Jennifer Aniston, Meryl Streep, Cillian Murphy and other stars on the red carpet at the Golden Globes 2023/Reuters
Each and every one of the participants in the opening ceremony of the Berlin Film Festival 2024 is required, at some point, to address the elephant in the room.
This big and dramatic political matter, the one that simply cannot be ignored, about which some kind of statement must be made.
The war in Gaza?
No way.
I'm talking, of course, about the decision to cancel the invitation to the ceremony of the five representatives of the far-right AfD party in the German parliament.
However, in the end this issue was somewhat pushed aside, and when the headlines on the cinema websites announced a "political opening ceremony with protests" they mainly referred to the intra-German issue, which took a prominent place in every speech at the event and also led to some (fairly polite) protests on the red carpet .
Admittedly, calls for a cease-fire in Gaza were also seen on the red carpet, and there were some creators who canceled their participation in the festival earlier in protest of the German policy on the matter.
In the week leading up to the opening event, an open letter signed by dozens of festival employees was published, calling for a stop to the fighting, the release of hostages, as well as a response from the festival management that would be "consistent with the one it presented in response to other events that have affected the international community in recent years."
In the opening ceremony itself, the topic came up several times.
Among other things, the Minister of Culture of Germany, Claudia Roth, referred to him, who spoke with shock about the "barbaric attack by the terrorists of Hamas" on 7.10 and called for the release of the abductees in Gaza.
Ruth also expressed concern about the difficult situation of the citizens in the Gaza Strip, called for a political solution to the situation and also condemned manifestations of violence and anti-Semitism towards Jews in Germany.
The festival even adopted the initiative of a pair of local activists - a German of Israeli origin and a Palestinian-German - who operate an intimate and small space that invites passers-by to come in and talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (alone at a time, and in German).
The tiny house was placed near the red carpet of the festival and will be running until Monday, including a live recording of a podcast about it.
Regardless of what is happening in Israel, this year's festival program is considered particularly political this year.
It's all relative, of course - film festivals are usually quite political.
The Berlin Film Festival specifically held a special program last year dedicated to the situation in Ukraine and has long been promoting the voices of filmmakers from Iran - when this year the issue resurfaced when the Iranian government prevented the pair of directors of a film called "My Favorite Cake" from leaving the country to participate in the screening of their film at the festival.
"Little Things Like This"/Official Website, Shane O'Connor, courtesy of the Berlin Film Festival
The opening film title this year went to "Small Things Like These", a fairly modest historical film based on a novel by Claire Keegan that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Oscar nominee Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong here, a coal miner and devoted family man from a small town in Ireland in the 1980s.
Bill raises five daughters together with his wife Eileen and tries to be a good and useful citizen in his community.
But in the run-up to Christmas, he is drawn into a loop of childhood memories and traumas, which only intensifies when he is repeatedly exposed to people and especially children in distressed situations.
The climax comes when Bill is exposed to the story of one of the girls who lives in the local church.
If you haven't come across the phrase "Magdalena Laundries" in the past, we will explain that it is a movement that operated for decades in Ireland and Great Britain.
What started as a kind of shelter for the rehabilitation of women in prostitution has turned into a prison on behalf of the Catholic Church.
Girls and women were sent and imprisoned in churches, where they were required to atone for sins such as giving birth out of wedlock, having sex, or simply being accused of excessive flirtatiousness, by doing penance and forced labor in laundries.
The last of these shelters in Ireland was closed in the nineties, a little more than a decade after the events of the aforementioned film.
The horrors that took place in these laundries have already been exposed in documentaries and feature films - the most prominent of which is "The Magdalene Sisters" from 2002. "Small Things Like These" is intended for an audience knowledgeable about the subject At least on a minimal level, one who can immediately recognize the meaning of a girl calling for help being dragged into a church building. The hero is, after all, the passer-by who chanced upon the scene and was exposed to one case of one girl and was required to decide - to act or not to act.
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"Little Things Like This"/Official Website, Shane O'Connor, courtesy of the Berlin Film Festival
Choosing such a film as the opening film of a "particularly political year" is almost a trick - an important topic that cannot upset anyone because it has long been a complete consensus, and along the way what a statement about the difficulty and also the importance of acting for others at the cost of personal risk.
Oh, and it doesn't hurt when it all comes in one package with famous producers like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and a lead producer/actor who also happens to be one of the hottest stars of the era.
By the way, at the opening ceremony, Murphy was asked if he would prefer the new film to win the Golden Bear award or for "Oppenheimer" to win him the Oscar, and he replied: "I can win both?".
Considerations of the festival's image aside, this is a likable film but also a bit negligible.
Keegan's acclaimed book was adapted into a screenplay by Enda Walsh ("Hunger"), with director Tim Milants in his most outstanding film to date.
Milants has directed mostly for television (including a few episodes of "Peaky Blinders" starring Murphy) and has yet to make a mark in the world of cinema - to the point that he doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry yet - and this film doesn't exactly sell him as a must-follow new voice.
The main interest in the story is Bill's struggle with the dilemma between taking action and a comfortable and detached conformism - and this dilemma is real and grounded in reality, so that even the viewer is not entirely sure what is the right thing to do.
Much of the credit also goes to Murphy, who here creates a character that evokes sympathy on the one hand but also one that sometimes you feel like shaking her so that she wakes up to her life.
