by Helen Barlow
Given Wim Wenders’ love of the Australian outback, where he filmed one of his favourite movies, 1991’s Until the End of the World, one might have thought that he’d include Warwick Thornton’s wondrously shot Wolfram in his deliberations as jury head at the recently completed Berlin Film Festival. Yet Wolfram went away empty-handed.
Whether the backlash to Wenders’ comments on the first day about how filmmakers must stay out of politics played into the jury’s decisions is anyone’s guess, but the fact remains that Berlin has always been the most political of festivals.
“If people have felt challenged then the Berlinale is doing its job,” the festival’s director, Tricia Tuttle, told the closing night crowd.
Ultimately, not all the winners are political, but the Golden Bear winner, the German-French-Turkish production Yellow Letters [above], certainly is. The film’s director, Ilker Catak [below], is Berlin-born of Turkish parents. As with Germany’s most famous German-born Turkish director, Fatih Akin, Catak has turned his eye to a Turkish story, after achieving immense success and an international Oscar nomination with 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge, which was set in a German high school. Yellow Letters, which follows two Turkish artists and their troubled relationship as they suffer political persecution, was shot in Germany, with Berlin standing in for Ankara and Hamburg for Istanbul.
Wenders called the film a drama of “the political language of totalitarianism as opposed to the empathetic language of cinema.” He said the feature gave the jury “chills” with its threat of repression. “This film will be understood worldwide, I promise you.”
Interestingly, Catak is the first German director to win the Golden Bear since Akin won for Head-On in 2004.
German actress Sandra Huller (Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest) was a shoo-in for the festival’s best actor award with her indelible portrayal of a 17th century woman and former soldier seeking freedom by pretending to be a man in Austrian director Markus Schleinzer’s Rose. Huller’s transformation is remarkable and the down-to-earth actress who has been living in Los Angeles for three years — and will soon be seen alongside Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary – made sure to thank the film’s make-up artist for helping with the prosthetics that created her war-torn look. Huller was admirably de-glammed in a flowing white shirt when many of the bare-shouldered actresses must have been freezing their tits off in designer garb on the outdoor Berlin red carpet.
When Brits Anna Calder-Marshall, 78, and screen legend Tom Courtney, 88 [above], received the supporting actor Silver Bear for Queen at Sea, it was a truly heartwarming moment. The British film, which also stars Juliette Binoche as Calder-Marshall’s professor daughter Amanda, is a dementia story we can all relate to in terms of, what can we do? Things get very tense after Amanda witnesses her stepfather (Courtney) having sex with her dementia-suffering mother (Calder-Marshall) and calls the authorities, which has immense repercussions. The jury decided to give the award to both actors as their synergy is so strong.
“You have no idea how much this means to me,” Calder-Marshall told the crowd. “Nothing has happened to me like this before and it’s been the most amazing experience. I felt loved beyond measure, trusted beyond measure and was able to go deeper and deeper into this very difficult, painful illness. We were an ensemble who dared to be naked and raw and just speak the truth. The fact that the doctors, the carers and the police were real people really earthed us.”
American director Lance Hammer [left] won the Jury Prize for the film.
Britain’s Grant Gee won the Silver Bear for best director for his first dramatic film, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, which traces the legendary jazz pianist’s struggles with addiction. Norway’s Anders Danielsen Lie is impressive in the Bill Evans role as is Bull Pullman as his supportive father.
Wenders, in announcing the award, noted how Evans had just made one of the great jazz albums in the history of jazz as the film starts. “It was an important point in his life when he lost his most important partner in his trio, his bass player, and he lost the affinity to his instrument, also his feelings. He was losing it all. It’s great Grant, that you made him go to his parents and that you got this unbelievable performance out of his father, Bull Pullman. That could have cured anybody. Incredibly shot in gorgeous black and white, the film is reminiscent of the original jazz photography with some of the most beautiful image compositions we have seen in a long time.”
Turkish director Emin Alper won the Grand Jury Prize for the Turkish film, Salvation, about a decades-old land feud in the Turkish mountains. The film was inspired by a real event when 12 members of a family in a village in the Kurdish region of Turkey raided a wedding and killed 44 people, including women and children.
Even if the superb Sundance winner Josephine looks bound to figure at the 2027 Oscars, the film failed to figure in the Berlin awards. Star Channing Tatum looked confused and jet-lagged at the film’s press conference, when he was asked about the political row at the festival and did not know how to respond, so didn’t. Earlier in the week, the ever-articulate Ethan Hawke managed to broach the subject of artistic involvement in films, noting “Anything that fights fascism, I’m all for it.”
Hawke’s film The Weight where he stars with Russell Crowe, went down well as it had done in Sundance, though screened away from the competition.
John Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York also came from Sundance. John Turturro is fine as always in this ode to the Big Apple and its changing environment as his seasoned pickpocket steals from the wrong person, while his pawnbroker, played by Steve Buscemi, tries to help.
Australian Sundance entry Saccharine directed by Natalie Erika James [below, centre, with the film’s team] screened a little under the radar as there was no press conference. It’s hard not to compare the film to The Substance, another woman-oriented fantasy-horror story about the pursuit of beauty directed by a woman. Set and shot in Melbourne, Saccharine focuses on a medical student (American Midori Francis sporting an Aussie accent), who believes she is overweight, so signs up for a 12-week transformation program. She then comes across a new weight loss pill, which she discovers is almost entirely composed of human ashes and decides to make her own drug by cremating a female cadaver that she has been assigned to research. The pill works, but she then has to deal with ghoulish visitations from the spirit of the cadaver.
The Dutch are not exactly known for their filmmaking prowess, though of course are famous for their open attitudes towards sex. Truly Naked, written and directed by Muriel d’Ansembourg, is a fascinating UK-set, English-language drama about an ageing porn performer (Welsh actor Andrew Howard) whose teenage son Alec (impressive Northern Irish newcomer Caolan O’Gorman) films the porn in their home with Lizzie (real life porn actress Alessa Savage), though their business is starting to fade. The film evolves into Alec’s coming-of-age story where he falls for his feminist-raised classmate, the motor-bike riding Nina, when they work together on a project on internet porn addiction.
Screen Daily says Truly Naked is “diligently researched and non-judgmental” and “forthright and unflinching in its depiction of the sex industry”, while it “handles Alec’s emotional journey with sensitivity and care.”
