The Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival) comprises the annual pre-autumn festival circuit alongside Sundance, SXSW and Cannes. Though the competition isn’t exactly a pipeline to the Oscars, it has hosted premieres for past Best International Feature winners and nominees “A Fantastic Woman,” “On Body and Soul” and “A Separation.” Additionally, the festival launched “45 Years,” which earned Charlotte Rampling her first Academy Award nomination in 2016, and “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” which received nine bids and won four in 2015. The 73rd festival was held February 16 – 26.
This year’s jury was presided over by Academy Award nominee Kristen Stewart. The slate includes new efforts from Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec and Christoph Hochhäusler, all three of whom belong to the Berlin school of filmmaking that emerged in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. 2023’s Golden Bear went to Nicolas Philibert’s “On the Adamant,” a documentary about a health care facility in Paris that specializes in art therapy and happens to be based out of a floating structure on the Seine. Presenting the award to Philibert, Stewart called the film “cinematic proof of the vital necessity of human expression.” Below, scroll through our gallery of the top 20 narrative feature premieres from this year’s Berlinale.
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“She Came to Me”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale “Maggie’s Plan” writer-director Rebecca Miller opened the festival with “She Came to Me,” a romantic comedy starring Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei. An opera composer (Dinklage) in a creative crisis finds inspiration after cheating on his wife (Hathaway), a psychiatrist experiencing a religious awakening, with a tugboat captain (Tomei). Ben Rolph (AwardsWatch) calls the movie a “highly entertaining” and “brilliant mix” of absurdist comedy and drama, and Owen Gleiberman (Variety) writes that it “demonstrates how the indie quirkfest can be resonant and real, with characters who have soul instead of a chewy center.” “She Came to Me” features an original song by Bruce Springsteen (“Addicted to Romance”) and a score from The National’s Bryce Dessner (who worked on the Dinklage-starring “Cyrano”).
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“20,000 Species of Bees”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale A child (Sofía Otero) finds unexpected support from her loved ones during a gender-identity crisis. Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) calls “20,000 Species of Bees” “warm” and “generously performed.” Otero, the movie’s eight-year-old star, won the Silver Bear lead acting award and became its youngest-ever recipient. Of her work, Guy Lodge (Variety) writes, “Alternately mischievous and diffident, as her character’s swinging moods and modes dictate, Otero’s performance in the lead is utterly winning.”
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“Bad Living”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale João Canijo came to this year’s Berlinale with two complementary films set at a Portuguese hotel and told from opposite ends of the social ladder. “Living Bad” details guest experiences, while “Bad Living,” which premiered as part of the main competition, is about resentments between the family-owned establishment’s multigenerational staff. Ola Salwa (Cineuropa) writes, “Watching Canijo’s mature and emotionally charged film becomes a moving journey as the protagonists clash and the nature of their own unhappiness is revealed.” Hector A. Gonzalez (InSession Film) gives the movie an A and says it’s “an engrossing and haunting look at female cruelty and family dysfunction.” “Bad Living” won the Silver Bear Jury Prize.
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“The Survival of Kindness”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale A character identified in the credits only as BlackWoman (Mwajemi Hussein) escapes from a cage in the middle of the desert and makes her way toward civilization in order to complete a mission. “The Survival of Kindness,” directed by Dutch-Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer (“Charlie’s Country,” “Ten Canoes”), is being described as a wordless, visually arresting parable about colonialism and the enduring psychic wounds it inflicts. Jessica Kiang (Variety) writes, “Man’s enormous inhumanity to man is reproduced in precise, characterful miniature, with a pared-back artistry that somehow earns de Heer the right to be thematically blunt, and deeply pessimistic.” Jason Gorber (RogerEbert.com) calls the movie a “dense yet immensely rewarding fable.” “The Survival of Kindness” won the main competition’s FIPRESCI Jury Prize.
