Okay, another year at the Berlin International Film Festival is over.
Although, talking about the articles of the film festival, the number of readings is not so high. But leave him alone!
I still asked Gu Caocao, an author in Berlin, to write this summary article to talk about this Berlin Film Festival and talk about those good movies that deserve attention.
The following is still Gu Caocao's summary.
The Berlin Film Festival is over!
This is my fourth Berlin Film Festival, and the rush to see the film, do interviews, write articles, etc. has been mastered, but the hectic and excitement of each year will never change. The film festival is like a high fever, coming too fast, vigorous when it is carried out, tired enough to choke but difficult to sleep, and the "post-film festival melancholy" at the end is not absent.
For the past four years, I have watched the Berlin lineup deteriorate year after year, and I have been dumped by the other two A-category film festivals, Cannes and Venice. But as a Berliner, I am still fully committed and diligent in watching films. After the closing awards last night, I used Douban to count that I watched 53 movies in Berlin this year.
However, unlike those fanatics who soak in the cinema all day to watch seven or eight films a day, I still have to take care of the work of journalists, and I can have such data thanks to the fact that the organizing committee arranged some advance screenings for journalists in Berlin before the festival, so I saw the films of the forum, panorama and other sub-units earlier than most people.
When counting the film list, I think back to those days when I came out early and returned late, and "went to work" in the dark cinema every day, the smiling or sad faces illuminated by the light of the screen during the screening, the bursts of applause or boos after the end of the film, the tired moments when I drank coffee and wrote until the early morning, the tired moments when I saw the judge Tom Tykwer and the occasional Sakamoto Ryuichi would say hi to me about hi, and discuss the screening break of the movie with my friends while eating...
Just want to say, thanks to Berlin.
This year's Berlin is undoubtedly special to me. Watching movies is always a private matter, as a reporter ran the film festival in recent years, writing reviews and then objective, workload and then top, encounter excellent movies, in the atmosphere of the film festival fanatical fans, it is inevitable to pay a little bit of real feelings.
But I have never encountered a situation where the films I like and praise win awards, disappointed every year, helplessly writing the big draft of the award-winning films every year, and simply want to hold a post-film festival sad fan club to zhang Luo complain about the conference.
But this year, the film "Don't Touch Me", which won the Golden Bear, turned out to be my favorite movie in the main competition unit.
The first time I saw the Romanian film in the media, I was completely in a mood of zero expectations, and as a result, I cried within five minutes of the opening scene, and my colleagues were so startled to find me tissues. Seeing the end, I couldn't help but cry again. Go home and immediately hit the watercress with five stars.
On the day of the award, my friends and I watched the big-screen live award ceremony with many fans at the Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz, thinking that such a film without a "golden bear" had no hope of winning the award, but I did not expect to know that Tom Tykwer and Chairman Dieter Klosslick announced that the winner of the golden bear was "Don't Touch Me", and could not help but scream on the spot.
The Berlin film festival has passed, but the new year with cinema has only just begun. Let's talk about this year's memorable and recommended films in Berlin.
Main competition unit
"Don't Touch Me"
Taking the Golden Bear is not a reason for my recommendation, and a large number of nude and SM scenes are not my reasons for recommendation. These sounds like gimmick nudity are completely erotic in the hands of director Adina Pintille, and the exploration of physical boundaries really touches the door of the heart.
It is an open, private film, the body is not beautiful or ugly, it is like a calm contemporary art project, a documentary with a condensed narrative, an anthropological report with a perfect aesthetic system, but its evoking and empathic connection to every memory of the audience proves that its essence is a film about love and intimacy, which takes place in the present.
As tom Tykwer, this year's jury chair, said, "We want to honor not only those works that show what cinema can do and how far it has developed, but also those that explain to us the future of cinema." In fact, under careful consideration, the choice of the Berlin Golden Bears is not a conservative way of playing every year.
Isle of Dogs
This movie will get a lot of attention if it is not recommended. I have written it in a single article before, so I will not go into detail. Just stamp it, which is the first place in the year of the dog film list.
