First look at the sequel to "Moana"/courtesy of Disney Israel and Forum Film
Choosing which film to see at a film festival is often a calculated bet.
In Berlin this is doubly true, because many of the films don't even have a trailer and/or are being screened here as a world premiere.
If you miss it, you'll find yourself staring at nature shots and fragments of stories against a multilingual monologue of a dead hippopotamus (not a movie I made up for the example, too bad).
On paper, "Pepe" is a movie about a hippopotamus who reluctantly arrives in Colombia, escapes from Pablo Escobar's private zoo and sets out to take revenge on humans.
This plot exists in the film, sort of, but it's more of a jumble of ideas and life moments that none of them really gets to the point.
The percentage of those falling asleep and leaving in the middle was accordingly.
But when you make a mark and get to be among the first to discover a great, or at least surprising and interesting, work, it's great fun.
This is how I felt, for example, when leaving the movie "The Outrun".
The truth is that this is only half wisdom because this particular film was screened a moment ago at the Sundance Festival, what's more, it has two of the most convenient cogs to stand out in a festival program - a well-known actress and an intriguing director.
The first is Sarah Ronan, who I don't think I've ever seen a bad performance from, and the second is Nora Pingscheidt, a German director whose film "Outside the System" won rave reviews and was also Germany's representative for the Oscars the year it was released.
So, as expected or not, "The Outrun" is my favorite film of the ones I've caught so far at the festival, and the enthusiastic applause that swept the hall at the end suggests to me that I'm not the only one who feels this way.
stormy returns.
Sarah Ronan from "The Outrun"/Official website, courtesy of the Berlin Film Festival
Adapted from Amy Liptrot's autobiographical book, Ronan plays a young woman named Rona whose life has crumbled due to severe alcohol addiction.
The story moves back and forth in time, from her childhood through her debauched years in London to the present, where she tries to pick up the pieces while staying at her mother's house in the Orkney Islands in Scotland.
It is a very moving and emotional story, but also full of beauty, which does not slide into clichés or romanticization.
Ronan, who is also signed on to produce here, presents a performance that, with a little luck, will bring her a fifth nomination for the Academy Award - and fully deserving of a golden statuette.
But the film works no less thanks to the clever direction, which precisely balances different directions, times and storylines so that we end this painful journey with a smile.
One of the biggest challenges in moving from the page to the screen is the translation of a written inner monologue into a visual medium.
When you don't do it right, you get stuck with narration that only weighs the film down.
Pingscheidt does use narration, but sparingly and only for one purpose.
The film depicts the heroine's alcoholism and rehab attempts in all honesty and ugliness, and the narration is there to remind us that Rona is more than her addiction.
She is a smart, open-minded and spiritual woman, with a love for nature and life.
The stories she tells expose us to the folk tales, fears and landscapes that make up her soul, so that the journey we see on the outside takes on additional depth.
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From "A Different Man"/official website, Faces off LLC
It's not the only film that came to the festival after a run at Sundance.
Alongside him, the fun "Love Lies Bleeding" of the independent studio A24, a strange and fun romantic thriller starring Kirsten Stewart and Katie O'Brien and "A Different Man", a suspense comedy starring Sebastian Stan, in which a man undergoes experimental treatment for her deformity syndrome, landed in the German capital. his face and you become a generic handsome almost overnight.
The former Winter Soldier plays here a man suffering from a syndrome that causes his face to be distorted.
Life misses him, until experimental therapy allows him to reinvent himself as a confident hunk who looks like, well, Sebastian Stan.
He gets a role in the play and an opportunity to win the heart of the playwright (Renata Reinsev, star of "The Worst Man in the World"), until Oswald (Adam Pearson in a show-stealing performance), a bombshell of charisma and talent with a distorted face himself, enters the picture. The result is a kind of black comedy, which sometimes wallows in anguish And in disgust raises interesting questions for discussion. Not everything works, but the result is interesting.
The stars are unrecognizable.
"Sasquatch Sunset"/Official Site, Courtesy of Berlin Festival
And there's also "Sasquatch Sunset," a project so weird it takes more than two sentences to introduce it.
The film follows a family of Sasquatches, or as they are more commonly known, Bigfoots, throughout a year.
They roam the forest, collect food, fight, make friends or escape from animals and so on.
They speak in a language reminiscent of monkey grunts, which is the only language you will hear throughout the film.
If all of this sounds too calm to you, then know that there are also secretions of all kinds and that the film opens with a sex scene, to the astonished eyes of the other two members of the family + a deer who happens to be there.
The creators are brothers David and Nathan Zellner, who recently co-directed The Curse, and the stars are Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg — but there's no way to figure that out until the end credits.
The film is defined as a "surreal comedy", but in practice it is somewhere between that and a realistic nature film and a drama about industrialization and deforestation.
Yes, that's quite a lot of different things in one movie, but it's an interesting movie that's very committed to its crazy idea.
I'm not sure who exactly the target audience is for silent and funny nature films with a touch of melancholy and a scene where Bigfoot throws poop at crows, but I hope he reads this text.
Our own soundtrack.
"Between the Temples"/Official Site, Sean Price Williams, courtesy of the Berlin Film Festival
And in a sharp transition, but still in the theme of familiar actors in somewhat esoteric films - "Between the Temples" is probably the first film in which you will find both Jason Schwartzman and a song by Eric Einstein.
Schwartzman plays here Benjamin, a cantor in a reform synagogue in New York who was widowed from his wife a year earlier.
Following the loss, he returned to live with his mother's couple, one of whom (Dolly de Leon from "Triangle of Sorrows") is determined to find him a good match.
One of the promising candidates is Gabi, the rabbi's daughter whose engagement was canceled just before the wedding.
But Benjamin is actually more interested in someone else - Clara (Carol Kane, "The Magical Princess"), the student he is preparing to enter the Torah as part of a very late Bat Mitzvah.
This is such a small film that it is likely that without the domes, the conversation about kosher hamburgers and the soundtrack consisting of seventies hits in Hebrew, you would not be reading about it on an Israeli website right now.
This piece isn't quite polished, but it's graceful and cute enough that we'll give it a go.
At the end of the film, the director and screenwriter Nathan Silver, who makes small indie films with tiny budgets, noted that this is the first time he has managed to be accepted into the festival, after over ten previous submissions.
Add to that the fact that the film was acquired for distribution by Sony Classics after its Sundance screening (the overlap continues), and you've got the potential start of a cinematic Cinderella story.
So if the next time you hear about him it will already come with a standard budget and a distribution contract with some streaming site, know that Boaz Sharabi's "Pamela" was somehow connected to it.
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Sarah Ronan
Berlin Festival