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“Till the End of Night”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale Directed by Christoph Hochhäusler (“The Lies of the Victors,” “The City Below”), “Till the End of the Night” is a Frankfurt-set psychodrama about an undercover cop (Timocin Ziegler) who begins having an affair with a trans woman (Thea Ehre) with ties to a drug syndicate he’s investigating. Critics aren’t enthusiastic, with Guy Lodge calling it “unconvincing” and David Rooney (The Hollywood Reporter) criticizing its “unsound plotting.” Ehre, however, won a Silver Bear for her supporting performance, which Kristen Stewart said “blew [the jury’s] hair back.”
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“Reality”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale “Euphoria” and “White Lotus” star Sydney Sweeney is enjoying glowing write-ups for her performance as whistleblower Reality Winner. The former NSA contractor leaked an intelligence report in 2018 about Russian cyberattacks during the 2016 election and subsequently received the longest-to-date sentence for divulging classified material to the media. Rory O’Connor (The Film Stage) calls Sweeney’s performance “stressed but never brittle, and thrillingly convincing,” adding that the film is indebted to her. From playwright-turned-filmmaker Tina Satter, “Reality” doesn’t attempt to cover her entire life or the months and weeks leading up to her decision and instead confines itself to one location on the day she was arrested. The film is based on Satter’s play, “Is This a Room,” which sources its dialogue directly and without embellishment from the FBI’s transcript of her interrogation. The project’s concept blends the conventions of dramatic reenactment with those of a documentary, lending the title a second meaning.
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“BlackBerry”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale The BlackBerry is joining Facebook, Uber, Theranos, WeWork, and Air Jordans on the list of companies and products to recently inspire dramatic narratives. “BlackBerry,” based on “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall Of Blackberry” by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, recounts the saga of Canadian firm Research in Motion, maker of the once-ubiquitous device that eventually ceded the smartphone market to Apple. At the film’s center are founder Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and co-CEO Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). Jason Gorber calls Baruchel “absolutely stellar” and proclaims “BlackBerry” “one of the great films to come out of this year’s competition slate.” Pete Hammond (Deadline) writes, “The filmmakers have taken a tech-heavy business book and given it life, soul and sorrow in the most human of terms, and that is no easy undertaking.”
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“Manodrome”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale As if there weren’t enough recent films about disaffected, radicalized men resorting to violence that either take inspiration from or have been compared to “Taxi Driver”—“Joker” and “Magazine Dreams,” just to name two examples—“Manodrome” doubles down by making its protagonist an actual taxi driver! Ralphie (Jesse Eisenberg) plays an insecure gym rat who is ideologically immersed in a men’s-rights group led by duplicitous lifestyle guru “Dad Dan” (Adrien Brody). Directed by John Trengove (“The Wound”), the project sees Eisenberg exploring darker facets of his character from “The Art of Self-Defense”–only with Brody assuming the role of Svengali rather than Alessandro Nivola. Steph Green (We Love Cinema) says Eisenberg is “brilliantly cast against type” and that he does “incredible work as a man barely able to keep his rage at bay.” Savina Petkova (AwardsWatch) calls him “phenomenal” and the film “fascinating.”
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“Ingeborg Bachmann Journey into the Desert”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale “Phantom Thread” and “Corsage” star Vicky Krieps plays Ingeborg Bachmann in a biopic about the Austrian poet and philosopher from filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, who is considered a vanguard of the ‘60s and ‘70s New German Cinema movement. Of primary focus are Bachmann’s fraught romantic relationship with Max Frisch (Ronald Zehrfeld) and a life-changing excursion to Egypt. Some are labeling the film reductive—Jessica Kiang calls it “oldfangled” and wishes Bachmann’s writing had been explored rather than “the salacious irrelevancies of who she went to bed with”—but it also has its passionate fans. Stephanie Bunbury (Deadline) praises “Journey into the Desert” as a “persuasively intimate” marriage between “Krieps’ mercurial portrayal and Von Trotta’s extravagant, operatic and equally mercurial direction,” adding that it “may also be the most perfectly realized film at the Berlinale.”
