In this blog, the ICO team highlights some of the titles from this year’s Berlin Film Festival that we’re most excited to see reach UK cinemas over the coming year, including new work by Mati Diop, Levan Akin and Jane Schoenbrun.
Duncan Carson, Projects and Business Manager
Matt and Mara (dir. Kazik Radwanski)
Director Sidney Pollack said ‘plot is the meat that the burglars throw to the dogs when they climb over the wall to get to the jewels, which are the characters.’ If that’s the case, then this miraculous feature is nothing less than a cache of diamonds. Full of drama, yet drama derived entirely from the circumstances created by its characters, it’s the latest from director Kazik Radwanski, lynchpin of Canadian indie stable MDFF. Working again with Deragh Campbell – who brought a Gena Rowlands-level of quicksilver instability and charm in his previous work Anne at 13,000 Ft. – he adds Matt Johnson as the co-lead.
Johnson, a talented director in his own right (most recently with Blackberry, a story of corporate meltdown in which he also starred), plays Matt, a minor literary celebrity who returns to his hometown of Toronto and reconnects with university classmate and fellow writer Mara (Campbell). What unfolds between the two is almost entirely trivial in terms of plot, absolutely gripping in terms of experience. Expressing a deep but unconsummated connection between the two leads, as well as the history that has kept them apart, it’s a portrait of life’s untaken, but seductively available, paths. Radwanski’s films have yet to be distributed in the UK, and US indie has had very mixed fortunes on this side of the Atlantic, but this deserves reception beyond festival play.
Dahomey (dir. Mati Diop)
Any artist hopes for their work to have a life of its own. If the seminal documentary had it that Statues Also Die, this is a story that confirms that statues also live. The question of cultural restitution – whether objects should be repatriated to their home countries – is history that continues to breathe. The theft is complete, and until relatively recently few in colonising countries have wanted to listen to the security alarm that has been blaring in the colonised’s ears since the primal act of desecration. This docu-fiction by French-Senagalese director Mati Diop urges us to consider it a live issue, both by offering perspectives on the value of these works in formerly colonised countries, but also by literally embodying some of these artworks with a life of their own. We see the ceremonial figures taken from the historic kingdom of Dahomey returned to modern-day Benin. Diop performs an act of metamorphosis, as the figures speak with the voice of ages stranded far from home. Seeing the care lavished upon them by Beninese curators as well as the extremely lively debate about their value at University of Abomey-Calav leaves you with no doubt as to their vitality and beauty, even of their totemic power.
Miraculously, Diop manages to condense this odyssey into just 67 minutes, a reminder that complexity is not necessarily a bedfellow of length. MUBI will release Dahomey in most territories and the film’s slender runtime is a major opportunity for cinemas to play host to broader post-film discussions about the issues it intricately unfolds.
Isabel Moir, Film Programmer
My Favourite Cake (dir. Maryam Moghaddam & Behtash Sanaeeha)
Playing in this year’s Competition, My Favourite Cake is a charming and tender romance that takes place over one unforgettable evening. The film’s writer-directors, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s previous film Ballad of a White Cow played in the 2021 Berlinale competition, but they were notably absent at this year’s festival due to a travel ban put in place by Iranian authorities.
Both funny and heartfelt, the film also paints a realistic portrait of contemporary life in Tehran. The two characters reminisce about their youth, living more freely, as the audience is regularly reminded of the harsh realities of life, particularly for women, under the nation’s increasingly repressive regime. We meet Mahim who lives alone after her husband’s death and her daughter’s departure to Europe. After a lunch with her friends, she uncharacteristically decides to break her solitary routine and look for romance where she finds a same-aged, divorced taxi driver sitting alone at a cafe. This enjoyable and moving encounter is beautifully acted by Lily Farhadpour & Esmail Mehrabi who are a joy to watch on screen whilst also painting a heartfelt portrait of finding love and connection later on in life.
Curzon has acquired the rights for UK distribution. The release date has not yet been confirmed.
I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
After seeing Jane Schoenbrun’s debut feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I was very excited to catch this one at this year’s Berlinale. Schoenbrun’s second feature follows two teenage outcasts (Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine) who try to escape their mundane existence by bonding over a 90s Buffy-esque TV show. Following its premiere at Sundance Film Festival, I Saw the TV Glow played in this year’s Panorama strand where it was also nominated for a Teddy award.