There are also many flashbacks to the protagonist's childhood, and they are the kind that justify the scorn that this cinematic tool often receives from the audience.
They are staged with an over-dramatism that may correspond to a traumatic childhood memory, but not the atmosphere of the rest of the film, which most of the time makes good use of understatement.
"It's Not Too Late"/Official Site, Laura Stevens, Agav Films, Courtesy of the Berlin Film Festival
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is present at the festival not only through various statements on the subject, but also in the program itself.
It includes one Israeli film - Amos Gitai's new film - and also a Palestinian-Norwegian documentary called "No Other Land", which is screened as part of the "Panorama" program, which focuses on political and social independent cinema, and documents the struggle of the residents of the Safar Yatta group of villages in the West Bank against violence Settlers and the institutional attitude towards them.
Gitai's film, screened as part of the prestigious official Berlinale Special, brings us back to the preoccupation with conformism versus taking a stand and action.
In its international distribution, the film was given the name "Shikun", which refers to one of two brutalist buildings in which it was filmed - the housing building where the "Yaalim" reception center operates in Be'er Sheva.
Its Israeli name, "It's Not Too Late", suits it much more, as a film that deals with and mainly opposes the idea of "horning" - blindly and obediently following the herd, which only becomes more common as the situation becomes more morally and ethically difficult.
The film, like the concept of rhinoceros itself, was inspired by the play "Rhinoceros" by Eugene Ionesco.
The play of the absurd receives here more and less direct gestures, from long monologues about the essence of that rhinoceros against the background of a character who creates an artificial rhinoceros horn for herself, through dialogues that contrast a character who is "horned" with a character who expresses opposition, to shots documenting the actors walking in circles (or talking about an ideological walk in circles), similar to the circular structure of the play.
"It's Not Too Late"/Official Site, Laura Stevens, Agav Films, Courtesy of the Berlin Film Festival
Unlike UNESCO, Gitai does not use the metaphor of man turning into a rhinoceros to distance criticism from the viewer.
The film is a clear call for resistance or at least for political awakening.
There is no real plot here, but mainly a sequence of pictures, parts of stories or simply discussions, with the characters answering to the real names of the actors and actresses, and sometimes changing their roles between scenes.
It starts in the housing building in question and continues to the empty and post-apocalyptic central station in Tel Aviv.
The director's recurring partner Hanna Leslau appears in one of the scenes in an interesting and surreal looking location especially at the station - the large Yiddish library of the "Young Yiddish" association.
The two locations are linked, among other things, by the characters of a real estate developer, contractor and architect (Menasha Noi, Atallah Tanos and the architect Amnon Rechter). Another recurring character is that of the French actress Irene Jacob ("The Double Life of Veronique"), which can be interpreted as a representation The physicality of morality and resistance but also as a criticism of the Europeans who watch everything that happens in Israel with deep shock but do so with a certain detachment from the people who experience all of this in practice.
"The Curator"/Official Website, Anne Wilk, Courtesy of the Berlin Film Festival
Hana Leslau's character in "It's Not Too Late" is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who briefly talks about her childhood in the shadow of the monumental disaster.
Another film focuses on the experience of the second generation in a much deeper way - "Treasure" by director Julia von Holtz, based on a book written by Lily Burt.
The creator and star of "Girls" Lena Dunham plays here Ruth, a music journalist from New York who comes to Poland to investigate the past of her Holocaust survivor father Adek, about a year after the death of the family's mother.
The father, played by Stephen Fry, joins her on the journey - less to return to the landscapes of his childhood, and more to watch over her and make sure no one tries to harm her.
Ruth's story is told in a way that the average Israeli already knows well from the works and real stories of the sons and daughters of the second generation of the Holocaust.
Childhood with parents suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, the obsession with reading and exposure to the horrors of the time, the question of whether to reclaim property and even real estate - all come up here to a certain extent, with a generous addition of self-harm. Perhaps for an English-speaking Western viewer, this is completely new and refreshing material, and as an introduction First, with the subject matter, this is not necessarily a bad film. There is something educational and emotional in it for moments, but it avoids trying to create some kind of romanticization around the family trip. Even when the idea of a "property claim" comes up again and again, it is clear to us that there is no fairy tale about a stolen house here, only a deaf bush from his side One is a young American woman who is willing to pay huge sums for porcelain dishes and on the other hand the people who live in poverty in Adek's childhood home and are also willing to lie and take advantage of the situation to their advantage. The
most successful scenes in the film are those that do not deal with ghettos or extermination camps, but with Adek himself. While Dunham does the same here A neurotic and difficult character that we already know from "Girls", Frey is the undisputed star and the main reason to see this film. He does play a New Yorker, but he often reminds of an Israeli father who does pranks abroad - a guy with broken English and a tendency to add the The news in unnecessary places.
He makes friends with anyone who stands by him long enough and showers love on his daughter as well, but there is a certain gap between what he says and does here and their problematic and distant relationship over the years, a gap that the film more hints at than actually shows.
And yes, he totally gives his daughter Polish speeches about her divorce and her eating "bird food".
Did we say an Israeli father?
More on the same topic:
Killian Murphy
Lena Dunham
Amos Gitai
Berlin Festival