February 19.

Festival art director Carlo Chatrian, whose time at the Berlinale was short-lived (he will leave the festival in the near future), said: “Viktor Kossakovsky is one of the few who knows how to combine amazing visualization with sincere concern for the fate of planet Earth. His new film, shot in Germany, explores the fragility of architecture. Greco-Roman buildings are still able to withstand earthquakes today, while modern buildings cannot withstand them. Isn’t it time to think about what human progress is, and whether we understand it correctly?”

In 2023, the documentary film “On Adamant” by French director Nicolas Philibert about a Parisian psychiatric clinic won the Berlinale. Perhaps this ensured the participation of two non-fiction films in the main competition. In addition to “Architecton,” the jury will evaluate “Dahomey,” by French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, about the return of once exported works of art from the kingdom of Dahomey by French museums to Benin. In 2019, Diop won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival for the feature film Atlantic.

The “Forum” program has already shown a slightly surreal “Editorial” by Ukrainian director Roman Bondarchuk about an employee of the natural history museum in the Kherson region who follows the trail of a steppe marmot. Events take place six months before SVO. If it is confirmed that the rare animal actually lives in those places, then the country may become part of some kind of European natural alliance. In the end, when the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is resolved, the leaders of world powers will plant trees.

“The Silence of Mary” by the Latvian director Davis Simanis is also presented in the “Forum” and talks about the Latvian-German theater and silent film actress Maria Leiko, who worked in the troupe of Max Reinhardt and starred with the classic German cinema Friedrich Murnau. In 1933, after Hitler came to power, she returned to Latvia. And after the death of her daughter in Moscow in 1935, Maria went there to visit her granddaughter. In 1937 she was arrested for counter-revolutionary activities, and in 1938 she was shot. Maria Leiko was rehabilitated in 1958. Her role was played by Olga Shepitskaya, who once starred in the famous Soviet film “My name is Harlequin.”

On February 17, the Berlin Classics program will host the first screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice.” The restored version of his latest film will be presented by the Swedish Film Institute, with whose assistance this film was once created. There will be three shows in total at the festival.

On February 20, the Berlinale Palast will host the awards ceremony for Martin Scorsese, who will be awarded the honorary Golden Bear for outstanding film achievements. He will present his 2006 film The Departed, in which Matt Damon, who arrived at the Berlinale as a producer, played one of the roles.