In addition to the two Italian films in competition at the 74th Berlinale which opens today (15-25 February), namely Gloria!
by Margherita Vicario and Another End by Piero Messina, in competition there will be, among the most anticipated films, Hors du temps by Olivier Assayas, A Traveler's Needs by Hong Sangsoo (with Isabelle Huppert), Bruno Dumond with The Empire and Dahomey, documentary- complaint by Mati Diop.
Meanwhile Assayas, competing for the first time at the Berlinale, tells the story of director Etienne and his brother Paul, a music journalist, confined to their childhood home together with their new partners Morgane and Carole.
Every room and every object, the trees in the garden and the paths themselves, everything awakens in them memories as well as ghosts of their childhood.
Fifth time in this edition, the last with directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian before the arrival in 2025 of Tricia Tuttle, former head of the BFI of the London Festival, for the South Korean Hong Sangsoo, which brings A Traveler's Needs starring Huppert.
This is the cryptic synopsis provided by the production: "She came from France. She was playing a child's recorder in a park. Without means to support herself she was advised to teach French.
She became a teacher of two women. She likes to lie on rocks and rely on makkeolli (Korean rice wine, ed.) for comfort."
Dumond with The Empire instead makes a parody of Star Wars, imagining that with the birth of a special child in the area of the Côte d'Opale, the same area of northern France in which the events of P'tit Quinquin and the 'prequel' were set ' But Loute, two different extraterrestrial forces in conflict with each other have landed, intent on taking over this creature.
In the documentary Dahomey, the French director Diop talks about colonization through the history of the works of art returned to Benin in 2021 after being stolen by the French colonizers in 1892, when the African country was called the Kingdom of Dahomey.
Among the excellent returns to the Berlinale, that of Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios in the running with La Concina.
Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones are the protagonists of this drama "set over the course of a single day in a bustling New York restaurant".
German Andreas Dresen is also back with From Hilde with Love: a period drama about a couple who fall in love before their lives are destroyed by the Gestapo.
The star of the film is Liv Lisa Fries, protagonist of Babylon Berlin and who will join Anthony Hopkins in Freud, in which she plays the daughter of the father of psychoanalysis.
In Pepe the Colombian director of Los Santos Arias follows the story of a hippopotamus transferred from Africa to live on the estate of drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Pepe encounters many individuals and stories awaiting that death that will make him "the first and last of his kind to be killed in the Americas."
Opening, as announced, is Small Things Like These by Belgian director Tim Mielants, starring Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer).
The film tells the story of the scandal of the Magdalen Laundries which welcomed girls who were orphans, or who were deemed 'immoral', due to their conduct considered sinful or in contrast with the norms of society at the time.
Horrible asylums run by Catholic institutions from 1820 until 1996, ostensibly to "reform young women."
Finally, let us remember that this year the Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement will be awarded to Martin Scorsese.
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