Tag: verdict

Crowning the dirtiest movies: our verdict of the 74th Berlinale

Posted on by victorfraga

This was my 12th Berlinale, and the seventh one since I founded DMovies in February 2016. It is no exaggeration to say that the event is very close to my heart. This year I had the privilege of attending both as a journalist as I normally do, but also as the producer and co-writer of The Visitor, a very British, hyperpolitical and pornographic reimagining of Pasolini’s Theorem (directed by the consistently transgressive and inventive Bruce LaBruce, and made possible visceral arts organisation a/political). Our movie did not win any prizes, but it did conquer a lot of hearts. David Opie of Indiewire called it a “depraved masterpiece”, and we received mostly positive coverage from the biggest outlets in the world, including Variety and The Film Stage. You can read our own review of the film here (obviously not written by me!).

The numerous parties, pitching and networking events related to The Visitor did not stop me from viewing and reviewing other films. In total, we published 29 pieces (21 of which by my own hand). You can see them all in our review archive.

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The winners, the dirty gems and the turkeys

My favourite film to win a major prize at the Berlinale this year was Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s The Devil’s Bath (pictured at the top of this article), by Ulrich Seidl Film Productions. A story set in rural Austria in the 18th century, and based on real court records. It is so shocking it is almost unbelievable.

I am glad that Hong Sang-soo’s A Traveller’s Needs and Mati Diop’s Dahomey snatched major prizes. I just have to highlight a couple of strange coincidences. The Berlinale gave its top prize the Golden Bear to a French documentary for the second consecutive year. And Mati Diop is the first Black woman to win the Festival, in a decision made by Lupita Niong’o’s jury. Lupita is also a Black woman, in fact the first one to preside the jury at the Berlinale.

My three very favourite films La Cocina (Alonso Ruizpalacios), Who Do I Belong To (Meryam Joobeur) and My Favourite Cake (Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha) all left empty-handed. The Competition included three genuinely awful movies (I gave one star/splat to each one of them, something I rarely do): Small Things Like These (Tim Meilants), Another End (Piero Messina) and Gloria! (Margherita Vicario). Sebastian Stan (from Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man) and Ema Watson (Small Things Like These) won the Best Lead and Best Supporting Performance prizes respectively. I would have given the awards to Anja Plaschg (The Devil’s Bath) and Adam Pearson (A Different Man), also respectively.

Outside the main Competition, a special mention to the rockumentarey Teaches of Peaches (Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer) and Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath).

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Complacence and censorship

The Berlinale has been complacent with the Gaza genocide, and it has attempted to censor critics. The event has repeatedly denounced Hamas, Iran, Russia and other oppressive regimes, yet it has failed to say a single word about Israel, a country that has illegally occupied and terrorised another one for 75 years, while implementing an Apartheid state and carrying out mass murder. A guerrilla protest was performed inside the Martin Gropius Bau, where the European Film Market (the industry side of the event) is held. Many award winners gave speeches denouncing the Festival’s silence and bias. Festival director Mariëtte Rissenbeek claimed: “it would have been appropriate in terms of content if the award winners and guests at the Award Ceremony had also made more differentiated statements on this issue”, in a shocking act of censorship (the clear objective here is to intimidate and indeed censor future award winners and guests).

The Berlinale has a history of supporting free speech and combating authoritarianism. Mariëtte Rissenbeek’s statement (which can be read in full here) is a barbaric attack on these values.

This good friend and fan of the Berlinale sincerely hopes that the event will reassess its position, and side with those who denounce the oppression of Palestinians with the same vigour its sides with those who denounce the horrors carried out by Putin in Ukraine. Surely if you are ballsy enough to pick a pornographic, ultra-subversive film such as The Visitor, you are able to challenge the rotten narrative that falsely and maliciously equates genuine criticism of a criminal state with anti-Semitism. Instead you chose to purge those who dare to speak up. I am extremely disappointed.

Our verdict of the 3rd Red Sea International Film Festival

Posted on by victorfraga

Fot the third consecutive year, DMovies attended what has quickly become a meeting point for filmmakers, industry pundits and movie enthusiasts from every corner of the planet. The Festival took place during 10 days, between November 30th and December 9th at the heart of the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In total, it screened 126 films from 77 countries, and in 47 languages. The extravagant red carpet ceremonies attracted Arab and international stars alike, including Sharon Stone, Catherine Deneuve, Amina Khalil, Diane Kruger, Ranveer Singh, Paz Vega, Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Burak Özçivit, and many others.

