The deck was stacked against Tricia Tuttle when she assumed the position of new director of the Berlin Film Festival in April 2023. Last year’s edition had ended in a scandal, at least from a German perspective, when several award recipients expressed their solidarity with Palestine, creating a “gross imbalance of political opinions,” as local politicians put it. Tuttle was in the audience that evening and must have gotten a good impression of the pitfalls a festival director must avoid when negotiating the complex political, financial and artistic environment of this festival. No sooner had she officially taken the helm that the Berlin Senate announced drastic cuts to the city’s budget for cultural events, further threatening the cash-strapped festival. Yet Tuttle, an American-born programmer who had made a name for herself as the director of the London Film Festival, remained undaunted, and the 75th anniversary edition, which took place in February, must be considered a clear success for her.
The indicators of this success are manifold. In making Todd Haynes the President of the International Jury and awarding Tilda Swinton the Honorary Golden Bear, Tuttle, the first woman and the first queer person to single-handedly lead the Berlinale, had secured the support of two stalwarts of the New Queer Cinema. Both are also longtime loyalists of the festival: Todd Haynes presented Poison here in 1991, for which he won the Teddy Award, and Tilda Swinton has been part of the program no less than 26 times, beginning in 1986 in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio. Their courage and outspokenness were a much-needed antidote against the worldwide onslaught of attacks against freedom of speech and democracy that dominated the headlines almost daily during the twelve days of the festival.
Tuttle also addressed structural problems within the festival. She strengthened the curatorial profile by eliminating Encounters, introduced by former artistic director Carlo Chatrian, because it had syphoned off some of the strongest films from the Competition, and by introducing Perspectives, a new section dedicated to first features that held numerous discoveries. Yet Tricia Tuttle’s biggest achievement was certainly to have created excitement again about the festival—no small task in days like these.
That excitement became palpable already with the opening film, Tom Tykwer’s Das Licht/The Light. Tykwer had twice opened the Berlinale with English-language productions—with Heaven, starring Cate Blanchett, in 2002, and then again in 2009 with the political thriller The International, featuring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. With The Light, he returned to the big screen after working many years on the series Babylon Berlin. Unlike recent openers, Tykwer’s new film took risks, both formally and in terms of its meandering story, and it proved a conversation starter. At the heart of the film is a dysfunctional middle-class family, whose members have become too self-absorbed to care about each other: Father Tim (Lars Eidinger, currently Germany’s most in-demand film and stage actor) is a former leftist who now puts his rhetorical skills in the service of a marketing company, while his wife, Milena (Nicolette Krebitz), operates an arts organization in Nairobi threatened by budget cuts. Their neglected seventeen-year-old twins have disappeared into their own worlds. Jon, a messy, is obsessed with online VR games and hardly leaves his room, while his twin sister Frieda drops acid in clubs at night and stages environmental protests á la Last Generation during the day. Everyone is so absorbed with what they’re doing that they hardly notice when their Polish housekeeper lies dead on the kitchen floor after suffering a heart attack. Enter the Syrian refugee Farrah (Tala Al-Deen, in a remarkable film debut), who despite her medical training prefers to work as a housekeeper for the Engels family—for reasons that are not revealed until the end, and for which the titular light, which Farrah uses for LED therapy, is an instrumental tool. Like the mysterious stranger entering a household in Passolini’s Teorema (1968), Farrah will thoroughly shake up the family that let her into their home.
Tykwer has called the new film “an older brother to Run, Lola, Run,” the 1998 film that torpedoed him into the international limelight. Indeed, The Light is full of homages to what has become a cult classic, beginning with a propulsive score again (co-)composed by Tywker, clever animation, and a bicycle chase under the elevated U-Bahn. Yet at 162 minutes, the new film is exactly twice as long as Run, Lola, Run, and the palette of themes, moods, and genres (including musical numbers) ranges far and wide. “The abundance of themes,” Tykwer has noted, “was important to me. There is simply so much that preoccupies us, challenges us, and overwhelms us.” The Light is indeed overwhelming, and opinions varied whether that’s a good thing or not. Topics run the gamut from migration, refugee drama, and climate change, through colonialism, work-life balance and mindfulness, but what sounds like heady stuff is suffused with a lightheartedness and a good dose of humor. An impressive cast and a playful cinematography do their part in a creating a bold film whose true protagonist is the city of Berlin.
Overall, the festival included a good mix of new voices and seasoned Berlinale directors. Among the festival veterans were Hang Sangsoo and Radu Jude, a Golden Bear winner here in 2021 with Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, though neither director brought their best work this time. That cannot be said of Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke, whose Blue Moon lit up the festival. Together, the director and his star had been to the Berlinale five times, launching Hawke’s career with Before Sunrise in 1995, and appearing here last in 2014, with the grandiose Boyhood.
