Like a tumor, he felt his Israeli identity, director Nadav Lapid said in an interview with Die Zeit at the beginning of this Berlinale. In the competition, the festival shows the artistic transformation of its attempt to become a Frenchman.
Lapid's alter ego in the movie "Synonymes" is Yoav (Tom Mercier), who after completing his military service in Israel, left everything behind to start a new life in Paris. Naked and freezing, he finds himself in the bathtub of a beautiful, but empty old apartment again, which he may inhabit transitional. His backpack with his belongings was stolen from him, the arrival in the Promised Land is frosty and unbehaust.
A rich young couple, who lives in the same house, takes care of him, equips the identity refugee with money and clothes. In his yellow cloak he roams the streets mumbling French concepts, synonyms, to himself. Even with Israelis that he meets, he does not speak a word of Hebrew, he wants to rise in his new home, to assimilate totally.
Guy Ferrandis / SBS Films / Berlinale
"Synonymes" with Quentin Dolmaire, Tom Mercier, Louise Chevillotte
The acting debutant Tom Mercier is recommended here in his first role as a candidate for the Golden Bear, his Yoav is a quieter, but no less physical Arthouse version of Adam Sandler's Israeli caricature Zohan from the US comedy of the same name. He tells the uninspired writer Emile (Quentin Dolmaire) Köpenickiaden about his life in Tel Aviv; For his girlfriend Caroline (Louise Chevilotte), he is endowed with magnificent wealth and becomes an exotic pleasure boy.
More and more absurd are the situations and events in which Yoav, with his foolish, French as the common French, until he recites the Marseillaise so furiously in a naturalization course, that every bloody text detail of the national anthem freezes the blood. One thing becomes clear: France, which holds its liberalism like a shield in front of it, likes to be inspired by its stories and uses its body with relish, really wants to accept it and does not want to absorb it.
They are worthwhile!
They were young, beautiful, and in possession of a magical box made of wood, which perhaps, Vincent (Gaspard Ulliel) would allow, herself and her, Louise (Freya Mavor), before the inevitable end of their brief but intense love affair to save. The idea of director Guillaume Nicloux ("The Abduction of Michel Houellebecq", "Valley of Love") is highly romantic and yet philosophical. It's about smoothing a turbulent past with time travel. Over four episodes, a total of 192 minutes, "Il était une seconde fois" (Berlinale Series) is an insane attempt that demands not only Vincent a lot, but also his observers. A man, driven again and again to crawl through an inconspicuous portal in the cellar, hoping, tormented, often failing at both ends. Carolin Weidner
Max Linz has made an insanely comical, because true (and therefore bitter) satire from the university operation caught between third-party delusions and evaluation compulsion. Five years ago, at the same place, Linz buttoned off the art business with "I do not want to be artificially upset". In "Continue Sanssouci" (Forum) now much is similar. Again, the performers speak spotty, tilting the events like the absurd to the surreal, steering the narrative towards an escalating endpoint. The film seems a bit more diligent in its aspiration to get every aspect of its theme on board, but fortunately no less anarchic in form and content. And he circles around his leitmotif: Virtual Reality is not only the specific field of research of the protagonists, but as a critical description of Academia seems to be much more fitting than the image of the ivory tower. Till Kadritzke
In the history of German Schlager there was a very glorious time for a young Lebanese, which had it over detours through Italy ultimately in a soft-boiled from simple lyrics and catchy tunes Germany: Ricky Shayne. Fueled by popularity by the youth central organ "Bravo" in the 1970s, the attractive Shayne found its way into the ears and hearts of countless listeners. Stephan Geene, who rediscovers his admiration for Ricky Shayne a few years ago in a self-made fan-album, decides to investigate the fascination of filming. The result is "Shayne" (Forum) a journey broken into six episodes into the world of the irrepressible musician, an anti-portrait, an excess, a staging. Carolin Weidner
A movie goes into the mushrooms. For two and a half hours, Bernd Schoch accompanied women, children and men for a season, collecting porcini mushrooms, chanterelles and blueberries in the steep slopes of the Romanian Carpathians. You can see them with their purses and satchels at their arduous passages through the forest or, as they are illuminated by the narrow cones of the headlamps, waiting for the dawn under plastic tarpaulins. You can feel the cold, the wet - and the time. Expectations of a rhizomatic film about the cycles of food production are disappointed - the viewer is thrown back on their own utilization logic. "Olanda" (Forum) is committed with unconditional consistency to the working people in this first "act" of the recycling chain. At the end of the film, they move on to the harvest in Spain or Holland. Esther Buss
