by Helen Barlow
The Berlin Film Festival has announced the competition programme for its 76th edition and Warwick Thornton’s Wolfram has been included. While it marks the sixth time Thornton’s films have been included in the overall festival, Wolfram is his debut competition entry. The film world premiered at the closing night of The Adelaide Film Festival, so the Berlinale will host its international premiere.
In the announcements, the festival called the film “a sequel” to Thornton’s 2017 award-winning true crime drama Sweet Country and is set four years later in 1932. “Wolfram is the story of two young Aboriginal siblings who make a daring escape to reunite with their family in this Outback Western tale of kinship and colonial reckoning.”
The siblings, played by Hazel Jackson and Eli Hart, are working in wolfram (tungsten) mines and after their overseer (Matt Nable) dies, they flee together with an 18-year-old (Pedrea Jackson) and are pursued by a pair of outlaws, played by Erroll Shand and Joe Bird (Talk to Me). Thornton regulars Thomas M. Wright (Sweet Country) and Deborah Mailman (The New Boy) also feature in the film.
The other major Australian Berlinale entry is the body horror Saccharine directed by Natalie Erika James, who previously made the horror movies Relic starring Robin Nevin, and Apartment 7A, a US production starring Julia Garner. Screening in the Panorama section after premiering in Sundance, Saccharine stars US actress Midori Francis as a lovelorn medical student, who becomes terrorised by a sinister force after taking part in an obscure weight-loss craze: eating human ashes. Danielle Macdonald also stars.
Another Sundance entry coming to Panorama is The Moment, a flashy pop mockumentary where Charli XCX plays an exaggeratedly manic version of herself and her meteoric rise to fame. (She has contributed to the soundtrack of Wuthering Heights.) Marking the movie feature debut of music video director Aidan Zamiri, the film also stars the ever-daring Alexander Skarsgard and Rosanna Arquette.
Also eagerly awaited from Sundance is Padraic McKinley’s Depression-era crime drama, The Weight, starring Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe. Set in Oregon in 1933, it follows Samuel Murphy (Hawke) who is torn from his daughter and sent to a brutal work camp. Warden Clancy (Crowe) tempts him with early release if he smuggles gold through the deadly wilderness. The Sundance blurb notes how Hawke gives a muscular performance as the film’s reluctant but resourceful hero, while Crowe is quietly menacing as his foil.
THE COMPETITION (where Wim Wenders presides as jury head)
While Hollywood studio movies are currently not a part of this year’s programme, the stars are coming out in force in independent films. None moreso than in the Karim Ainouz’s competition entry Rosebush Pruning, which stars Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage and Elena Anaya, and also features Tracy Letts, Elle Fanning, and Pamela Anderson. It’s set in an opulent Catalonian villa where four American siblings wallow in isolation and their inherited fortune, eschewing the demands of their blind father, and seeking love and validation through each other and their latest designer clothes. When the eldest brother and lynchpin of the family announces that he is moving in with his girlfriend, blood ties are severed and his brother starts to uncover the truth surrounding their mother’s death. The family slowly begins to disintegrate.
Kornel Mundrusczo’s US/Hungary film At the Sea likewise has a stellar cast with Amy Adams, Australia’s Murray Bartlett and Dan Levy. It follows a woman who after a stint in rehab returns to her family’s Cape Cod home where sobriety forces her to confront buried trauma and the terrifying question of who she is without her career as a dancer.
Beth de Araujo’s Josephine, also coming from Sundance, stars Channing Tatum, Gemma Chan and Mason Reeves as eight-year-old Josephine, who after accidentally witnessing a crime in Golden Gate Park, begins to act violently. Tatum and Chan give keenly felt turns as parents who are totally devoted to their struggling, beloved child but are ill-equipped to navigate the upheaval that their family faces.
Nightborn directed by Hanna Bergholm (Hatching) stars Harry Potter’s Rupert Grint and Seidi Haarla (Compartment No. 6) as husband and wife, Jon and Saga, as they move to an isolated house in a Finnish forest with dreams of starting a family. When their son is born, Saga knows something is wrong and their marriage starts to crack.
Leyla Bouzid’s French-Tunisian film In a Whisper follows Lilia, who returns to Tunisia for her uncle’s funeral to be confronted by family secrets and to co-habit with three generations of women. Eya Bouteraa co-stars with French-Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass who also has a second Berlin film, Only Rebels Win, where her widow falls in love with a Sudanese man, who is more than half her age.
In Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea, French icon Juliette Binoche stars alongside Tom Courtenay. Binoche’s character moves to London with her daughter to look after her ageing mother. Binoche recently told Deadline: “It has the theme of Alzheimer’s and what are the boundaries between what you can do, or what you cannot do, with somebody who has this illness. It brings up questions…and through different generations, there are three different generations.”
Sandra Huller stars in Markus Schleinzer’s Rose (Austria-Germany), which is set in the early 17th century and follows a soldier arriving at an isolated Protestant village in Germany claiming to be the heir of an abandoned farm. Even if he proves to be a good man, the villagers’ suspicions grow.
Anders Danielsen Lie (The Worst Person in the World, Sentimental Value) plays the titular character in Grant Gee’s Irish-UK film Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Evans is a legendary jazz pianist who at the height of his career must deal with the death of his bassist and musical soulmate in a car crash.
Away from the competition, Bella Ramsey (The Last of Us, Game of Thrones) and Neil Patrick Harris co-star in George Jaques’ highly anticipated debut UK film Sunny Dancer. As if conquering cancer were not hard enough, 17-year-old Ivy’s parents sign her up to spend the summer at what she calls “chemo camp”. Once there, she unexpectedly manages to find friends in a group of misfits and has a summer she will never forget.
Perhaps the film that seems the most fun is Ulrike Ottinger’s The Blood Countess, billed as a twisted and humorous vampire tale. Isabelle Huppert stars as the Countess, who together with her maid embarks on a baroque quest through Vienna to recover the red elixir of life and a book that threatens the vampire realm. Hot on their heels are a police inspector, two vampirologists, a vegetarian nephew and his therapist.
Still, a midnight documentary on metal legends Judas Priest by Sam Dunn and Tom Morello should have a lot of fans. As will Gore Verbinski’s sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die with Sam Rockwell, Juno Temple and Zazie Beetz.
The 76th edition of The Berlin Film Festival takes place from February 12-22
