by Helen Barlow
When French-Senegalese director Matti Diop’s Dahomey won the Berlin Festival’s Golden Bear, it marked the second consecutive year that a French documentary took the top prize, after Nicolas Philibert’s On the Adamant in 2023. This year’s win was partly due to the jury head, Kenyan-Mexican actress and Oscar winner, Lupita Nyong’o, pushing for the award to go to another young woman from an African background and a story that means a lot to her. The 68-minute film follows the journey of 26 plundered royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey exhibited in Paris, now being returned to Benin.
In her speech, Diop (above) noted how the prize “not only honours me, but the entire visible and invisible community that the film represents. To rebuild, we must first restitute, and what does restitution mean? To restitute is to do justice.”
The 2024 Berlin programme was decidedly arty, and it marks the final Berlinale curated by co-directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, who were doubling down on their mission to include films that might not make it to cinemas. Chatrian had come from the Locarno Festival, but next year we might see some changes as the American-born London-based Tricia Tuttle, a former director of the BFI London Film Festival, will take over for the landmark 75th Berlinale.
This year at the festival the follow-up prizes were particularly obscure. South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo won the Grand Jury prize for A Traveller’s Needs, his third film starring Isabelle Huppert; France’s Bruno Dumont took out the Jury Prize for Empire, an intergalactic battle between good and evil set in a French fishing village; and Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias won best director for the highly experimental Pepe, which follows the ghost of a hippopotamus owned by Pablo Escobar.
Some of the best films, including Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, had already premiered in Sundance; and which screened in competition. Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan (below) won for best performance, playing a man whose face is disfigured by neurofibromatosis and is miraculously cured, only to be upstaged by a man who still has the condition and is played by the remarkable Adam Pearson, who has the condition for real.
Emily Watson won for best supporting performance in Tim Mielants’ Small Things Like These, the opening world-premiering film that starred Cillian Murphy and where the producers include Murphy and his Oppenheimer co-star Matt Damon. Murphy plays an Irish father who challenges the code of silence around the Magdalene Laundries where Watson is a feisty, villainous head nun. In accepting her award, the British actress paid tribute to the “thousands and thousands of young women whose lives were devastated by the collusion between the Catholic Church and the state in Ireland.”
Two of the best films at the festival were German. Writer-director Matthias Glasner took the Silver Bear for best screenplay for his semi-autobiographical, highly original tragicomedy, Dying, which boasts a strong performance from the country’s leading actor Lars Eidinger as the son in a dysfunctional family. For my mind, he should have won the acting gong.
The other acting contender might have been Liv Lisa Fries for Andreas Dresen’s From Hilda, With Love, the historical story of a woman who became involved as a pro-Russian freedom fighter and was captured by the Nazis and executed during World War Two. Both Fries and Eidinger star in the hit German series Babylon Berlin.
Last year’s jury head Kristen Stewart was in town for Love Lies Bleeding (above), which came straight from Sundance. The film’s British director Rose Glass had made an impression with her previous film Saint Maud and Stewart was keen to work with her. Stewart’s Lou works in a gym where she meets the love of her life, Jackie (Katy O’Brian) a volatile drug-using body builder who goes to work with Lou’s criminal father, played by a pony-tailed Ed Harris, who is clearly having a lot of fun. Trouble and violence ensue.
Further films from Sundance include the futuristic Another End starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Between the Temples with Jason Schwartzmann and Carol Kane and The Outrun starring Saoirse Ronan.
Besides Adam Sandler in the disappointing Netflix film Spaceman—where he is not funny at all—the social media darling and Euphoria star Hunter Schafer (below) probably caused the biggest media fuss. Her horror film, Cuckoo, her first feature after two seasons of Euphoria, is directed by Germany’s Tilman Singer and at the film’s press conference Schafer injected some fun into the proceedings and proved quite the extrovert. This week of course she was arrested at a pro-Palestinian protest in the US, so she is well and truly in the news.
The Palestinian film No Other Land, which was made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective and follows the eradication of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, won best documentary.
Throughout the festival, the Iranian film My Favourite Cake had led the critics poll, yet it went away empty handed. The directors, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, were not allowed to come to Berlin. Exiled Iranian Paris-based actress, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the star of the Australian film Shayda, protested with a placard (below). The heart-warming story follows a 70-year-old woman who meets a man over afternoon tea and learns to love again. It could take place in any country, though is particularly prescient in a dictatorial state where women’s rights are heavily restricted. The film is worth checking out when it comes to our shores.
So too is the Danish prison drama Sons, directed by Gustav Moller (The Guilty) and starring Sidse Babett Knudsen (Borgen, Westworld) as a fierce prison warden (below).
Then there’s Alonso Ruizpalacios’s La Cocina, a New York Mexican restaurant drama where cultures from around the world come together. It’s The Bear on steroids and features Rooney Mara, who was in Berlin to promote the film.