The new film by the Norwegian artist Lene Berg uses photographs, court material and the protagonist's descriptions to show how Berg's partner, an African-American publisher, becomes a criminal offender without committing an offense. Absurd allegations find their way into a court case that ignites absurd legal dynamics. It is stunned to see how a mixture of aggressively driven gentrification in Harlem, traditional patterns of perception and a racist judicial system produces an innocent convict who has lost his right to vote. "False Belief" (Forum Expanded) provides the frightening case study of those more systematic analyzes of institutional racism made by films such as Raoul Peck's "I Am Not Your Negro" or Ava DuVernay's Netflix documentary "Thirteen" in recent years. Till Kadritzke
Maria and Niels roam Berlin as if it were a huge playground. But instead of digging in the sandbox, they go together on a rally, looking for men or women who also like to romp a little with them. A daring couple who has left so many conventions behind. One day they spy on the public, the British PhD student Chloe. With radishes in her basket and a worldliness that leaves both, she triggers especially in Maria (Paula Knüpling) something. The attraction is mutual, and so the team opens this summer for a more amorous visit. Director Thomas Moritz Helm has teamed up with Paula Knüpling in "Today or Tomorrow" (Perspektive) to create a female figure who "lives in an outrageous relationship to herself" and takes what she wants. Carolin Weidner
The wind howls around the houses in the mountains of Anatolia, and at night it crackles in the undergrowth, which even the shepherd horror. Nature is overpowering in "Kiz kardesler" , the competition entry by Turkish director Emin Alper, and with it the fate of the people seems immutable. Three sisters had already made it to the way, they lived as Besleme, a mixture of maid and adopted child, with wealthy people in the city. Now, for various reasons, they are back in their father's pit. The mood varies between affection and jealousy, bandits stiff through the village. But not all hope is in vain. Alper tells a story about poverty and social opposites as fairy tales with characters half myth and half harsh reality. Enchantingly beautiful, disturbingly intense. Oliver Kaever
In Brazil in the near future, Joana is responsible for handling divorce applications. Secretly, she refers the divorced couples to a Christian sect, in which broken relationships are to be cemented by ritual intercourse. Gabriel Mascaro's "Divino Amor (Panorama) develops his peculiar tension entirely out of the unclear mix of utopian and dystopian elements within his vision of the future: sexual disinhibition is embedded in a society geared entirely to the regulation of reproduction, and thus a staunch state religion rubs shoulders Moments of genuine wonder: the neon-saturated colors of the film are also an expression of cheerful exuberance, sometimes the emblem of official surveillance - a flickering instability that ultimately engulfs the entire film
When letters are written or read in the cinema, all attention is focused on the message thus conveyed and looking back on history: the "space of time" (Thomas Heise). Sofia Bohdanowicz, who developed "MS Slavic 7" (Forum) together with actress Daregh Campbell, is interested in another aspect: the multiple separations that a letter marks as a material object (spaces, emotional distances). Specifically, it is about the written in exile correspondence between Bohdanowicz 'great-grandmother, the Polish poet Zofia Bohdanowiczowa and the author Józef Wittlin. Time and again, a woman incarnated by Campbell goes to the library to not only view the material cataloged under the signature "MS Slavic 7", but also to crackle in front of the camera. Zofia's words appear as subtitles, transcripts, projections, read in bed. An approach to one's own family history in free-floating form. Esther Buss
The good soul of this bittersweet US indie film: Mara is small, has very great clothes, her black hair surround a rather round face with very round eyes. Jo is her best friend from high school times: taller, slimmer, fairer, prettier, and needier. Mara comes to life and is always there for Jo, who sometimes does not really get along. Dan Sallitt's "Fourteen (Forum) tells the story of an unequal friendship, but also of how in no relation to give and take can be perfectly balanced, with his generous omissions in which sometimes months, sometimes even years disappear, the film looks like He lives above all from the excitement of the casual, intimate form and quite risky dramatic climaxes, in which Sallitt always sets the right tone. " Till Kadritzke
