The first films and the selection committee for Berlin Critics’ Week 2024
Political cinema between Merkel masks and capitalist horror visions. Filmmakers in the crossfire between church, colonialism and feminism. Dreams as interventions, and the failure of art in the face of Chinese state power. The first films of the 10th Berlin Critics’ Week are confirmed.
Because the German state has failed, a large number of people are living in the forest, outside of society: Visually inspired by the climate activists who have been occupying Hambach Forest near Cologne at regular intervals since 2012, shedding their civil identity as part of their activism, the video artist Omer Fast (Continuity, Remainder) delves into surreal realms with his third feature film Abendland. Beginning with his cinematic masquerade, we want to debate the possibilities and strategies of political cinema today. We will be showing and discussing Abendland alongside the psychedelic, nightmarish short film Notes from Gog Magog, in which Riar Rizaldi crafts a horror vision of international capitalism from the concrete realities of workers in South Korea and Indonesia. In doing so, Rizaldi pushes the limits of what can be endured; while time, space, the body, and the image itself all disintegrate completely.
Westerns are outdated! Deliberately rebelling against no-frills entertainment films, the trio of Clara Winter and Miiel Ferráez present themselves in their debut feature Wikiriders – an ironic road movie in which their alter egos cross Texas and Mexico in search of the legacy of colonialism. They ultimately encounter it in the form of an influential aristocratic family – a family far more alive than they would like. In Nocturne for a Forest by Catarina Vasconcelos (The Metamorphosis of Birds), too, those who were thought dead live on. Here, the director lets spirits speak – specifically the spirits of Portuguese women, who were for a long time socially oppressed by the local church. Notably, the film features the important painter Josefa de Óbidos, whose painting Sagrada Familia takes center stage in a supernatural reflection. The evening will be opened by Natalia del Mar Kašik, who calls for a duel of the gazes in her Pistoleras, a film that flits by faster than a shadow.
Dreams About Putin is based on dreams about Vladimir Putin, which have been published online in text form by many people since Russia’s war of aggression began. Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez have assembled, from a variety of dream logs and archival footage of Putin, a trip into the subconscious of the present. Using computer-generated images, the filmmakers – who are living in exile – comment strikingly on current conditions while confronting the impossibility of making critical films in contemporary Russia. And what happens when art ultimately breaks apart under the weight of political conditions? This is the subject of Zhenming Guo’s debut feature film Tedious Days and Nights. Here he depicts a group of Chinese artists, resisters, and dropouts centered around the poet Dekuang Zeng; this group’s life and work are shaped by their traumatic memories of the Tiananmen Square massacre and by their frustration over the Party dictatorship’s societal restrictions. In the ruins of a former coal mining region, their grand gestures of resistance fade away, along with their melancholy and their crude sayings – but these do not fade in the cinema, where Guo’s semi-fictional film-poem takes on a remarkable power.
Berlin Critics’ Week 2024 will take place from February 14 to February 22, 2024. The film program will begin on Thursday, February 15, 2024 at Hackesche Höfe Kino.
The selection committee for Berlin Critics’ Week 2024
The film selection for Berlin Critics’ Week is made by a regularly changing international commission, which is predominantly comprised of film critics. The selection for the festival’s 2024 installment was curated by Lucía Salas and Srikanth Srinivasan together with Petra Palmer and Dennis Vetter from the artistic directors’ collective of Berlin Critics’ Week. We would also like to thank Devika Girish and Pedro Segura for their collaboration, and Yu Shimizu for her input as a program consultant. The film selection of the Berlin critics’ Week does not follow any thematic criteria – instead, we will be presenting new, exciting films from the current festival season.
Lucía Salas is an Argentinian film critic, program curator, and filmmaker. She is co-editor of the film magazine La vida útil, a member of the program team at the Punto de Vista festival (Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Navarra), and a lecturer in Curatorial Studies at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola; she also works with the platforms Con Los Ojos Abiertos, Jugend ohne Film, Viennale and others. Together with the collective LaSiberia Cine, she directed the film Implantación (2016) as well as several short films. She is currently a PhD student in the Communications program at the CINEMA department of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
Srikanth Srinivasan is a film critic, program curator, and translator from Bangalore. Since 2008, he has written about film for numerous publications, with a focus on experimental film and video art. His first monograph Modernism by Other Means (published by Lightcube) is the first book to be written on the work of Indian experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta. Srikanth’s second book Nainsukh, the Film, was published in 2023 by Museum Rietberg in Zurich.
The first films at a glance
Abendland
Dir: Omer Fast, GER 2024, 115 min. – World premiere
Dreams About Putin
Dir: Nastia Korkia, Vlad Fishez, BEL/HUN/POR 2023, 30 min. – German premiere
Nocturne for a Forest (Nocturno Para Uma Floresta)
Dir: Catarina Vasconcelos, POR 2023, 16 min. – German premiere
Notes from Gog Magog
Dir: Riar Rizaldi, INA 2022, 20 min. – German premiere
Pistoleras
Dir: Natalia del Mar Kašik, AUT 2023, 2 min. – German premiere
Tedious Days and Nights (混乱与细雨)
Dir: Zhenming Guo, CHN 2023, 110 min. – European premiere
Wikiriders
Dir: Clara Winter, Miiel Ferráez, MEX/GER 2024, 60 min. – World premiere
Read the announcement at wochederkritik.de
Press contact: Elisabeth Mohr, presse@wochederkritik.de
Picture: Abendland by Omer Fast, © Filmgalerie 451 / Piffl Medien
Berlin Critics’ Week is an event organized by the German Film Critics Association and funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds, the Stiftung Kulturwerk of the VG Bild-Kunst, and the Rudolf Augstein Foundation. The opening conference will be held in cooperation with the Film and Media Art section of the Akademie der Künste.