Sight&Sound - 05.2020

(Jacob Rumans) #1
May 2020 | Sight&Sound | 19

Always and Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No
Evil (see page 20). The former was a deserving
and popular winner of the Grand Jury Prize,
despite having already played at Sundance.
It’s not unprecedented for a film that isn’t a
world premiere to compete in Berlin, but it
is unusual to have two – Kelly Reichardt’s
lovely First Cow was the other. And it was
certainly a surprise to see one of those titles
awarded a major prize, though again, this was
not unprecedented: Richard Linklater took
Best Director in Berlin in 2014 for Boyhood,
which had already premiered at Sundance.
Across the whole festival, there was a
noticeable increase in films that had already
screened elsewhere. In particular, the outstanding
Sundance docs Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets and
Welcome to Chechnya made quite an impression
in Panorama’s Dokumente strand. The relaxation
of a dogmatic attachment to world premieres
dogma may lose Berlin some inter-festival
bragging rights, but it made for a less flabby
selection overall, and everyday attendees
benefited as a result. (Berlin has a vast public
audience, this year selling 330,000 tickets.)
Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil, which presents a
quartet of urgent tales about the death penalty in
Iran, took the Golden Bear, as widely predicted.
As happened when his countryman Jafar Panahi
won for Taxi Tehran in 2015, the award was given
in his absence because he had been banned from
leaving the country by the Iranian government.
But the empty seat symbolically reserved for
him at the ceremony seemed oddly emblematic
of a Competition at which only a few of the
filmmakers presented truly showed up: as has
often been the case, the discoveries, surprises and
delights were mostly to be found in the sidebars.
This is where the new artistic director Carlo
Chatrian and his team really made their presence
felt. The festival changed shape this year – not
a wholesale revolution but an evolution,
in very welcome directions. At no time, for
example, was there any discernible mourning
for the defunct Culinary Cinema strand, which
despite initial good intentions had morphed
into an excuse to bribe foodies to ‘only’ pay
€100 for a Michelin-starred meal if they sat
through a bad cooking documentary first. And
both the Panorama and Forum sections were
considerably smaller than in previous years,
making both feel more potent and manageable.


Panorama
The “sexy, edgy, daring” Panorama section
benefited from streamlining. A revitalised
selection spanned the spectrum from the austere
social inquiry of Srdan Golubovic’s Father,
which won the section’s audience award for
best feature, to the intense topicality of Kitty
Green’s portrait of a young woman working for
a predatory film boss, The Assistant (see Rushes,
page 12, and review, page 62), screened while
the Harvey Weinstein judgement was pending.
The sidebar also took in the multicultural rap
of Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli, the youthful
optimism of Faraz Shariat’s No Hard Feelings
and the extraordinary bodies in motion of Patric
Chiha’s dance doc If It Were Love. And let’s not
forget the single most explicit unsimulated act
of fellatio this reviewer has ever seen outside
of porn, in joyously queer Brazilian oddity Dry
Wind. Panorama 2020! Something for everyone.

Forum
By comparison Forum (“reflections on the medium
of film, socio-artistic discourse and a particular
sense for the aesthetic”) provided few breakouts.
That was partly because to celebrate the sidebar’s
50th anniversary, 28 Forum highlights from the
past five decades were shown, by Luchino Visconti,
Theo Angelopoulos, Chris Marker, Oshima Nagisa

and Straub/Huillet, among others. Naturally, a lot of
the new, rawer titles were overshadowed. That said,
the Chinese film The Calming by Song Fang and
Joshua Bonnetta’s esoteric ethnographic doc The
Two Sights received strong notices, and two terrific
Toronto imports, Kazik Radwanski’s high-anxiety
Anne at 13,000 ft and Matthew Rankin’s gonzo The
20th Century, again proved the wisdom of going
for quality over premiere status – not that Forum
has ever been particularly guilty of the reverse.

Encounters
There may also have been some cannibalisation
of Forum by the Berlinale’s newest and most
exciting section, Encounters. The strand
that feels like the closest reflection of the
sensibility of artistic director Carlo Chatrian
and the members of his previous Locarno Film
Festival team who came to Berlin with him,
Encounters is designed to showcase more daring,
challenging films in a competitive environment,
and certainly delivered on that remit.
The big winner was The Works and Days (of
Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), by C.W.
Winter and Anders Edström – which, thanks
to an eight-hour running time, few outside
the jury saw. But the award of a share in a Best
Director prize to Cristi Puiu for the punishingly
intellectual, divisive provocation Malmkrog
was a statement of intent and Special Jury Prize-
winner The Trouble with Being Born by Sandra
Wollner was a truly radical choice: focusing
on a paedophile and an android 10-year-old
girl, it treats breathtakingly discomfiting
subject matter with clinical intelligence.
Gunda, Viktor Kossakovsky’s wordless
documentary about a farm pig, beguiled all
who saw it; Mariusz Wilczynski’s flat-out weird
hand-drawn animation Kill It and Leave This
Town confounded just as many. Josephine
Decker’s Shirley, starring Elisabeth Moss as the
20th-century writer Shirley Jackson, brought
a little dose of star power to the line-up. That
had already been seen at Sundance; Melanie
Waelde’s zinging, nervy debut feature Naked
Animals came out of nowhere. If Encounters is
representative of the ‘new’ Berlinale, yes please.
Despite setbacks that could have sunk
a less robust festival, the 70th Berlinale
innovated just enough and retained just
enough to maintain goodwill at least until
edition 71, assuming it ever happens.

The festival changed shape


this year – not a wholesale


revolution but an evolution,


in very welcome directions


The Trouble with Being Born

Mogul Mowgli
Bassam Tariq, UK
Riz Ahmed plays a rapper named Zed who’s
on the brink of a major tour and superstardom
when he’s hospitalised with an
autoimmune condition. Ahmed
produced and co-wrote the script
with American director Bassam Tariq,
researching the medical background
and drawing on his own life to
make a lean and highly personal
film that provides a funny and
fresh look at identity, parental
and societal conflict and the
perennial struggle to achieve
one’s dreams. Lou Thomas


Servants
Ivan Ostrochovský, Slovakia/Romania/Czech Republic
Servants exemplified what the Berlinale’s
new section Encounters is supposed to be
about: uniqueness. A Catholic seminary in the
Bratislava mountains becomes a model for
the way politics worked in Communist-
era Czechoslovakia. Ostrochovský
leans heavily on a mood of static
tension and on gorgeous monochrome
tableaux photography. If it feels more
like a collection of terrific scenes than
a coherent narrative, that’s because
the script is deliberately elliptical.
Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating
ideological chiller. Nick James

The Trouble with Being Born
Sandra Wollner, Austria/Germany
Artificial intelligence has never felt as brutalising
as it does in Wollner’s second feature. During
a hot summer, a pale, elf-like young girl called
Elli idles at her home pool, beside her beloved
Papa. But their bond is sexual, and Elli turns
out to be an android, locked in an imperfect
code. When Elli gets lost, then is picked up
and programmed for a new role, she struggles
to piece together what happened and which
memories are truly hers. The film’s stunning,
tactile sound design by Peter Kutin and the eerie
cinematography by Timm Kröger beautifully
convey the idea that the greatest thing we must
fear from AI is ourselves. Ela Bittencourt

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