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“Golda”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale Having been, alongside the Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro,” at the center of a “Jewface” controversy, “Golda” premiered with one of the competition’s highest profiles. The film embeds us in Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s (Helen Mirren) strategy room during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which Egypt and Syria launched to recover territories lost in June 1967’s Six-Day War. Liev Schreiber co-stars as Nixon-era Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Online furor over Mirren’s casting and prosthetics notwithstanding, her performance as the original “iron lady” has received some very enthusiastic write-ups out of Berlin. Complimenting her work capturing the vocal essence of a woman born in Ukraine and raised in Milwaukee, Owen Gleiberman writes, “The voice that emerges from this formidable figure is not what we might expect. It’s light, fast, and American, and Mirren gets it exactly right.” Leslie Felperin (The Hollywood Reporter) highlights aspects of Mirren’s physical transformation that aren’t owed to make-up, writing that she “cannily uses the way Golda smokes as a means to illustrate character. The way she handles a hefty Zippo lighter denotes competency and command.” Such a fully realized performance has gotten actors less admired than Mirren Oscar nominations for tepidly reviewed films before.
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“Inside”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale An art thief (Willem Dafoe) finds himself trapped in a luxury Manhattan penthouse without food or water after a job takes a terribly unexpected turn. Marco Vito Oddo (Collider) writes, “Everything is glued together by another Dafoe performance that proves he’s one of the greatest actors of all time.” Pete Hammond echoes that sentiment, calling the performance a “tour de force.” American audiences can see the movie stateside beginning March 17.
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“Afire”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale In Christian Petzold’s “Afire,” a getaway to the Baltic Sea is interrupted by a young novelist’s (Thomas Schubert) raging insecurities and a literal forest fire. Paula Beer, who has worked with Petzold twice before, co-stars. Guy Lodge calls the “well-observed” and “acidly funny” comedy of manners a “superb, smoldering” film, and David Rooney says it’s a “nimble chamber piece.” Petzold has a long history at the Berlinale. His previous two films, “Undine” and “Transit,” competed for the Golden Bear. 2012’s “Barbara” (starring Nina Hoss), took the Silver Bear for directing and represented Germany at the 85th Academy Awards. 2007’s “Yella” won Hoss a Silver Bear for Best Actress (the category only became gender neutral in 2021). “Afire,” which premiered in competition, won this year’s runner-up Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. It has been acquired by Sideshow and Janus Films, the team behind “Drive My Car” and “EO,” for North American distribution. In Germany, “Afire” is scheduled to open on April 20.
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“Femme”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale A homophobic hate crime’s victim and perpetrator enter a secret relationship in a thriller critics are calling “taut” (Guy Lodge) and “subversive” (Wendy Ide, Screen Daily). Months after Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is assaulted by a street gang while in drag, he encounters one of the men who beat him (“1917’s” George MacKay, sporting some serious neck tattoos) at a gay bathhouse but isn’t recognized, which gives him an opportunity to exact revenge. The film sounds vaguely similar to Eliza Hittman’s “Beach Rats,” which is about a closeted young man who runs with an aggressively chauvinistic crowd in South Brooklyn. Its star, Harris Dickinson, happens to also play the MacKay role in the short on which “Femme” is based. Loud and Clear’s Serena Seghedoni awarded the film five stars, calling its screenplay “flawless” and “genre-defying.”
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“White Plastic Sky”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale In the 22nd century, the citizens of a massive plastic bubble are horticulturally repurposed on their 50th birthdays (though anyone can volunteer themselves sooner) in order to preserve human life on Earth. Specifically, an implanted seed turns people into food-producing trees meant to feed the next generation. When a counselor (Tamás Keresztes) who guides others toward accepting their civic obligation learns that his wife (Zsófia Szamosi) plans to fulfill hers early, he desperately tries to dissuade her. Carlos Aguilar (The Playlist) compares “White Plastic Sky” to “Soylent Green” and calls it an “intellectually invigorating conversation piece.” The trailer for the dystopian sci-fi thriller reveals a stunning, rotoscoped vision of the future. Scott Roxborough (The Hollywood Reporter) describes the aesthetic as simultaneously “retro and modern, as if someone had uploaded a 70s animated film onto a PS4.”