On Sunday, the main association for cinephilia was founded. He is driven, among other things by the concern for the young generation of children. But this concern seems unfounded, at least in the generations' demonstrations. Again and again films here reach a large young and enthusiastic audience. And this is taught in the most beautiful way: "Goldie" , the latest work by Sam de Jong ("Prins"), looks like a Dardennes film with Snapchat filter. The social hardships, the futile dreams, all this is narrated in the story of precarious teenager Goldie (Slick Woods) and her two little sisters, whom she suddenly has to take care of. However, brightly-colored animations and an extremely charismatic lead actress pump him up with a liveliness that counteracts any genre-starvation. Hannah Pilarczyk
Because of love, Frank Beauvais once moved to Alsace. When that's gone, the director is still there. And with him hundreds of films, books, records. Barricaded in a depressive uniformity that consists, among other things, of watching several films every day, Beauvais accompanies the world events from his shell, pursuing various terrorist attacks and sinking into himself. He devours a total of four hundred films between April and October 2016; they provide the visual material of this processed phase of life. Underlaid with a diary-like essay, Beauvais opens the doors to a sad, sensitive and rich world in "Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle" , which is brightened up by short, friendly visits. Then, finally, announces a move. Frank Beauvais goes back to Paris. Carolin Weidner
"Buddies" (Panorama 40) is a movie that had no time to lose. In nine days, Arthur J. Bressan filmed his quick-written two-piece piece about an isolated AIDS patient and a volunteer ("Buddy") and presented it in 1985 amid a paralyzed gay scene and an ignorant policy, two years before he himself admitted to the disease Victim fell. He believed that only a feature film could raise awareness of the theme, relying on music, good actors, melodramatic aggravation, and a sensitive film language that eroded the relationship between the two men, giving them freedom of movement. For 33 years there was no money and opportunities to digitize "Buddies", for which a film rental company was founded in Germany in 1985 in order to bring it to the public faster than the Berlinale. As a masterpiece of tender men's film, "Buddies" is now a rediscovery - and a current call to solidarity and to be touchable. Jan Künemund
In the Mongolian steppe lies the naked corpse of a woman, ice cold, the wind sweeps over it. A young police officer is turned off to guard the crime scene, and in turn a shepherdess guards him: she uses her rifle to drive out a she-wolf who wants to fetch the meat in order to get her boys through. Everything is interconnected here, and the two park benches that stand bizarrely in the endless expanse only emphasize that nature is in charge. "Öndög" by Chinese director Wang Quan-an ("Tula's Wedding", competition) is a conceivably laconic meditation on life and death, birth and rebirth. In the steppe, there is Death Metal, there is sex around the campfire, a lamb is slaughtered, a calf born, a child conceived. A cycle from the Mesozoic to the present day. A circle, however, which one can deftly reach under the arms, as the shepherdess, this strong, quiet heroine, proves. Oliver Kaever
The filmmaker Hassan Fazili is threatened with death by the Taliban. With his wife and two daughters he flees from Afghanistan first to Tajikistan, then on the Ostbalkanroute direction Germany. The family keeps their perennial "Journey to the Edge of Hell" on mobile phones. Her film "Midnight Traveler" (Panorama) shows images that do not yet exist in the abstract refugee discourse and uses cinematic intelligence to record human reactions to inhuman states: waiting, smuggling of people, Nazi attacks. How this family is thrown back on nothing but itself and finds a lifeline in making pictures is shocking and touching. Not until the father films the daughter dancing to Michael Jackson in the dorm: "They do not really care about us." Jan Künemund
"Tandaradei ...". On the threshold of the narrative Ingrid Caven recites a poem by Walther von der Vogelweide. Sometimes she sings too. Or she howls with the wolf. Rita Azevedo Gomes explains in "A Portuguesa" (Forum), her colorful adaptation of Robert Musil's novella of the same name, all action space to the stage, the diorama and paintings - with hints of Dutch painting, such as Vermeer and van Eyck. While Mr. von Ketten is at war with him year after year, his wife, who has been remanded from Portugal, spends time on a ruined castle reading, drawing, singing and making strange sculptures. In doing so, she steadily consolidates her place by literally "sitting out". "A Portuguesa" is a pure image viewing, the figures are staggering into the depth, every thing has its place, even the language is objectively in space. Only the animals do what they want. Esther Buss
