by Larry Kardish, FilmColumbia Co-Executive and Co-Artistic Director
The Berlin International Film Festival, known as the Berlinale, ended on Sunday, February 23, the day Germans went to the polls. I suppose this was appropriate, as the first Berlin Film Festival, which took place in 1951 on the initiative of an American serviceman in Berlin, a city then in ruins and divided into four districts each administered by an Allied occupying force, was established to “showcase” the culture of the “free world.” In short, the Festival began as a political gesture aimed at the civilian population of Berlin, and for the next seventy-four years, through the creation of West Germany and East Germany, and the building and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, it has remained, more than less, an artistic event inflected by politics.
This year, the 75th edition of the Berlinale, now under the direction of North Carolina-born Tricia Tuttle, who formerly ran the London Film Festival, tried hard to steer clear of controversy. It succeeded in delivering a solid series of premieres and restorations. Tilda Swinton received a Lifetime Achievement Award and gave a rousing opening speech about the necessity of cinema in the face of autocracy. Todd Haynes, as the jury president, delivered awards, one Golden and several Silver Bears, that pleased most of the audience attending the nineteen feature films in competition. This was a mere fraction of the 175 features shown in venues spread over the large city.
Dreams, a playful, surprising, emotionally rich and intellectually rewarding human comedy won the Golden Bear. Set in Oslo, Dreams is the final feature in writer/director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Trilogy that includes Love, which premiered to acclaim earlier this year in Venice, and Sex, which showed at the Berlinale last year and was a highlight of FilmColumbia in October. Accepting his award, Haugerud said Dreams was about the power of reading. At school, Johanne, a seventeen-year-old, develops a serious crush on Johanna, a new teacher. Johanne writes vividly about Johanna and, needing to share her feelings, asks her grandmother, a noted poet, to read what she wrote. Complications ensue.
Berlin’s acting prizes are gender neutral. Two are awarded – one each for lead and supporting performances. This year two non-American actors won for playing New Yorkers. Rose Bryne, an Australian, was celebrated for being Linda, a Long Island housewife, who for good reasons, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Mary Bronstein’s dark comedy of domesticity gone berserk (If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You), and Andrew Scott, an Irishman, received his Bear for acting Richard Rodgers at Sardi’s on the night of March 31, 1943 where his former lyricist, Lorenz Hart, lies in wait to “congratulate” him at the party for the opening of Oklahoma!, Rodger’s new musical. In Blue Moon, a physically transformed Ethan Hawke plays Hart deliciously, loquaciously and vulnerably. This chamber piece is directed by Richard Linklater from a barbed and witty script by Robert Kaplow. In one of the many non-competitive sections of the Berlinale another wonderful film revealed itself in which non-American actors played New Yorkers. Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day recreates the day, December 19, 1974, on which the photographer Peter Hujar visited the apartment of his friend Diane Rosenkranz to recount everything he did the day before for a book she was developing about how an artist lives. Rosenkranz recorded Hujar on that day and the film is based entirely on the transcript of the conversation between them. While Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, both British, easily charm viewers as good buddies, Sachs manipulates time and space in tricky and original ways.
The good news is Dreams, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Blue Moon, and Peter Hujar’s Day have American distributors and, given when they will be released theatrically, each has a good chance of distinguishing FilmColumbia when the Crandell, in its new glory, reopens.
Two other films I thought winners were Zelimir Zilnik’s Restitution, aka 80+, from Serbia, and Ido Fluk’s Koln 75, from Germany. Zilnik, who, as a Yugoslav dissident in his mid-twenties, won the Golden Bear in 1969 for Early Works, returned this year as an octogenarian filmmaker with a delightful lowkey comedy about an aged former jazz musician to whom the Serbian government suddenly returns the mansion he was born in, now a wreck, that had been expropriated during the Second World War. How, with the help of old and new friends and a fractured family, he copes with this “restitution” is a delight.
The zesty and ebullient Koln 75 is a time-shifting tale of how an eighteen-year-old music promoter from Cologne, Vera Brandes, organized against many odds Keith Jarrett’s solo concert. The recording of that concert, also called Koln 75, went on to becomeone of the best-selling jazz albums ever. Mala Emde stars as the young Brandes, John Magaro as Jarrett, and Michael Chernus as a journalist narrator. They are all fabulous and Ido Fluk ingeniously maneuvers around the fact Jarrett, disliking this particular concert, would not grant the filmmakers rights to it. Koln 75 turned out to be the Berlinale’s popular crowd pleaser. While the film is a German-Polish-Belgium coproduction, its writer/director Ido Fluk, who wrote and directed it, is from Brooklyn.
The search for films for FilmColumbia 2025 is in full swing.