Congratulations to Wes Anderson for winning the Best Director Award for Isle of Dogs, and hopes that Berlin will set a new rule for him to summon a golden bear with a few silver bears.
"Dovlatov"
Each film of Alexei Germain Jr. is different, and this film, which focuses on the famous Soviet satirist Sergei Dovlatov, presents a fascinating picture of literary history and politics in a span of just six days.
Although Alexei Germain Jr. was a conspiracy theorist himself, he was an all-rounder when it came to making movies.
《Real Estate》
It was a film that was collectively spurned by international critics, but critics in Berlin were all applauded.
Everyone is stuck in their own lives and moral instincts, and the hardcore two-gun old lady in this movie seems very charming to me.
The soundtrack of this film is my favorite outside of non-music films and music documentaries, and it is completely a masterpiece of Contrast and Complementarity between Techno, ambient music and images. The film is not a triumph in terms of performance or script, it is a completely audiovisual experience. The film is recommended to use the episode Wim Mertens' "Iris" twice.
"HeartlessNess" (non-competition)
Using an iPhone to make movies has long been a gimmick, but the advantage of the small size of the mobile phone to the maximum, the camera play a variety of tricks, I am afraid that Soderbergh.
It's an iPhone movie textbook. In addition, the whole film performance soundtrack editing and so on are all superior work, and the failure is lost in the old theme of imprisonment in a secret room.
The Happy Prince (non-competition)
"BBC" and "Wilde" are two labels that can completely determine the quality and style of a film. Although this is The debut of Rupert Everett's performance and director, there is not much personal style to be seen. Recommended to all Wilde lovers.
Forum module
Madeleine of Madeleine
My favorite film at the entire Berlin Film Festival.
The film premiered in Sundance to rave reviews, and was invited to the Berlin Forum section. The heroine, Helena Howard, was discovered by director Josephine Decker in the Teen Theater Workshop, playing her mother by Miranda Jolay, a cool New York girl — you would never have imagined that fashionista, novelist, and performance artist Miranda Jolay could play a cautious, sensitive and shy mom.
The heroine's pregnant drama teacher in the film is Molly Parker, the actor of Jackie Sharp in "House of Cards", and her role is also a great image reversal. It's a film that's all about acting, ending with Helena Howard mimicking her mother, and its tension, explosiveness, expressiveness, and appeal are all-encompassing.
The Wolf House
This is the last film in the forum section to win the grand prize. A imaginative stop-motion animation, the style is simple and childlike, using clay, oil paint, tape and other eye-opening materials, the flat and three-dimensional seamless connection of the characters, the dialogue is switched in turn by Spanish and German, the little girl with the piglet runs away from home to meet the wolf's black fairy tale, is told out of the layers of political, historical nested structure, just 75 minutes firmly grasp people.
"The Elephant Sits on the Ground"
This one has been written in detail before, and it will not be expanded. The best respect for an artist is to appreciate his work. I hope that this film can meet more audiences in its full form as soon as possible.
Green Mist
Guy Martin stunts generally clip together Hitchcock's various film clips to form a new story. Large-scale quirks are on display.
But you have to convince, so know Hitchcock, eat through each scene, and clearly structure the new story, it is definitely a big deal. Every frame of this film is a shot shot in San Francisco that year, which can be said to have created geophilic fan filmology with one hand.
The humor of this film is very advanced, whenever the characters in the film want to speak, the director will subtract the part of the speech, we can only see the demeanor and posture of the characters before and after speaking, and the plot is actually connected, making "Green Mist" a "silent film" full of dialogue scenes but no lines.
Panoramic unit
History of Tenderness
Chinese films were absent from the main competition, and only three of the sub-units were shortlisted, and Yang Mingming's "History of Tenderness" was one of them. I really liked her first DV short film, "Female Director".
This one is still self-directed and self-written script, continuing her fierce and enthusiastic energy, and also invited two big names in the independent film industry - Nai An and Zhang Xianmin to star. Rough and reckless, real and powerful.
