Germany’s Berlinale Film Festival Hosts a Demonstration of Support for Ukraine.
- Spencer Blanchard
- Berlin, Berlinale, Nicolas Philibert, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy
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The event was held on the Berlinale red carpet in front of the Festival Palace and featured Ukrainian filmmakers, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to Germany Oleksiy Makeiev, German State Commissioner for Culture and Media Claudia Roth, Chairman of the Jury for the Festival’s Main Competition Kristen Stewart, and others.
“The Berlinale staunchly condemns Russia’s ongoing war of aggression, which violates international law, and expresses its solidarity alongside many further participants with the people in Ukraine and all those who are campaigning against this war,” The Berlinale’s administrators posted on Facebook.
On February 16th, the Berlin International Film Festival opened. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, spoke via video chat to the audience at the festival’s start. The lineup for this year’s festival featured two videos and six Ukrainian films. The festival itself is devoted to Ukraine, and attendees don the Berlinale emblem, which was painted in the national colors of Ukraine.
The 2023 Berlin International Picture Festival’s Golden Bear for best film went to Nicolas Philibert’s documentary On the Adamant, which takes an up-close look at the patients and staff of a mental health facility on the Seine River in the middle of Paris.
The 72-year-old Philibert spent months on a barge anchored in Paris’ Seine to document a mental health facility that particularly meets the requirements of its patients’ creative needs for his eleventh feature. His film examines concepts like creativity and art, sanity and madness, but it does so without titles or definite categories.
“I don’t like partitions or labels,” Philibert said. “In this film on psychiatry, we were always [careful] to not always distinguish very clearly between patients and carers. I tried to reverse the image we always have of mad people [which I see] as discriminating and stigmatizing. I wanted us to be able, if not to identify with them, at least to recognize what unites us beyond our differences.”
In Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s 20,000 Species of Bees, Sofa Otero portrays an 8-year-old boy who is starting to transition, making her the youngest-ever recipient of the Silver Bear for best starring performance at the Berlin International Film Festival.
The Plough, a family drama in which Philippe Garrel’s real-life children portray three siblings who are the most recent and possibly final generation of a family of puppeteers, won Berlin’s best director award. Garrel dedicated his prize in honor of the late, great French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.
Afire, directed by German filmmaker Christian Petzold, won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize as runner-up. Four young adults are threatened by an approaching forest fire in a vacation home on the Baltic coast in this tragicomedy.
João Canijo’s Bad Living, a Portuguese-French film about the conflicts among the five women who manage an old hotel, won the Silver Bear jury reward.
Till the End of the Night, a transgender criminal romance directed by Christoph Hochhäusler, won the Silver Bear for best supporting performance, going to German trans actress Thea Ehre. “If I’m allowed to speak very plainly, this performance blew our hair back,” Berlinale Jury President Kristen Stewart said, announcing the prize. “This person has an aura.”
A single award is given for the best leading performance and a separate award is given for the best supporting performance at Berlinale, which was the first big film festival to introduce gender-neutral acting honors.
Angela Schanelec’s Music, a modern-day reimagining of the Oedipus myth, presented almost completely without dialogue, was the surprise winner of the best screenplay honor.
Disco Boy, the feature début of Giacomo Abbruzzese, was beautifully filmed by seasoned cinematographer Helene Louvart, who received Berlin’s Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.
Tatiana Huezo, a Mexican filmmaker, won two awards early on for her most recent film, The Echo, which examines families living in a remote village in northern Mexico. She won the best director award for the Berlinale’s Encounters section as well as the Berlinale best documentary award. The director and the movie’s producers will split the $42,000 (€40,000) cash reward that comes with the documentary award.
The 19 films up for consideration were chosen by Berlinale Panel President Stewart and her jury of five women and two men to receive this year’s Golden and Silver Berlin Bears. Along with Stewart, the Berlinale Competition panel also includes the French-Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, the German director Valeska Grisebach, the Spanish director Carla Simón, the Hong Kong director Johnnie To, and the American casting director and producer Francine Maisler.
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