Berlin Panorama Audience Winner ‘Happiness’ Underscores Opportunities, Challenges for Kazakh Filmmaking

Can space define our relationships? It’s a concept that directors Ramon and Silvan Zürcher investigate in their new film “The Girl and the Spider.” Set around the confines of a cramped apartment, the dwelling becomes a central character as important as the roommates — and possibly former lovers — who inhabit it. In the film, Lisa (Liliane Amuat) is about to move out but not before dealing with the peculiar qualities of Mara (Henriette Confurius).

EXCLUSIVE: IFC Films has set a July 8 stateside release date for Claire Denis’ Berlin Film Festival winner Fire, starring Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon.

Resembling more of a personal tribute than exhaustive biography, Pietro Marcello‘s Lucio Dalla documentary, “For Lucio,” takes its title as an invitation. A rambling eulogy that is just as often confusing as it is profound, Marcello’s wisp of a film (running less than 80 minutes) may be missing key context for those not already versed in the life and music of the politically-oriented Italian singer-songwriter.

Many of Hong Sang-soo’s films are structured around a woman’s solitary wanderings. The single ladies played by Kim Min-Hee in “On the Beach at Night Alone” or “The Woman Who Ran,” or Lee Hye-Young in “In Front of Your Face,” are free radicals, moving from encounter to encounter and disrupting the equilibrium of the people they meet, as meandering conversations reveal a friend’s dissatisfaction or a couple’s disagreement.

The Panorama prizes have been handed out at the Berlin International Film Festival, with top honours going to Baqyt (Happiness) and Aşk, Mark ve Ölüm (Love, Deutschmarks and Death).

Gail Halvorsen was a United States Air Force pilot known as the “Candy Bomber” for dropping candy over Berlin from his airplane during the Berlin airlift in 1948.  Gail Halvorsen joined the Air Force as a pilot during World War II, serving as a transport pilot in the South Atlantic. After World War II, Berlin was divided into four sections occupied by the United States, France, England, and Russia.

Leaves rustle in the wind, sand swiftly lifted from the ground as it resumes its nomadic journey, taking from one place to give to another. Around it, all seems to be consumed by stillness, but, in the safety of this deceiving quietness, life bursts through settled roots to create anew.

Premiering in the Special Gala section of this year’s Berlinale, the latest film from Italian director Dario Argento is surprising in more ways than one. Rather than copy the style of the giallo films from the 1970s and 1980s that made him famous (“The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,” “Deep Red,” and “Suspiria,” to cite just a few), his “Dark Glasses” finds ingenious ways to retain the core of the giallo while adapting to our current times.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief“The Novelist’s Film,” which Wednesday earned Korean director Hong Sang-soo the Grand Jury Prize in Berlin, has scored multiple rights deals. With Seoul-based Finecut handling the rights sales, the film was licensed to Ama Films for Greece and Cyprus, Mimosa Films for Japan, L’Atalante Cinema for Spain, Arizona Films Distribution for France and to The Cinema Guild for the U.S.Finecut also did European Film Market business with “Contorted,” an unorthodox horror about a family tragedy.

The Sole family grows peaches. Round white peaches ripen first; then the flat white peaches that supermarkets like; then yellow cling peaches. Their farmhouse is surrounded by the plantation they have tended for three generations, promised to them in perpetuity by the current owner’s great-grandparents during the Civil War. Memories are long in their corner of Catalonia. Nobody remembers a time before peaches. Harvesting determines the rhythm of their rumbustious family life. When the fruit ripens, it’s all hands on deck.

Cinema Guild has acquired U.S. rights to The Novelist’s Film, the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize winner from South Korean writer-director Hong Sangsoo, which recently made its world premiere at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival. The film is the third Silver Bear winner in as many years from Hong—who won Best Director for The Woman Who Ran in 2020 and Best Screenplay for Introduction in 2021—and will be the 11th of the director’s works released by Cinema Guild in the last seven years.

It sounds like the set-up to a French New Wave film: a French au pair falls in love with an Irish pickpocket leading to a whirlwind romance that changes both their lives. It might be twee, but Joan Verra (Isabelle Huppert) lived it, and on a long, rainy, nighttime drive reflects on the intense, yet fleeting relationship of her youth.

Sat in front of a computer, musician Nick Cave reads a few questions aloud. These are deeply existential musings sent in by people he has never met.

Ben Croll To follow-up his 2016 debut “Marija,” Swiss filmmaker Michael Koch set his sight skyward, fixing his vision on a remote Alpine farming community both untouched and victim to time. The filmmaker immersed himself in that world, working with village locals, collecting stories and living off the land, and would then channel those experiences into his sophomore feature.Now premiering in competition in Berlin, “A Piece of Sky” follows a taciturn farmhand, Marco (Simon Wisler), and a single mother, Anna (Michèle Brand), who find strength in each other as they build a life in the punishing Alpine range.

The streets outside her window are dripping with hope, and yet Élisabeth (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is lost. It is Paris, 1981, a new president has been elected, and Élisabeth’s husband has left, claiming the thrillingness of motion by moving in with a new girlfriend while his ex is left with the stagnance of remaining, the apartment where they’ve raised their children, Judith (Megan Northam) and Matthias (Quito Rayon-Richter), at once comfortingly familiar and dreadfully new.

“Do you believe in God?,” Julia asks her stepfather on his sickbed. He looks down at her little face. Not much captures his interest these days. “I think so,” he mumbles. Julia continues, undeterred. “I believe in something else,” she says firmly. “The sun, mountains, animals, trees. And snow.” Marco says nothing — he never said much, even at his most hale and hearty — but his big body seems to soften in acceptance. She’s talking his language.

Of all the unsolved mysteries in Claire Denis‘ new Berlin Competition film, the biggest may just be its U.S. retitling to a generic and not particularly representative “Fire.” The film’s English title in the rest of the world, “Both Sides of the Blade” — a line from the terrific Tindersticks track that ends the film —is not just cooler and more compelling.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentAdding to its notable lineup in Latin American movies, Paris-based sales agent MPM Premium has taken international sales rights to “Fogaréu,” from writer-director Flávia Neves, part of Brazil’s new wave of female filmmakers, which is one of the most exciting developments the country’s cinema currently has going for it.MPM Premium is introducing the film at this week’s Berlin Festival, where it world premieres in Panorama on Feb. 15.First glimpsed at 2020’s Ventana Sur project market, “Fogaréu” shares a sense of attitude and a feminist agenda and a visual verve with fellow Brazilian Ventana Sur titles “The Pink Cloud,” Iuli Gerbase’s a sci-fi character-driven thriller, and “The Joy of Things,” Thais Fujinaga’s portrait of motherhood, also playing at the same market.

Naman Ramachandran Acclaimed Bangladeshi director Rubaiyat Hossain, known for her powerful women-centric films, has a new project participating in the Berlinale Co-Production Market and is launching a female filmmaker grant.Her Berlinale co-production market project, “The Difficult Bride,” follows Novera, a bride-to-be in present-day Dhaka who is in love with the groom and the idea of a fairytale wedding, but secretly struggles with her body, which does not seem to comply with the wedding rituals. She makes continuous trips to the beauty salon and uses home remedies to “cure” her body.

Demystifying and questioning the very notion of authenticity, Jason Kohn’s informative and oddly riveting, diamond-documentary “Nothing Lasts Forever” is ostensibly about the oft-antagonistic relationship between natural and synthetic diamonds. Yet, diamonds are an in-road as Kohn explores the commodification of such abstractions as love and desire, questioning how exactly a shiny rock — one that isn’t even that rare — became a physical manifestation of commitment.