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Tótem
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale Lila Avilés’ “Tótem” sounds like a possible 2024 International Feature submission from Mexico. The movie takes place at a birthday party for the moribund Tona (Mateo Garcia) and is mainly seen through the eyes of his seven-year-old daughter, Sol (Naíma Sentíes). Like Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married” and Trey Edward Schultz’ “Krisha,” the observational drama plunges viewers into the paradoxical intimacy and chaos of a family gathering. Jonathan Romney (Screen Daily) begins his review by writing, “One of the rare authentic miracles that a film can pull off is to depict the intimate and the seemingly inconsequential, and to do it with absolute naturalness. Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés achieves this feat with elegance and insight in ‘Tótem.’” Zhuo-Ning Su (AwardsDaily) calls it a “miracle of a film” and “the discovery of the festival.” It was considered a serious contender for the Golden Bear but ultimately lost to “On the Adamant” (though it won the Ecumenical Jury Prize). Avilés’ first feature, 2018’s “The Chambermaid,” was submitted to the Academy Awards but did not receive a nomination.
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“Disco Boy”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale A Belarussian immigrant (Franz Rogowski) joins the French Foreign Legion for the chance to become a citizen and is stationed in the Niger Delta, where he discovers a metaphysical connection with a guerilla fighter (Morr Ndiaye). Critics are calling Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut a strange but stimulating headtrip. Peter Bradshaw compares it to the works of Gaspar Noé and Nicolas Winding Refn, calling it “a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness, or into something else entirely: the heart of an alternative reality, or a transcendent new self.” Diego Semerene (Slant) praises Rogowski, writing that his “face proves to be the perfect vehicle for conveying indescribable wounds.” DP Hélène Louvart won the competition’s cinematography prize, the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.
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“Limbo”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale With the help of the victim’s sister (Natasha Wanganeen), a heroin-addicted cop (Simon Baker) investigates a cold case in a South Australian desert mining town and experiences tension between police and Aboriginal locals firsthand. Director Ivan Sen wrote and shot the procedural, which Peter Bradshaw calls “a terrific outback noir.” Of Wanganeen’s supporting performance, Zhuo-Ning Su writes, “She provides the black-and-white film with its human pulse.”
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“Music”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale “Music” is a modern, experimental deconstruction of the Oedipal cycle directed by Angela Schanelec, who won the festival’s directing prize in 2019 for “I Was at Home, But.” Like the director’s other films, “Music” defies easy classification. A child (played as an adult by Aliocha Schneider) is abandoned on a mountain during a storm, grows up to accidentally kill a man, and meets a maternal prison guard (Agathe Bonitzer) with whom he begins a family before learning of the cruel trick fate has played on him. Jessica Kiang calls it “a mystifying but rewarding riff” on Greek mythology that also draws from the story Sisyphus. Caitlin Quinlan (BFI) writes that “Music” is “slow and meandering, oblique and opaque,” but also “frustratingly brilliant.” The movie, which won the competition’s screenwriting award, was purchased for North American distribution by Cinema Guild.
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“The Plough”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale Philippe Garrel (“The Salt of Tears,” “In the Shadow of Women” ) directs his own children in “The Plough” follows a family of French puppeteers trying to preserve their father’s memory through their shared passion. Critics weren’t blown away by this one, with most of the seven who have reviews posted on Rotten Tomatoes complaining about its length (Jonathan Romeny calls the pacing “leaden”) and hermetic perspective (Jessica Kiang says it’s “self-indulgent”). Nevertheless, Garrel did win the competition’s directing prize.
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“Art College 1994”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Berlinale Liu Jian (“Piercing I,” “Have a Nice Day”) returns to Berlin with “Art College 1994.” The 2D-animated slacker comedy, set against the backdrop of major social and economic changes in China, places viewers inside dorm rooms buzzing with banter about early 20th-century art, classic cinema, and Kurt Cobain. Leslie Felperin compares the film to the works of Éric Rohmer and Richard Linklater. Wendy Ide writes, “It evokes a specific time and a place so vividly that you can almost taste the stale cigarette smoke and cheap beer.”