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Programming secrets

I asked the Director of International Programming Kaleem Aftab about their programming secrets: “We divide programming into two departments, the Arab programming department and the international one. We talk to each other all the time, and only at the highest level between myself and Antoine Khalife, who’s the director of our Arab programme. Each one of us has their own team. On my team, I have six full-time programmers. Plus, there are the film liaisons we work with who occasionally help because this year we got so many more submissions than previous years. Only African, Arab and Asian films can submit through the online system. Last year through that method we had 400 films coming. And this year we had over 1400! So the number of hours we had with the size of team was probably not enough. So it was good to have a larger support mechanism because it’s very tricky to go through so many films. Plus, we have all of the films playing the film festivals and the films that sales agents send us directly. By the start of September, we have seen everything”.

He goes on to explain how his peer works: “Antoine has a team of four people. They look at the Arab films throughout the year. The Red Sea Fund and the Red Sea Lodge do so much work with either developing Arab film or financing Arab films. We’ve been watching the Arab films cut by cut over the years, so we have a much better footing of what it is. In the field of Arab and Saudi films, there are probably around 1,200 to 1,500 movies made, including shorts”.

I also asked Kaleem what makes an Arab film, and whether a British movie could ever qualify as “Arab”. He responded: “We have 22 Arab countries. It’s on the website which we consider Arab because there’s a lot of there are some vagaries. And then we also consider anyone who has an Arab, African or Asian passport who lives in another country. But the director has to have the passport and the film has to be about the Arab and Asian world.

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Challenging orthodoxies

The programme of the Red Sea International Film Festival is surprisingly audacious and diverse. The most recurring topic is female oppression and empowerment (Amjad Al Rasheed’s Inshallah A Boy, Humaid Alsuwaidi’s Dalma, In Flames, (Zarrar Kahn), and many others). Certain films question the mechanisms of religious oppression, while others even shed a positive light portrayal of LGBT+ characters.

Kaleem and his team picked a very special British film for this year’s edition of the Red Sea. “We’re showing Copa 71 (Rachael Ramsay and James Erskine), which was the first attempt to put on a women’s football tournament. This is the story of women who are saying no to the old powers. It goes into the history of women’s football, when it was banned, and how it was extremely popular in the early 20th century. So I felt that in a country such as Saudi Arabia, a place where women’s rights and gender rights are changing a lot, it would be great not only to bring Copa 71, but also to make it a gala”. A little masterpiece indeed, and an eye-opening movie that needs to be seen in Britain and the Arab world alike.

And Copa 71 isn’t the exception. There is not shortage of female directors at the Red Sea. “This year we have 31 female-led movies”, Kaleem notes.

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Different sensibilities

The Festival boasts a large number of strong Iranian movies, such as The Last Snow (Amirhossein Asgari) and Roxana (Parviz Shahbazi). Iranian cinema has always fascinated me. And it’;s remarkably different from Saudi cinema. Iranian cinema is contemplative and reflexive, while Saudi cinema drinks from the same water as Hollywood, I opined. Kaleem disagrees: “I don’t believe that Saudi cinema drinks from the same water as Hollywood. I think it’s too early to say that. The Red Sea Film Festival has only been going for three years. This is the first time in four decades we’ve been trying to develop a Saudi film culture. Maybe in four or five years we’ll actually see the sensibility of Saudi films“.

He shares my passion for Persian movies: “We all know the values and merits of Iranian cinema, the poetic way that they deal with tricky subjects. Iranian cinema is wonderful, as everybody in the world knows. We were joking as we were watching the films that this could just have an Iranian film festival because there was so many good films submitted. We had to reject so many good films that we loved just because of the sheer weight and volume”.

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The winners and the dirty gems

The big winners were as follows:

Prizes were given a jury presided by Australian filmmaker Baz Lurhmann. He was joined by jury members Joel Kinnaman, Freida Pinto, Amina Khalil, Paz Vega, Hana Alomair and Fatih Akin.

My dirty favourites were the following four films, all awarded our five splats (a filthy genius rating):

  • The heart-ripping Jordanian social-realist drama about faking a pregnancy Inshallah a Boy;
  • The luminescent Iranian rural drama The Last Snow;
  • The sobering British documentary about erasing women’s football from history Copa 71; and
  • The equally elegant and terrifying Emirati exorcism horror Three (Nayla Al Khaja).

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Our coverage

With a little helping hand from American journalist Joshua Bogatin and Brazilian writer Duda Leite, we published a total of 38 pieces this year. This includes five interviews (with Baloji, Rachel Ramsay, Kaouther Ben Hania, Tamer Ruggli, and the Malaysian tigress Amanda Nell Eu), as well as nine republished reviews of films that we watched earlier this year in other festivals. You can read them all by clicking here.

Picture at the top by Victor Fraga. Middle picture is a still from ‘Inshalah a Boy’. The last image is a still from ‘Copa 71’.