In Blue Moon, Hawkes plays legendary lyricist Lorenz Hart as he confronts his shattered self-confidence while his former collaborator Richard Rodgers, now working with Oscar Hammerstein, celebrates the opening night of his groundbreaking hit Oklahoma! on March 31, 1943. Based on a script by Robert Kaplow, whose book, Me and Orson Welles, Linklater had adapted in 2008, the film shows the triumph of the new through the eyes of the old lyricist, as his professional and personal fate take a dramatic turn towards the worse. Before the curtain falls, Larry sneaks away to the bar next door, the legendary Sardi’s, where the premiere will be celebrated. This bar will be his stage for the duration of the film. Hart, who calls himself “omnisexual,” eagerly awaits an encounter with Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), a Yale student with whom he has been exchanging letters, but as he painfully realizes, Elizabeth’s admiration for him pertains solely to his artistic work.
This stillbirth of a romantic relationship is compounded by the breakup of his professional one with Rodgers (Andrew Scott, who won a Silver Bear for Best Supporting Actor), even if Rodgers promises him a revival of their earlier success. Thus ends a twenty-year collaboration that produced such hits as “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon.” Noting that Hart and Rodgers were the Lennon and McCartney of their era, Ethan Hawke has quipped that their subsequent eclipse by Rodgers and Hammerstein is, “as if Wings became bigger than The Beatles.” As the film’s prologue reveals, Hart died in November of the same year, collapsing in a New York alleyway.
Hawke plays the diminutive Hart as witty and slightly vulgar character with a combover, always looking for a victim to try his punchlines, sordid jokes and rambling monologues. Hart is in almost every scene, a tragic figure whose brilliance still shines through but who has been hitting the bottle too hard. Rather than true appreciation, he now elicits pity, or less. In a warm and touching scene, Hart unknowingly gifts the writer E. B. White the character Stuart Little, which would launch the essayist’s career as bestselling author of children’s books.
Other highlights in the Competition included a pair of films revolving around young girls with supernatural gifts. In Iván Fund’s mesmerizing Argentinian drama, El Mensaje/The Message, the young heroine Anika (Anika Bootz) can ‘channel’ what animals might feel and think. Her gifts are turned into hard cash her grandparents, who employ her talents to communicate the sentiments of pets, both dead and alive, to their anxious owners. It’s a minimalist and tender black-and-white film, set in the flat, monotonous pampa north of Buenos Aires, that keeps viewers on their toes, even if—or precisely because—many questions remain unanswered. It culminates with a truly magical moment that reveals that Anika is able to create even deeper bonds. The Message was awarded the Jury Silver Bear, an inspiring symbol of hope and defiance in a time when Argentinean President Javier Milei is attacking culture in that nation with a chainsaw.
In contrast to Anika, ten-year-old Marielle, the protagonist of Frédéric Hambalec’s Was Marielle weiß/What Marielle Knows, has gifts that are not appreciated by everyone. The premise of the film sounds like something by Yorgos Lanthimos: After suffering a blow to the face, Marielle develops the telepathic ability to see and hear everything her parents do and say, even if she is not with them. At the dinner table, she lets on that her mother Julia (Julia Jentsch) shared an explicit sexual fantasy during a cigarette break with a co-worker, and then calls out her father Tobias (Felix Kramer) for lying about a humiliating situation at work, when a book cover he had authorized was dismissed by his co-workers as ‘pseudo Magritte.’ Her parents initially opt to dismiss their daughter’s supernatural gift as “vivid imagination,” but the distrust that has been sown between them keeps growing. What Marielle Knows raises interesting questions about the balance of privacy and brutal honesty: what happens if the filter, and with it any protection, is taken away? Hambalec cleverly calibrates the funny and the uncanny effects of this surreal situation, and it becomes increasingly hard to determine who is sincere and who manipulative, creating an ambivalence the film’s final shot slyly refuses to dissolve. Thirteen-year-old Laeni Geiseler as Marielle is a revelation.
An audience frontrunner, and a personal favorite of mine, was the Brazilian O Último Azul/The Blue Trail, which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Award. It was director Gabriel Mascaro’s second visit to the festival, after Divine Love, a film about a fundamentalist dystopia, premiered here in 2019. The new film is set in the Amazon, in the near future, but in a time that very much resembles our own. In order to increase the productivity of young professionals, the state decrees to take care of the old. Every senior at 75 or older must report to a remote “colony” that provides food and housing. And now the name of Tereza (renown theater actress Denise Weinberg in a wonderful performance) has appeared on a list, forcing her to report to the authorities. But Tereza is not quite ready yet to be put away, she wants one more adventure out of life.
The Blue Trail takes a touch of The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999) and a pinch of the Japanese drama Plan 75 (Chie Hawasaka, 2022) to forge its own unique story of rebellion against age discrimination and the looming threat of authoritarian societies. In Mascaro’s film, these threats reveal themselves not in a technological changes but in behavioral realms. Importantly, the celebration of its unlikely heroine’s resilience is given far more room than the specter of a dystopian society. Throughout the film, Mascaro stays close to Tereza and her adventure-filled journey through the rivers and tributaries of the Amazon, contrasting an image of a heavily industrialized region with amazing natural beauty. Tereza works in a meat-processing factory for alligator meat, and mounds of discarded tires fill the banks of the rivers. Yet on her journey she makes otherworldly encounters, meeting a taciturn boat skipper who introduces her to the blue snail, whose magic drool, when dripped into one’s eyes, enables the user to see their destiny, and the free-spirited Roberta (Cuban star Miriam Socarras), a senior on the run like Tereza, but captain of her own ship and life.