Ten-year-old schoolchildren rehearse for the big theater performance before the holidays. They dance, sing and recite poetry. The teacher is ambitious, the required gestures and feelings are far too big, the nervousness increases. In the middle of an exercise in the event of a terrorist attack instead. Fears are fueled and translate into a feverish dream mood, which combines with the erotic awakening of Daniel. He saw a classmate naked and is ashamed. His friend wants to dance tango with him. In the end, Fischer-Dieskau sings Schubert's litany on the feast of all souls. In "Daniel Fait Face" (Generation), the fascinating feature film debut of Marine Atlas, time stands still, and consciousness becomes as sharp as the seemingly sober images. A film that tiptoes very confidently to circling feelings for which you have no words at the age of ten. Jan Künemund
After half of "African Mirror" (Forum) are the doubts why you should look at this, tangible. Why should one keep looking at the racist images of René Gardi from Africa made by the Swiss in the fifties and sixties? Why listen to his comments on the "noble savage"? Two minutes later, when a shocking decisive information about Gardi has been reached, you know it all the more clearly. In his brilliant montage of Gardi's own archive material, texts and images, Mischa Hedinger refuses to comment and instead lets the material talk about and against his maker. A sovereign film on so many levels. Hannah Pilarczyk
Skateboards, Gangsta Rap, Camcorder: Jonah Hill's directorial debut "Mid90s" (Panorama) is bursting with timestamps, but does not look nostalgic on its own growing up in the LA of the nineties. Personal memories for the 35-year-old actor are but loose guides to tell his story about Wuschelkopf Stevie, who has to find his place in the new cool circle of friends. And being cool is hard work, this movie tells us, showing a close look not just at the specific milieu, but also at the subtle codes and mechanisms that make the boy a man. At the same time, and that's what makes the film so special, Hill seems to have a crush on each of his boys - and leaves his amateur actors all the freedom to bring new life to the conventions of the coming-of-age genre. Till Kadritzke
Attuning big cinemas with a grand gesture, that's probably what opening films are supposed to do. The Independent Week of Criticism defies this expectation, renounces the lute and the unique, and for that very reason programs the much nicer opening film than the spectacle on Potsdamer Platz. "Nakorn-Sawan" approaches the fragile concepts of remembrance and grief in suitably hybrid form: filmmaker Puangsoi Aksornsawang leaves documentary material from her single father in Thailand to run, then she begins to use a fictive family at the mother's funeral as a second narrative thread to stage. The loss of the mother is real, Aksornsawang has experienced it himself. Truly, however, their narration is on both levels, because the fiction jumps to the documentation here, supports them in the painful saying and pointing and offers a kind of comfort - in the film, but also through the film. Hannah Pilarczyk
Somewhere in the Midwest, the teenage world is almost as we know it from movies: high school, adolescent constipations, neurotic parents, motor congestion. Then a student disappears, and "Knives and Skin" (Generation) becomes a bright nightmare like you have never seen before. Make-up is applied, figures put on masks and throw themselves in disquieting costumes, the actresses ensemble assembles as a choir and makes dialogues from 1980s songs. At some point you realize how incredibly detail-loving this film is crafted, which seems to know no fixations and communicate in the colors rather than people. And those who do not notice the name of the director after the Berlinale did not understand the cinema: Jennifer Reeder. Jan Künemund
The abstract talk of "structural change" finds in "Bait" (Forum) concrete images of an irreconcilable confrontation. In a picturesque fishing village in Cornwall, fishermen knot thick knots, while wealthy city dwellers stow fine wine in the fridge. There is a dispute over a parking lot and a lobster, a hipster, just outwardly indistinguishable from the locals, freaks out because of machine noise in the morning. "You do not even have a boat," says one of them, and meets Martin at his most sensitive point - his brother has misused it for excursions. Mark Jenkin seeks not the analysis, but the expression: injury, anger, resentment, incomprehension. Also the assembly is brushed full of riot. The lamented loss of tradition finds its form in coarse-grained, hand-developed black and white images on 16mm. Film and fishing crafts as complicity. Esther Buss
