Berlin Hidden Gem: 'Voices in the Wind' Depicts a Sense of Connection in Japan

Burhan Qurbani's Berlin Alexanderplatz, a modern-day adaptation of the 1930s-set literary classic, is the front runner for this year's German Film Awards, the Lolas, having picked up 11 nominations, including for best film. Berlin Alexanderplatz premiered at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.

The German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), one of Germany’s most prestigious film schools, has sacked its British director, Ben Gibson, following an incident during the Berlin Film Festival in which he exposed his backside to a female student during a heated argument.

An impoverished laborer returns home one day to find that social services have taken his children, after the family’s increasingly dire circumstances push his wife to commit a desperate act. With a corrupt local administrator blocking the way to a fair hearing to get them back, the man decides to cross the country on foot in order to plead his case to the government in Belgrade.

Overshadowed by a grisly, racially motivated shooting in western Germany and the growing pains of new festival leadership, this year’s Berlinale served to illuminate the market dynamics and global issues set to impact the international film and television industry in the run-up to Cannes — provided coronavirus stays away from the Croisette.

Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof, whose sixth feature “There is no Evil” won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear on Saturday, is one of his country’s most prominent directors even though none of his films have screened in Iran where they are banned. In 2011, the year he won two prizes at Cannes with his censorship-themed “Goodbye,” Rasoulof was sentenced with fellow director Jafar Panahi to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking for alleged anti-regime propaganda.

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s drama “There Is No Evil” took home the top Golden Bear prize at the 2020  Berlin Film Festival.

It’s a brave young director who has the gumption to revisit Alfred Doblin’s 1929 Weimar Republic classic Berlin Alexanderplatz. A 1931 film version directed by Piel Jutzi was notably followed by Rainer W.

Landing under the auspices of the Berlinale’s newly introduced Encounters strand aimed at fostering “aesthetically and structurally daring works,” The Trouble With Being Born, having its world premiere Thursday, could well end up being the most daring – not to mention divisive – film in a festival not known for holding back on provocation.

Films about mature romance are hard to come by, and even rarer are the ones that deal with the desires and yearnings of closeted elderly gay men in patriarchal Chinese society.

In a dark, shuttered South Korea devoid of people after a financial apocalypse, a naïve young gang knocks off an underworld gambling den and becomes the target of an implacable killer. Young writer-director Yoon Sung-hyun, whose 2011 coming-of-age drama Bleak Night won multiple Best New Director awards and heralded him as a leader of the next generation of South Korean filmmakers, fulfills that promise nine years later in the nerve-janglingTime to Hunt (Sa-nyang-eui-si-gan).

In a dark, shuttered South Korea devoid of people after a financial apocalypse, a naïve young gang knocks off an underworld gambling den and becomes the target of an implacable killer. Young writer-director Yoon Sung-hyun, whose 2011 coming-of-age drama Bleak Night won multiple Best New Director awards and heralded him as a leader of the next generation of South Korean filmmakers, fulfills that promise nine years later in the nerve-janglingTime to Hunt (Sa-nyang-eui-si-gan).

Are animals more precious than humans? For his debut feature, Eeb Allay Ooo!, Prateek Vats lets the audience decide what to make of the real-life monkey menace that has long plagued the high-security areas around government buildings including the Parliament in India’s capital, New Delhi.

Are animals more precious than humans? For his debut feature, Eeb Allay Ooo!, Prateek Vats lets the audience decide what to make of the real-life monkey menace that has long plagued the high-security areas around government buildings including the Parliament in India’s capital, New Delhi.

Johnny Depp in the role of acclaimed photojournalist W. Eugene Smith is the most fortunate thing about Minamata, the impassioned account of a real-life environmental tragedy in Japan caused by industrial negligence.

Johnny Depp in the role of acclaimed photojournalist W. Eugene Smith is the most fortunate thing about Minamata, the impassioned account of a real-life environmental tragedy in Japan caused by industrial negligence.

There is a white telephone booth with a rotary phone connected to nowhere that sits atop a hill overlooking the town of Otsuchi on Japan’s northeast coast. More than 30,000 people have used it to "speak” to deceased loved ones.

By Nancy Tartaglione

Lana Del Rey has canceled her upcoming European tour, one day before it was set to begin.

Filipino director Raya Martin was caught out, for a moment, when first pitching the project that would eventually become his latest feature, Death of Nintendo. Then he decided to simply tell it like it is."This film is Stand by Me … with circumcision," Martin remembers saying, referencing Rob Reiner’s 1986 classic."I was unsure at first how best to describe what we were trying to do," he explains.

For 25 years, from 1992’s “La Frontera” through 2017’s ”A Fantastic Woman,” a subsequent Oscar winner, the Berlinale has prized a rich trove of Chilean movies.