Schoenbrun’s sophomore effort creates a tribute to adolescent fandom, shared connection, and the urge/need to escape through pop culture and media. Much like the haunting and atmospheric We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, both films play with elements of the horror genre. As the central characters continue to consume and disappear into the fictional universe, they start to lose grip of their own reality as both worlds begin to blur. It creatively explores the power of media and how it helps shape our own identity, allowing us to see other worlds on screen as well as identify with fictional characters. Schoenburn lovingly references these iconic 90’s shows and the influence they had on their upbringing, explaining that “It’s a very strange phenomenon that I don’t think people take seriously, but certainly as a dissociated queer kid in the suburbs, many of my closest emotional relationships were with characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (see full quote)
A24 is handling international sales. So far, details of UK distribution have not been announced.
Amy Cresswell, Young Film Network Officer
Betânia (dir. Marcelo Botta)
This was my first trip to Berlinale, and I was very excited. I’d got in the evening before to two men in my hostel snoring out of sync all night and the three films I watched before this were… not good. So, I was desperate for Betânia to be either my saving grace or have a soothing soundtrack to nap to. Luckily, it was exactly the discovery you wake up to.
Betânia is a woman, and it is a place. The woman, played with force by Diana Mattos in her debut role, has just turned 65 and lives in a rural settlement in Brazil. We are introduced to Betânia at her husband’s funeral, and to her family who want her to move nearer to them, to the place she is named after. She resists, sticking to salting the fish as the fridge loses electricity again whilst feeling the wind fuelling the nearby turbines that stoke a city bigger and brighter. After a devastating incident, she is forced to surrender her stubborn independence and move back to her shifting village surrounded by the Lençóis Maranhenses’s sand dunes which create lagoons tourists will do anything to see and change the landscape so regularly it’s hard to settle.
If place can be character, then this film is full of it. Director Marcelo Botta is obviously in awe of the landscapes he’s filming and it’s hard not to be – they’re vast and beautiful, tricking you into planning flights in your head before switching your perspective to the realities of living amongst sand, moving rivers and tourism.
This film contains too many stories to put into a short review. Betânia’s son-in-law looks for work as a tour guide, she fights to get her grandson into school, her daughter finds dependence in religion and her granddaughter explores her queerness. Botta takes on big themes and although loses focus a little, manages to weave identity and change, tradition and modernity, family and loss, dream and memory, in a funny, warming, beautiful story. You can feel the care put into this film and I look forward to watching it again.
Mikaela Smith, Film Programmer
Crossing (dir. Levan Akin)
Following his 2019 drama And Then We Danced, which premiered in Directors Fortnight at Cannes and had an unfortunately limited release stilted by COVID-19, Levan Akin returned to the festival circuit with Crossing. Akin is of Georgian heritage, which is where this film begins, in Coastal Georgia we meet Lia. Lia is a retired teacher, on a journey to reconnect with Tekla, her transgender niece who was pushed out of the family a number of years prior. She meets Achi, a cheeky chappy living opposite Tekla’s last known address, and the unlikely pair begin on their journey of discovery – crossing the border and heading into Istanbul.
The film is a gentle, eloquent cry for acceptance for the trans community, of intergenerational understanding and connection; remarkably soft and warm while remaining bittersweet. Sumptuous and comforting to watch while offering something of an emotional gut-punch, but never stepping over a line into gratuity or exploitation. I really couldn’t fault it, perfectly restrained and elegant, I can’t wait to enjoy more stories from Akin in the years to come.
Janet Planet (dir. Annie Baker)
I can’t say I am enormously familiar with Annie Baker as a playwright, but I did see her recent play, Infinite Life, at the National Theatre back in November, and I did find it to be one of those things that feels very slight at the time, but somehow shifts your tectonic plates completely. I didn’t see it coming at all, from a play about five women living with chronic pain, taking part in a retreat where they can only drink water and muse about life, but I felt it in my bones. In short, it immediately made me love her. Needless to say, I have been eagerly anticipating her film debut since that day.
Like Infinite Life, Janet Planet is, formally, mostly women talking. In this case it’s the titular Janet, a therapist and single mother living in rural Massachusetts (played with excellent restraint by Julianne Nicholson), and her dry, misanthropic, but oddly endearing 11-year-old daughter Lacy. The two are co-dependent, the mother-daughterness of their relationship is often a complicated one. The film follows the pair over one summer in 1991, as various friends and lovers drift in and out of their house. It’s languid, acutely capturing how peaceful, and utterly boring a lonely childhood summer can be. It’s paced like an afternoon luxuriating in the sun, with nothing to do but watch the birds and the bugs pass by. It’s a feeling otherwise difficult to tap into, and while I do think this film has its flaws, I found it so peaceful to simply sit in life with Janet and Lacy.