Berlin (AFP)
The pandemic, which is disrupting the film industry and depriving the public of the big screen, also inspires directors: several Berlinale films evoke end-of-the-world atmospheres or address the health crisis head-on.
From the main competition to the parallel sections, here's a look at the different ways the Covid-19 permeates the 71st edition of the film festival which runs online through Friday.
- Masked actors -
Customers of a pharmacy, all masked, discuss the interest of the sanitary measures taken in Romania: in "Bad luck banging or loony porn", a fiction shot in the midst of a pandemic, the director Radu Jude integrates the constraint of sanitary measures.
A double reason, according to him: "The film had to be contemporary and the masks are part of our daily life. I wanted to capture this moment, to find the anthropological aspect of wearing the mask. Then I was also concerned about the health of the people concerned. ".
"No film in the world is worth the trouble that someone catches even a simple cold, and my bad films even less", ironically the director for whom the cinema is a "marker of time".
He says he chose the masks "like costumes", adorned with slogans or smileys, deliberately out of step with this acid comedy on the story of a teacher caught up with the leak of an intimate video.
- Apocalypse atmosphere -
Filmed before the coronavirus crisis, the German-Swiss science fiction thriller "Tides", presented in the "Berlinale Special" section, evokes an Earth partly deserted by humans who took refuge in a huge space station because of the apparition. ... of a deadly global pandemic.
In his second feature film with spectacular landscapes, Tim Fehlbaum wanted "more to offer a visual experience than a script", he told AFP, without suspecting that reality could "catch up with (his) fiction".
He wonders, however, if his work will not put off viewers "if the last thing they want to see is a film reminding them of this depressing period".
Unless it arouses curiosity: "Maybe after seeing it, the public will still discuss structuring things about the situation we are living".
A similar situation for the poetic drama "Terminal District" (section "Encounters"), by Iranian Bardia Yadegari.
Struck by pollution and a deadly virus, Tehran lives in fear with a population forced to emigrate or live in quarantine.
"The shooting took place just before the pandemic (...) The tragedy was to occur in the distant future, but suddenly the pandemic appeared. The catastrophe is closer to us than we think", warns- he.
- Zoom in the spotlight -
The Covid-19 and the way it forces people to make radical adaptations has served as a direct source of inspiration for Canadian John Greyson.
His short film "International Dawn Chorus Day" convinces birds from all over the world on the Zoom application, which has been acclaimed for a year for social distancing.
Based on a damning report from the NGO Human Rights Watch, the birds accuse the Egyptian authorities of using the Covid-19 as a pretext to put in place exceptional measures aimed in particular at silencing any opposition to President Abdel Fattah al. -Sissi.
"The contrast between the birds that fly freely around the world, as we all undergo various forms of confinement, was an initial inspiration. Then the contrast was compounded by the extreme incarceration that all Egyptian prisoners undergo," explains its director.
- Filming the story -
Chinese director Shengze Zhu, author of "A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces" ("Forum" section), has chosen to deal head-on with Covid.
His documentary without dialogue delivers an ambivalent portrait of the city of Wuhan, before and after the appearance of the first cases of Covid-19 in December 2019.
The director was born and raised in this megalopolis in central China and had been working on this project since 2016.
"I don't think this film is capable of rehabilitating the image of a city or anything else (...) What happened last year had a profound impact on a lot, a lot of things. can't avoid it in this film, ”she told AFP.
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