For Chat Cinema Podcast guest filmmakers Tom Berkeley and Ross White talked about their well received film ROY, character driven story of loneliness. The duo looked poised to make the next step. Fast forward to March 12th, Tom Berkeley Ross White won the Best Film Short at the 95th Academy Awards in Hollywood for AN IRISH GOODBYE.
After the announcements of the main awards of this year’s Berlinale, other films also deserve recognition. In the Encounters section, The Klezmer Project was directed by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann. Although it did not win (Here, by Bas Devos, took the prize), The duo’s work deserves stand-alone appraisal. Leandro, a frustrated Jewish wedding cameraman in Argentina meets and falls in love with a clarinetist. To spend time with her he contrives a documentary project commission for television. This project will take him across the remotest parts of Eastern Europe.
The Klezmer Project is original in that it adds a linear fictional narrative onto what is otherwise a documentary. It also manages to do this very seamlessly to provide double interest and entertainment. The quest to find the lost klezmer melodies that have been safeguarded by the Romani people both educates and fascinates. The film was recognized by winning the GWFF society Best First Feature Award. The prize of 50,000 € guarantees the safeguarding of Film and TV rights. A Special Mention from the GWFF was also given to The Bride, directed by Myriam U. Birara and in the Forum Competition section.
Tótem, directed by Lila Aviles, played in the Competition section failed to win any of the main awards. However, this Spanish take on melodrama both charmed and delighted. A family celebrates the birthday of a young father, also a painter. Sadly, he is also facing his impending mortality. The child protagonist, played by newcomer Naíma Senties, could easily have won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance. The award went to another child protagonist Sofía Otero for 20,000 Species of Bees. Tótem, however, won the prize of the Ecumenical Jury. The well received work finished ahead of Golden Bear winner On the Adamant, awarded Special Mention at the festival.
One film in the Competition which surprisingly failed to win a prize was Limbo, directed by Ivan Sen. A detective called Travis Hurley arrives in a small Australian outback town. Staying at the Hotel Limbo, he has come to investigate a 20-year-old unsolved homicide of an Aboriginal woman. The only evidence he has is a number of tape recordings. Meanwhile, the victim’s family is reluctant to give much information, particularly to a white cop.
With patience, Travis will uncover some unpleasant truths, highlighting the injustice faced by Aboriginal Australians. Indigenous Australian film director Ivan Sen had previously won the Premiere First Movie Award at the Berlinale in 2002 for his first film Beneath Clouds. In Limbo he has created a hypnotic “desert noir” that makes excellent use of the landscapes. The choice of black and white further enhances the backdrop and static progress of narrative resolution.
A personal nod also goes to the following films: Blackberry, The Shadowless Tower (Main Competition); Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker, Kiss the Future (Berlinale Special – Out of Competition); Calls from Moscow, Notes from Eremocene, Cidade Rabat (Forum Section).
By Steve Yates
The 73rd Berlinale: A Look at the Main Prize Winners
The Berlin International Film Festival 2023 Award Ceremony took place on 25th February. Actress Kristen Stewart served as president of a seven-person international jury. The prize ceremony has often had some unusual choices for winners and this year was no exception.
The Golden Bear for Best Film went to On the Adamant, directed by Nicolas Philibert. As always, it is the film‘s producers (here, Céline Loiseau, Gilles Sacuto and Miléna Poylo) who are credited for the prize. The documentary focuses on a day care center on the River Seine in Paris. During the course of the film we get to know the bond between the care workers and patients
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Christian Petzold has always been a popular director at the Berlinale. This year he won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize for Red Sky (Afire). Four young people are staying in a holiday home on the Baltic Coast. One of them is a writer, struggling to finish his latest book. Meanwhile there are warnings of a heat wave and potential forest fire nearby. Petzold is successful here in making character interactions become a study in existential psychology. Also notable is the building of tension in what is otherwise a slow-paced but compelling film.
The Silver Bear Jury Prize was awarded to the Portuguese film Bad Living, directed by João Canijo. It concerns five women who have run an old hotel with ongoing conflicts. When a younger person arrives, old wounds are reopened.
Philippe Garrel, the French director (and sometime actor), is popular at the Berlinale and beyond, with films also regularly featuring in competition at Cannes and Venice. This year The Plough won him the Silver Bear for Best Director. The film concerns a traveling family puppet theater. After the father and grandmother die, the remaining family struggles to keep the legacy alive. It deserved the award for depicting the passion and realities of a puppet theater in the modern age.
Other main awards benefitted from the renowned Berlin accolades for fringe or special interest topics. Sofía Otero was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance in 20,000 Species of Bees. Directed by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren, a distraught child and her mother experience life changing experiences in a summer house. At just eight-years-old, Otero has made history as the youngest Berlinale winner.