Gabriel Mascaro’s film was one of many remarkable Brazilians films screening at this year’s Berlinale, which also included the presentation of a restored version of Iracema, the 1975 classic of Cinema Novo directed by Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, and the latest film by renowned Brazilian director Anna Muylaert, A Melhor Mãe Do Mundo/The Best Mother of the World. As the title indicates, the figure of the mother takes center stage in this film, something that was already the case in her Mãe Só Há Uma/Don’t Call Me Mother (2016) and Que Horas Ela Volta/The Second Mother (2015), both of which premiered here, with the latter winning the coveted Panorama Audience Award.
In the new film, the mother in question is Gal (Shirley Cruz), a catadora as the people are called who pull heavy carts collecting recyclables, and who are ubiquitous in Brazilian cities. An abusive partner, (played by Brazilian super star Seu Jorge as a mixture of threat and charisma), forces her to flee with her kids, packing them on her cart and hitting the streets of São Paulo. In order to dispel their fears, she tells small Benin and his older sister Rihanna that they’re going on an adventure. Gal’s destination is the house of her sister, all away across the 12 million megalopolis, and the journey there holds moments of wonder and of extreme vulnerability. The first night, they ‘camp’ on a traffic island while fireworks from the stadium of their favorite soccer club illuminate the sky, yet trying to make a living during the day is a far less romantic experience. Unlike the mothers in Muylaert’s previous films, Gal is black, which further curtails her options to care for her children. Yet she is determined not to become a victim, as so many women do in Brazil’s male-dominated society, and watching the film one cannot help root for this extraordinary mother—a modern-day Mother Courage who decides to take her life into her own hands. Unlike Bertolt Brecht’s iconographic heroine, she survives ‘her war’ by discovering a community where she least expected it.
Among the many impressive documentaries screening this year, a pair of German films stood out for me. Both of them focus on family members who lost loved ones in racist-motivated attacks: In 1992, seven-year-old Ibrahim Arslan survived an arson attack in his house in Mölln, while his sister, grandmother and cousin tragically died in the fire. In the wake of the crimes, the town of Mölln received hundreds of letters of solidarity from all over Germany, which were archived and then forgotten. Only many years later, and almost by accident, did Ibrahim Arslan become aware of their existence. In Die Möllner Briefe/The Moelln Letters, director Martina Priessner, winner of the Panorama Audience Award, creates an intimate portrait of Ibrahim and his siblings, detailing the persistence of their trauma but also introducing them to some of the original authors of these letters, whose offers for compassion and sorrow, withheld when they were so necessary, are finally conveyed in person.
Das deutsche Volk/The German People, by Marcin Wierzchowski, focuses on the mourning family members and survivors of a racist attack in the city of Hanau on February 19, 2020, in which a German far-right extremist shot and killed nine people, all of them first- and second-generation immigrants. The film recounts the story of the crime from the perspective of the bereaved, showing their pain and rage, documenting their struggle for justice, and unearthing the systemic racism that prevented immediate help and a complete reconstruction of events. For four years, the director accompanied the victims’ loved ones in their struggle for justice and their determination not to be treated as second-class citizens.
Erinnerungskultur, or cultural remembrance, is a big part of contemporary Germany’s confrontation with its history, guided by the question, What may a nation not forget? What makes The Mölln Letters and The German People unique contributions to this wide-spread practice is that they insist on remembering people who are too often considered not to form part of mainstream German culture. While Priessner and Wierzchowski put different emphases in their respective works—the former inquiring who the people were who expressed their solidarity some thirty years ago, and the latter exposing the deliberate roadblocks erected by the police and justice system to deter further probing into the crime—both make the victims the center of their film, affording them the opportunity to tell a story the German public has yet to hear.
The fifth anniversary of the Hanau attacks coincided with the Berlinale. In his speech that day, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier specifically acknowledged that the efforts of the victims were crucial in contributing to a more inclusive understanding of cultural remembrance in Germany: “Over the past five years, much has been done to keep the memory of the Hanau attack alive. And that, dear relatives, is not least thanks to you. You have all achieved a great deal in the fight against forgetting!”1 Perhaps even more impressive was his open admission that police and politicians had failed and that the current renewed efforts to shed light on the events were due to the families’ persistence and intervention, even if many of their still unresolved concerns were glossed over. Four days after Steinmeier’s speech, the results of the German elections, in which the far-right party AfD (Alternative for Germany) came in as second strongest party, made it more than clear how timely and urgent The German People is. Tricia Tuttle’s inclusion of the film in the Berlinale Special, which she co-curates with Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz, is a clear sign that she understands the much-celebrated political aspect of the festival she now heads.
Notes
- See the website of the German President: https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/Frank-Walter-Steinmeier/Reden/2025/02/250219-Hanau-Gedenken-Anschlag.html. Accessed February 28, 2024. ⮭