First Films & Selection Committee of the Berlin Critics' Week 2023
The first films and the selection committee of Berlin Critics’ Week 2023
Advertising images that cover up crimes. On the death of the director. What makes a feminist classic? Late-night cult, a mission to Mars and a supernaturally charismatic mattress. Don’t miss the first films of the 9th Berlin Critics’ Week.
We open this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week with a film programme entitled Missing in Action. These three films, taken from different generations, all feature visible and invisible bodies. In her short film essay ¿Dónde está Marie Anne?, Yaela Gottlieb shapes advertising clips into a portrait of a missing person, ultimately commenting on how Latin American military dictatorships have made people disappear throughout history. In his feature-length debut De Noche los Gatos son Pardos, Valentin Merz has a director disappear on the set of a sexy costume film and expands from this incident into a playful, light-hearted exploration of genre cinema and its motifs. Between the film crew, a particularly curious investigator, and the laconic employees of a funeral home, there emerges a whodunit that quickly veers off course and becomes, among other things, a ghost film. An historical accompaniment for those two films comes in the form of Valie Export‘s A Perfect Pair (1986), in which the interdisciplinary artist Export unfurls a wide range of feminist and anti-capitalist ideas. Originally created for television, this work was first broadcast as part of the episodic film Seven Women – Seven Sins as the instalment dedicated to “lust”. Between the films, and across generations of filmmakers, a debate unfolds about popular and capitalist images – and about possible counter-designs to them.
Stephen Sayadian‘s cult film Café Flesh (1982), which is influenced by New Wave music and Surrealism, introduces an evening of excessive cinema in the tradition of midnight films such as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo or David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Under the tag line Midnight Metabolism, we turn our attention to films that develop new narrative forms and new perspectives on cinema out of a penchant for classics of film history. In Mission to Mars, Amat Vallmajor del Pozo makes ironical allusions to science fiction motifs while sending two brothers on a perilous space mission through toxic fog in the middle of the Basque Country. Apocalyptic undertones meet good old punk rock and a fine sense for vulnerable men in this, del Pozo’s debut film. A series of mundane – and then increasingly supernatural – developments surrounding a mattress provide the crux for Syeyoung Park‘s The Fifth Thoracic Vertebrae, an experimental horror film whose mind-bending sound design will hopefully excite more than just horror fans.
Berlin Critics’ Week 2023 will take place on February 15-23, 2023. The film programme starts on Thursday, February 16, at Hackesche Höfe Kino.
The Selection Committee of Berlin Critics’ Week 2023
The selection of films for Berlin Critics’ Week is made by an international team of mainly film critics, whose membership changes annually. Libertad Gills, Victor Guimarães and Patrick Holzapfel curated the selection of films for the 2023 edition of the festival together with Petra Palmer and Dennis Vetter from the collective artistic direction of Berlin Critics’ Week.
Patrick Holzapfel, born in Augsburg in 1989, lives in Lower Austria and is active in literary, journalistic and curatorial work. Editor-in-chief of the website and print magazine Jugend ohne Film. Published in Die Presse, Mubi Notebook, Perlentaucher, Filmdienst, among others. Film programs at Goethe-Institut London, Zeughauskino Berlin, Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Filmarchiv Austria, among others. 2016 Siegfried Kracauer Fellow of the German Film Critics Association, 2022 Startstipendiat literary fellowship from the Federal Chancellery Austria. Winner of the 2022 Open Mike competition.
Libertad Gills is a filmmaker, critic, and researcher born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She teaches film at the Universidad de las Artes (EC) since 2015, co-directs the annual film programme Rialécticas: Jornadas Cinematográficas de Guayaquil, and is co-editor of Fuera de Campo, the academic film journal of the Universidad de las Artes. In September 2022, she published La crítica es una escuela, a book of conversations with Latin American film critics about film criticism today. Website: www.libertadgills.com
Victor Guimarães is a film critic, programmer, and professor based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He is currently a columnist at Con Los Ojos Abiertos (Argentina). His work has appeared in publications such as Cinética, Senses of Cinema, Desistfilm, La Vida Útil, La Furia Umana and Cahiers du Cinéma. He has curated retrospectives such as Argentina Rebelde (2015) and special programmes for festivals such as 3 Continents (France) and Frontera Sur (Chile). He is currently a programmer at FICValdivia (Chile) and the artistic director of FENDA (Brazil). Furthermore, he holds a PhD in Communications from UFMG, with a research stage at Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3).
The first film programmes at a glance:
MISSING IN ACTION
¿DÓNDE ESTÁ MARIE ANNE?
Dir: Yaela Gottlieb, AR/PE 2022, 6 min. – European premiere
DE NOCHE LOS GATOS SON PARDOS
Dir: Valentin Merz, CH 2022, 110 Min. – German premiere
A PERFECT PAIR (EIN PERFEKTES PAAR ODER DIE UNZUCHT WECHSELT IHRE HAUT)
Dir: Valie Export, AT/DE 1986, 12 min.
MIDNIGHT METABOLISM
CAFÉ FLESH
Dir: Stephen Sayadian, US 1982, 73 min.
MISSION TO MARS (MISIÓN A MARTE)
Dir: Amat Vallmajor del Pozo, ES 2022, 71 min. – International premiere
THE FIFTH THORACIC VERTEBRAE (DASEOS BEONJJAE HYUNGCHU)
Dir: Syeyoung Park, KR 2022, 65 Min. – German premiere