One has to get used to the camcorder look of Peter Parlow's forum contribution "The Plagiarists" , everything seems so direct and immediate. The look of the film is also part of a general reflection on how life transforms into art, where people take the stuff out of which they make films and novels. In the first part, "The Plagiarists" (Forum) tells a rather banal story about a hip couple who spend a night with a stranger after a car breakdown. Half a year later, Alison makes a discovery with Karl Ove Knausgård, which just makes this evening appear in a different light. A plagiarism reproach is in the room, and ultimately the question of whether there is no plagiarism behind every truth - and behind every still so immediate camcorder image a sophisticated script. Till Kadritzke
What is a union? What is it worth to strike for? Jean-Gabriel Périot addresses these questions in "Nos défaites" (Forum) to the film course of a high school in Ivry-sur-Seine. The answers are very different. Only one knows what a union is, about half of the strike holds something. The inner moral pendulum that swings between "right" and "wrong" seems to have come to a standstill because of its complexity; the young faces are sometimes as sympathetic as they are apathetic. As an experiment, Périot infiltrates students with political cinema, reenacts scenes from Godard to Tanner, puts the communist manifesto in their hands, and the camera on top of that. The effect is astonishing: From the slack, radicals who have nothing to do with politics are suddenly called into uprising. Carolin Weidner
Nadav Lapid succeeds in a partly turbulent, partly thought-provoking film farce with surprising images and moments, which belongs without too much political dimension to the better contributions in the weakening competition of this Berlinale. It deals with the impermeability of European societies towards immigrants willing to integrate, but above all shows how difficult it is to get rid of their cultural and biographical homeland.
The youth in Naples's gangster-controlled Sanità district, which Italian director Claudio Giovannesi ("Fiore") also competes with in "La Paranza dei Bambini" ("Piranhas"), also have a similar problem. Only that the 14- to 15-year-olds fate, if not overzealously add to the laws of their neighborhood. Screenwriting and novel are by Mafia and Naples connoisseur Roberto Saviano, was filmed with remarkably charismatic amateur actors. For example, Nicola (Francesco di Napoli), a handsome guy with ambitions, joins forces with his boys' clique to take control of the neighborhood: waving fame, fortune, and new, expensive scooters and sneakers. On the one hand, the boys are still too young to publicly drink alcohol or to be left in the disco; on the other hand, they immediately deal with submachine guns and chase away the adult local rip-offs who extort protection money from Nicolas Mutter every week in the laundromat. Do the kids make it better? No.
screengrab / Berlinale
"Répertoire des Villes Disparues" with Larissa Corriveau
For there is no such thing as a heroic journey or even a way out of the spiral of crime and violence propagating itself in ever younger generations; the brutal rules of the road are devoid of education, university, or the chance to leave the three, four streets where there are played this Napoli-minted "Goodfellas" plot.
Although saves director Giovannesi with those drastic representations that once made Matteo Garrone's Saviano adaptation "Gomorrah" and the subsequent TV series to shockers and never really goes into the political depths of Italy. The constant comparison of reality, adrenaline-drunk children watching cokes and war games, gives this "piranhas" quite a bite. Nicola and his girlfriend Letizia dream of leaving for Apulia, in a beach holiday of neighborhood stress, which should never end. But both suspect that their future consists in being disempowered by the younger kids, if not being mocked.
Then rather thunder with the car on the wall? This way out of predestined lifestyles apparently chooses the young Simon in the feature film "Repertoire des Villes Disparues" ("Ghost Town Anthology") by Berlinale regular Denis Coté ("Boris sans Béatrice"). The venue is a 215-inhabitant village in the French-Canadian Quebec. The accident, which was perhaps suicide, hits the community in the march: anyway, the place is threatened by rural exodus, the perspective of aging here is as dull as the barren, wintry landscape. Then suddenly children with strange masks run around and do jokes. And out of the mist mute figures peep, one of whom seems to be the injured Simon.
Coté, himself a French-Canadian with a rural background, tells a supernatural horror fairytale in a rough 16-millimeter format. His parable works really well on dying places, which are haunted by their past, but unfortunately not in the end, but the reflex to escape this home before becoming an undead himself brings Coté home with some effective scary moments.