Thea Ehre won the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance in Till the End of the Night by Christoph Hochhäusler. In the crime thriller, Ehre plays a Trans character just out of prison on probation. Meanwhile, Angela Schanelec received the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for Music, a perplexing film that will likely divide audiences. Concerning the Oedipus myth and containing little dialogue, its accolade therefore seems somewhat controversial.
Finally, the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution was awarded to Hélène Louvart for her cinematography in Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy. A film not without some flaws, the prize for original cinematography was nonetheless well deserved.
By Steven Yates
The hit series BRIDGERTON is known for inclusive casting, sexy Victorian Age storylines and those wigs.
In the first in a series of quick conversations from the Anamorphic Cafe Club, award-wining cinematographer Jeff Jur talks about he shoots the Netflix show to get the hairpiece details.
Click to see the video.
I interviewed filmmakers Sam Freeman and Ng Ping for a Chat Cinema podcast last year. The BAFTA nominees had completed their short film noir FEMME. Fast forward to this week, the duo unrolled their feature debut FEMME at the Berlinale. A continuation on the sexual repression theme from the duo’s first work, the longer version stars Charles MacKay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett in a cat a mouse game of revenge. The reviews have ranged from mixed to positive.
Short listed for the 2023 Oscar, ALMOST HOME is a futuristic sci-fi short film with moral resonates today, responsibility for a life and death decision.
An interview with Producer Jonas Lembeck.
A sci-fi short film, not an easy assignment, why did you decide on this one project? Where there times you had to say, “NO”?
When Nils pitched me the idea for the first time, I was amazed by the concept of setting a coming-of-drama in space. I liked the idea of telling a story about isolation and growing up in this contained environment. The genre elevates the dilemma very well for me. So, for me, it was not a Covid film. It poses a broader question of what a life worth living is. I guess everyone made his own opinion about that during the pandemic and probably everyone went through this. Therefore, I thought this is the right film at the right time and we must shoot this. After the decision was made to engage as a Producer it became clear instantly that this project won’t be easy to realize and we`ll have to overcome some obstacles. This is by the way also a reason I decided on ALMOST HOME: I really liked that this idea was ambitious and not an easy assignment, but I believed in the visuality as well. During the whole production & postproduction, we always had to find creative ways to work around and deal with the limited resources we had. For example, we couldn´t afford to rent a proper stage to build up the spaceship and shoot. We rented an old hall in Munich, Germany that was used by wastewater management before. So we had some issues with the smell but it fitted the budget. I remember me and some members of our production crew standing on the roof of this hall covering the roof, so it gets dark in there. When it comes to saying “NO” I have to admit that this was part of the daily work, but I am not a fan of just saying “NO”. For me, it is more of a discussion about what exactly we need and there may be some ways to work around it. It was the top priority in this project (maybe with every project but especially here) to find the very best balance between creative needs and our resources. In the end, it was an amazing team effort and so many team members really gave a lot for the film. Our cast & crew and partners made this possible. I am super grateful for that!
A genre known for mega budgets, where you a nervous about how the film would look and the comparisons?
Sure, Sci-Fi is known for mega budgets. For me ALMOST HOME is kind of more a grounded Sci-Fi film. It is an honour to be shortlisted as one of the first Sci-Fi shorts among these other great filmmakers. As I said for us as a team it was a challenge to make this happen. I would lie if I were saying their haven´t been times when I was thinking about decisions more than twice. I am still happy that we were able to attach such great partners like ARRI and our film school in Munich who trusted in the creative vision as much as we did. Also, I discussed decisions with our Executive Producers Philip Hofmann and Robert Richarz from my company lehof.
What type of interaction did you and Nils have on this project?
We both met each other at film school. ALMOST HOME was our first project together. Nils and I share the same vision of projects we want to realize, also when it comes to what we want to shoot as our next movie. During the last two years realizing ALMOST HOME, we have been working together shoulder to shoulder. This was quite an intense journey. As you can imagine we believed in the same creative vision and part of the work as Director-Producer-Duo was always to align everybody on this vision. I really like the way Nils works he is very clear about his creative vision and at the same time, he is very pragmatic and always hands-on and open-minded to find solutions. That’s what I meant with “there was no simple ‘NO’”. Even though everybody has his principles we always tried to balance decisions to find the perfect solution without losing the underlying creative vision of course. I think we complement very well in many aspects so that’s why we currently developing the next projects together.
Do you have a rule for filmmaking?