Less bullshit! Play the piano! 》
Chilly Gonzales is probably one of the most interesting musicians in the world, with a classical music family biography, graduated from the Conservatory of Music to study classical and jazz, but went to Berlin to become a hip-hop singer, creating a musical personality of "Chilly Gonzales", and after living in Paris, he regained his housekeeping skills of playing the piano, and the artists he collaborated with were Daft Punk, Jarvis Cocker, Feist and other cool people. The film is a journalist-turned-directorial debut, with no stylistic skills to speak of, and is entirely narrated in the order of Chilly Gonzales' artistic career. But he himself is too funny to look at the loss.
Maggie, Maya, Mia
Recommend another music documentary. I don't have a feel for hip-hop at all, but serious musicians deserve attention. The film is based on M.I.A.'s own 700+ hours of footage in his early years, which she gave to her gay honey, Stephen Loveridge, a few years ago, to support the latter in cutting a documentary about herself.
But it was clear that the friendship between the two broke down, and the film dragged on for five or six years before it came out, and M.I.A and the director did not look at each other at the press conference in Berlin. Without much gossip, this music documentary, whose author does not know who is good, tells the story of a sri Lankan armed leader whose daughter became a political hip-hop singer who performed at the Super Bowl but was completely banned by Madonna because of her middle finger, and it was all a hit.
Riverside
A must-see for fans of Xingdingxun. It's not a brilliant Japanese youth cruelty necrophilia lgbt story, but the rich nude scene of the second order hall can't be missed!
Roll call criticism
Criticism does not exist, praise is meaningless.
Songwriter
The appeal of Ed Sheeran, the one-man pop prince, should not be underestimated, and when the documentary premiered, his single fan base blocked the traffic across Potsdamer Platz, and the screams of fans and fans resounded under the Berlin sky.
But compared with his super popularity and the musicality of "÷", which is one of the best in the pop music world, his documentary "Songwriter" can only be said to be right and wrong! often! rotten! Let your cousin record himself, no problem, Joan Didion's documentary is not also made by his nephew.
But this cousin is in good feelings and really can't make movies. This film is not handheld photography at all, but simply shakes the lens, and if you eat too much before watching, you will want to throw up. And with no plot, no focus, no structure to speak of, the editor may simply delete the destroyed shots and pile the rest together. I couldn't see the key to album production, I couldn't see the complete process of writing songs, and I didn't see the charm of Ed Sheeran's personality. The whole film is not as good as some video bloggers in terms of quality and texture.
Compared with "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Asynchrony", which also appeared at the Berlin Film Festival and recorded Ryuichi Sakamoto's post-production concert after making "Async", the producer of this "Songwriter" may be so ashamed that he had to buy a three-star review from The Guardian. As a non-fan, I can only advise fans not to go to the movie to avoid being insulted.
"Ut Island July 22"
The main competition is a shortlisted film. This one-shot film attempts to recreate a single-man crime shooting on the Norwegian island of Uteute. Because the film is based on the real events of history, the director's battle royale conception is already unbearable, and the various dramatic and subjective elements imposed are still very rough, arbitrary, and low-level, which is simply uncomfortable.
The script was hugely flawed and biased, the cinematography made mistakes that could not be ignored, and all the group actors did not seem to receive any guidance. Despite the relatively high score of 2.9 for the film, I still think the film is unethical. The fact that the film appeared at the highly political Berlin Film Festival made me very skeptical about life.
When writing this year's Berlin Preview, I was still very angry, why there are few famous directors this year, why all filmmakers only want to go to Cannes, why the big cast only crowds Venice, and whether the Berlin Film Festival is over.
Looking back at the film list of these ten days, the last few days went to several public venues for the final days, and I gradually relaxed. If every year a few old gangs take turns to occupy the pit, a few familiar faces go back and forth to get awards, solidify the class according to seniority, and indulge the arrogance and prejudice of minority "intellectuals", it is really boring.
Politics first, avant-garde boldness, eclecticism, can be an attitude, a taste. There are many film festivals in the world, so let the Berlinale be as poor and sexy as the city where it is located.