Film programme for Berlin Critics’ Week 2023 is finalized
The film programme for Berlin Critics’ Week 2023 is finalized
Directors who get mixed up in history. Films that subtly revolutionize consciousness. Care and caring, translated into images and sound. Cameras that probe urban life. Pop and politics, reflected by male bodies. The film programme for Berlin Critics’ Week 2023 is finalized.
We expect a particularly intense debate about our Reaction Shot programme, which brings together films exploring their creators’ involvement in contemporary history. In the essay-film Solmatalua, Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade combines images of the Black Diaspora with nature sounds, religious singing, poems, popular music and the voices of Brazilians fighting against racism. In recent years, the young director Vadim Kostrov has made himself into a sought-after festival guest thanks to his impressionistic, thoughtful cinema and his portrayal of Russian youth. In Still Free, he shows the young couple Kostya and Katya making a summer trip to a public swimming lake – one final carefree moment before Kostya joins the Russian military. The filmmaker and activist Masao Adachi is considered one of the more controversial voices in contemporary cinema due to his heavy involvement with the Japanese Red Army and the PFLP. His new film Revolution+1 takes the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe as a starting point, using the assassin to formulate an ideological assault on Japan’s social order. In doing so, Adachi explicitly demands that the audience take a moral and political position on his film.
A film that directly penetrates the consciousness—and a sect that protects it—are at the center of The Film To Come by Raúl Ruiz, who made this as part of a series celebrating the Locarno Film Festival’s 50th anniversary. Ruiz’s cinephilic conjuring of the future opens the closing programme for the 2023 Berlin Critics’ Week. Under the title Softly Surreal, we will show and debate films that combine tenderness with formal inventiveness to radical effect. Manaka Nagai’s Moon Night follows a young woman on an after-hours escapade from her apartment: a shirt from the clothesline carries her to the moon, bringing the magical into the midst of the mundane. The loosely connected scenes of Smog In Your Heart then completely suspend the rules of narrative cinema. With a flickering frenzy of jump cuts, Lucía Seles launches off into the trials and tribulations of managing a tennis court complex. In this – the first part of a trilogy that now already consists of four parts – Seles achieves nothing less than the reinvention of absurdist comedy.
Following on from our Opening Conference, which took the title Aesthetics of Care, we will be discussing questions of care and caring in film aesthetics at the cinema. Members of the collective artistic direction of the Critics’ Week Amos Borchert, Elena Friedrich, Petra Palmer and Dennis Vetter have curated a program of four films that span an arc through different stylistic forms. After showing four films, which span a range of different styles, we will question the directors about their methods as well as their views on feminism and capitalism. The artist Elke Marhöfer has made several films in which the world and its ecosystems are experienced in ways beyond the human; in her short film prendas – ngangas – enquisos – machines {each part welcomes the other without saying}, humans are only a marginal phenomenon. Eva Giolo assembles rituals of the everyday in The Demands of Ordinary Devotion: propelled by the sound of a breast pump, her film creates a choreography around work, the body, objects, nature – all incessantly held together by hands that order, care and repair. In Koban Louzou, Brieuc Schieb presents disarming digital images of a group of people living together on a farmstead. Under the thumb of a whimsical patriarch (Virgil Vernier), tensions and friendships remain in balance until everything derails in the end. The evening closes with the dreamy short film Dawn by Leonor Noivo, which features the inconspicuous transformation of a mother into a fish.
One of the most impressive works by the filmmaker and photographer Sharon Lockhart is entitled Teatro Amazonas and takes, as its subject, the audience at cultural institutions. One long, unblinking shot documents every movement from the crowd at a sound performance. The film provoked debate after its screening at the Berlinale Forum. Maputo Nakuzandza by Ariadine Zampaulo features a bride who refuses to marry: Zampaulo follows this character deep into the urban canyons of Maputo, allowing her film to repeatedly digress and wander off up alleys or into hidden corners. It is a metropolitan symphony – dramatization and snapshots of everyday life come together, with the urban environment entirely obeying the rules of the film. Dominique Loreau travels through cities and human dwellings accompanied by Chinese mitten crabs, which provide the fulcrum for her nimble and evocative essay-film Such a Long March. Together, these films – unter the title Cinecology – make for an evening dedicated to questions about the visuality of urban life and the (im)possibility of cinematic spaces.
With Shin Ultraman, Shinji Higuchi shows how philosophical and experimental monster films can be, as he extends one of the most important film series related to Godzilla and co. Here Ultraman takes up the fight against a sophisticated adversary who has traveled from his home planet to Earth in order to play politicians off against each other. The director Marcelo Lin, originally from Brazil, has always flirted explicitly with the aesthetics of Hollywood films – in contrast to his contemporaries Adirley Quierós, Affonso Uchôa, Lincoln Péricles and André Novais Oliveira. In Serrão, somewhere between a documentary and a surrealistic escapade, he depicts an ageing rapper with an artificial eyeball. This concludes an evening of films under the title Gentle Giants.
All programmes and events at a glance
TH 16 Feb
20:00
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
LUST (EIN PERFEKTES PAAR ODER DIE UNZUCHT WECHSELT IHRE HAUT)
Dir: Valie Export, AT/DE 1986, 12 min.
FR 17 Feb
20:00
AESTHETICS OF CARE
PRENDAS – NGANGAS – ENQUISOS – MACHINES {EACH PART WELCOMES THE OTHER WITHOUT SAYING}
Dir: Elke Marhöfer, CU 2014, 26 min.
THE DEMANDS OF ORDINARY DEVOTION
Dir: Eva Giolo, BE/IT 2022, 12 min.
KOBAN LOUZOU
Dir: Brieuc Schieb, FR 2022, 60 min. – International premiere
DAWN (MADRUGADA)
Dir: Leonor Noivo, PT 2021, 28 min.
SA 18 Feb
20:00
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 VERTEBRA (DASEOS BEONJJAE HYUNGCHU)
Dir: Syeyoung Park, KR 2022, 65 min. – German premiere
SU 19 Feb
20:00
GENTLE GIANTS
SHIN ULTRAMAN
Dir: Shinji Higuchi, JP 2022, 113 min. – German premiere
SERRÃO
Dir: Marcelo Lin, BR 2021, 18 min. – European premiere
TU 21 Feb
20:00
REACTION SHOT
SOLMATALUA
Dir: Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, BR 2022, 15 min. – German premiere
STILL FREE
Dir: Vadim Kostrov, RU 2023, 31 min. – World premiere
REVOLUTION+1
Dir: Masao Adachi, JP 2022, 80 min. – International premiere
W 22 Feb
20:00
CINECOLOGY
TEATRO AMAZONAS
Dir: Sharon Lockhart, US 1999, 40 min.
MAPUTO NAKUZANDZA
Dir: Ariadine Zampaulo, BR/MZ 2022, 60 min. – German premiere
SUCH A LONG MARCH (UNE SI LONGUE MARCHE)
Dir: Dominique Loreau, BE 2022, 62 min. – German premiere
TH 23 Feb
20:00
SOFTLY SURREAL
THE FILM TO COME (LE FILM A VENIR)
Dir: Raúl Ruiz, FR/CH 1987, 8 min.
MOON NIGHT
Dir: Manaka Nagai, DE 2022, 15 min. – German premiere
SMOG IN YOUR HEART (SMOG EN TU CORAZÓN)
Dir: Lucía Seles, AR 2022, 112 min. – European premiere