I think I don’t have this ONE rule. What I´ve learned again while producing ALMOST HOME and what kind of speaks for the project is the importance of TRUST. For me, every step builds on that, and trust must be the foundation, especially for ambitious projects. As simple as it sounds: Trust in the creative vision, trust your team and your partners and of course vice versa.
Check out the interview with director Nils Keller.
Almost Home is short listed for the Academy Awards.
Short listed for the 2023 Oscar, ALMOST HOME is a the present day topical sci-fi short film from Nils Keller explores decisions and relationships in the future on spaceship.
A interview with director Nils Keller.
A very today reference set in the future, how did you develop this storyline?
The idea for ALMOST HOME was inspired by a newspaper article I read in March 2020 about a cruise ship’s odyssey due to the mounting fear of Covid 19. What really shook me was the mention of people who, after being trapped aboard their floating steel prison for weeks and despite the prospect of finally being able to leave it, wondered if it was safer to stay. Absurd at first glance, I immediately wondered what this might say about our lifelong struggle to draw a line between safety and freedom. The idea of using certain aspects of this article and turning it into a more universal short film story that departs from Covid’s reality and takes the form of a character-driven coming-of-age drama set in space evolved over the next few days.
Almost Home, the choices and conflicts in the story, you stayed away from the good guy, bad guy, can you explain this?
In creating the film, which at its core was meant to be a metaphor for our lifelong struggle to determine the right balance between freedom and security, two things were very important to us: we wanted to ask questions, not provide answers – and in order to achieve that, we wanted to create multidimensional characters with very good but very contrary intentions. Let’s face it: life would be so much easier if it consisted mostly of circumstances where there was a clearly good and a clearly bad option. But in fact, that is rarely the case. Most of the things we must decide on are tremendously complex and become even more complicated as more people are involved in the calculation and emotions as well as individual perceptions start playing their parts. The pandemic has given us a very global and painful example of this. And in some ways ALMOST HOME draws from this confusion while intentionally moving away from Covid itself and asking more general questions about growing up, handling social conflict, sharing and taking responsibility and navigating life-changing situations where it’s hard to know what long-term consequences will arise.
Why did you decide on a sci-fi film with CGI as a project, not exactly an easy choice.
As a director, my passion goes towards these grounded yet cinematic genre films that focus on the characters and highlight their drama. I think it’s one of the most magical powers of cinema that narrative distance can pave the way to talk about essential issues in our lives that would otherwise be buried under too many strange or personal circumstances, or too hurtful to address. I also like the entertaining and world-building part of genre narratives, where you’re a little freer to tell your story. In the specific case of ALMOST HOME, the main reason for setting the story in a futuristic and isolated environment was to distance it as much as possible from Covid 19. The spaceship is meant to provide a confined cinematic stage to reflect on what it means to be dependent – on our parents or other people who try to have a saying in our life choices – and how hard it can be to break away from that while not destroying the relationship. It’s that very physical yet metaphorical expression of not being able to run or hide. I wanted to focus on our characters and their dramatic conflict and see the larger implications of life in that.
Of course, we knew from the beginning that it would be very difficult, some even said impossible, to create a no-budget sci-fi film with so many challenging elements. There was an ongoing pandemic, little money, the need to build a full-scale walkable spaceship and tons of visual effects. On the other hand, the fact that we were students offered us a unique chance for support, funding and trying things out. People tend to love these passion projects and there were so many great filmmakers and supporters helping us with almost no payment involved. Among them companies like ARRI giving us their cameras and lights for free, our film school (the University of Television and Film Munich) etc. Since DoP Georg Nikolaus and I had done some commissioned CGI projects before, we were also confident, that this could be a manageable thing. Of course, everything turned out to be much more difficult. But thanks to the great team and the hard work of everyone involved, our dream didn’t crash but started flying. And it’s an amazing honour for all of us involved to receive such great feedback now on such a high level. It really is beyond our wildest dreams.
Obviously you worked closed with a veteran cinematographer, what was the relationship?
I wouldn’t necessarily say that Georg Nikolaus is a veteran cinematographer, even if he has the calm and many impressive skills of one. I think it was very important for this project that he and I know each other since the beginning of film school. We did almost all our short films together and worked on some commissioned productions for commercials and television together. There has always been a shared understanding that story and characters must come first when we think about visual language. In the case of ALMOST HOME, we discussed the possible layout of the spaceship early on to make sure we had the right mix of a narrative stage for our story and enough opportunity to visually approach the characters and their environment in an intimate way. Further down the road, we used the 3D model of the spaceship, created by our incredible production designer Pan Patellis, to work out literally every shot, the blocking and camera movements. The spaceship was so cramped, the shooting time so short and the technical demands so advanced, that we had to exactly know where to put the camera and determine what walls and ceilings had to be disassembled for certain scenes. Yet we also often took a step back from planning and considered how to visually help express Jakob’s emotionality and his longing for Earth as it felt important to convey a human and poetic note in a cold environment like ours. Through highlighting Jakob’s personal items with their used surfaces, the presence of the earth through moving sunlight glimpses through the windows with the blue marble in sight etc. As a result, there was a lot of planning together with the art department as well. We also stayed true to the idea of letting the camera playfully float at the beginning of the film where Jakob feels free and optimistic in zero gravity. Advertently, when gravity sets in, the visual language becomes as stiff as his body. In order to emphasise the relationship between Jakob and his mother and their shifting understanding of each other, we discussed every angle, inch and trick possible inside a confined set like ours. It was of incredible help here, that ARRI Rental supported our work with their amazing equipment like the ALEXA Mini LF, lights and much more. Later in post-production, Georg continued to be an integral part of our naturally understaffed project, having ongoing conversations about the right perspectives for visual effects, dispelling, preparing the colour grading, creating screen inserts, artworks etc.
ALMOST HOME has been shortlisted for the Oscar 2023.
I never know what to expect at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The Dutch fest always provides twists and turns with a program that challenges my views on cinema.
“Family Is Family”. A family can be a source of inspiration for artists. Morgane Dziurla-Petit’s family inspired work Excess Will Save Us is an examination of close relationship and manipulations. From a small French Village Petit points a lens at inhabitants whipped up by paranoia by far off event. However, in this story, who are the true nemeses?
An interview with Morgane Dziurla-Petit from the International Film Festival Rotterdam
Congratulations! You shattered illusions about French Sophistication. How has your view changed now as compared to when you started this film?
“Well I never had an illusion that French people were particularly sophisticated, growing up in a working class family. But I had the belief that sophistication was needed to change social class which felt important to me when I was younger. This is the kind of things that transforms your heritage into shame.
Making Excess Will Save Us was definitely a work on stopping the shame and creating a dialogue. I do not idealise countryside or working class because I find that there can be a lot of violence – afflicted and inflicted – but making the film made me grow so much more love and understanding for where I come from.”
These types of feelings, manipulations and reactions to events one would expect from perhaps Middle or Rural America, not a few hours drive from Paris. Are you saying emotions are universal?
“I think that anyone who makes films has the belief that emotions are universal. And with globalisation, the systems that influence us – even if you are a 93 year old man – are becoming more and more similar. But I am also in a particular situation as a French filmmaker because I live in Sweden – a country that is very much influenced by the US, much more so than France. I can see that it has sometimes influenced my choices.
Even though I work with a multiplication of small stories happening in the village of my family, I wanted them to be understood by an international audience. For example, there is that story about my grandfather believing that the tombstone of my grandmother has a strange smell. One of the versions of the edit went to the point where he shared that it maybe had something to do with Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès, a French man famous because he has killed his family and has never been found by the police. Though hilarious for a French person, I could see that this would not land on an international audience so it was removed.”
The dysfunctional relationships were central. As a director was it hard to get the talent to be exposed in this manner on camera?
“Comedy is the love language in my family so it was hard with the people I am the closest to – especially my dad – to sometimes go out of that. I wanted the film to operate movements between comedy and drama and my father could be anxious about that. He likes to have a direct answer about what people think of him and there is nothing more direct than a laugh. It is part of his character though and I love that look he has in the film where he is always trying to be seen by the audience. That’s what makes me laugh but that’s also what makes me love his character despite the terrible things he does. All in all each of the non professionals have an opinion on how they want to be seen in the family and it is extremely similar to the way they want the camera to see them.”
You drew inspiration from your family and community, how did they react to the film?
“Amazingly, I really could not have hoped for better. They see the film as something very true to who they are even in the more fictional parts. And I was surprised to see a difference from showing the short film I had made about them where most of their comments back then were on details like the clothes they wore or the cleaning they should have done better. This time they did not speak about that and enjoyed the story… and also understood my job much better going through the emotional journey that they know is a construction of a whole team of people.”
As a filmmaker, are you drawn to more farcical situations?
“My next project is a drama so it could be weird to answer yes even though it is something I obviously love. I think that in general I am drawn towards quidproquo, cringe and meta. And these are things that can be worked on in both the context of comedy and drama. They have the power to make you feel intimately close to characters and again… work on our own shames.”
Excess Will Save Us All was screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam in January.
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French Avant Gard filmmaker Jean Luc Godard passes away today. The influential filmmaker inspired generations. As a director he broke all the rules becoming a major a reference point in cinema world.
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