Berlin Review: U2 Doc ‘Kiss The Future,’ From Matt Damon & Ben Affleck, Shows How Bono And Band Inspired Sarajevo Under Siege

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer One of Austin’s hometown filmmakers is bringing his next movie to SXSW. Director Robert Rodriguez will screen a work-in-progress cut of his crime thriller “Hypnotic,” starring Ben Affleck, for fans at the SXSW Film Festival in the Texas capital on March 12. In the film, written by Rodriguez and Max Borenstein (“Godzilla vs. Kong,” HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty”), Affleck plays a detective who is investigating a series of inexplicable crimes while searching for his missing daughter, whose disappearance is somehow involved with a secret government program.

With the delicacy of a bee probing a flower for pollen, Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren picks her way through the tensions and dilemmas within a family where the youngest member, an 8-year-old boy called Aitor, is feeling his way toward a new identity as a girl. Sofia Otero, who deservedly won the Silver Bear for a lead performer at the Berlinale’s award night Saturday, shows an instinctive, unforced and generous understanding of how difficult her character’s life must be. As Coco – the between-stools nickname the family has devised to avoid anything too specifically gendered – Otero is alternately obstinate, tearful, mischievous and withdrawn. She craves her mother’s comprehension but pushes her away when she tries to talk to her about why she doesn’t want to go to school.  

Folk music icon Joan Baez, who’s now 82, came of age just as musicians’ live gigs were often recorded and thereby preserved for the record, virtues that are used to advantage in Joan Baez I Am A Noise. An up-close, intimate and mostly frank account of a career that arched across more than 60 years of musical and political expression while countless trends came and went, this elaborate documentary navigates adroitly through the professional and the personal aspects of a very full life, one marked by far more good fortune than bad. Whether you’ve followed her career for decades or are just now discovering her, the life under scrutiny is undeniably impressive and ceaselessly engaging.

Christoph Hochhäusler’s slow-burn urban noir Till the End of the Night starts with time-lapse footage of the film’s first set, a well-to-do and apparently lived-in apartment flat, being built from scratch out of an empty room. Sadly, what looks to be challenging piece of Brechtian deconstruction is literally a plot point, as well as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the layers of deceit in the story that follows.

Odd people turn up in deserts. People are also inclined to disappear. A strange moonscape of opal prospectors’ digs and slurry heaps helps to set a bleak mood in Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen’s Limbo, shot in gently faded black and white in the South Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, repurposed here as Limbo. Limbo, says the preacher whose radio show seems to be the only thing available on the local airwaves, is the edge of hell. Here, unpurged sinners may be “in friendship with God.” Damnation, however, isn’t far away.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Watching “Kiss the Future,” a documentary about the band U2’s relationship with wartorn Sarajevo in the 1990s, it’s hard not to think: “We’ve seen this movie before.” That’s not to do with the doc itself so much as how aspects of the 30-year-old footage from Bosnia’s brutal civil war parallel what we’ve seen in the news coverage coming out of Ukraine for the past year. Both involve stranger-than-fiction (or stranger-than-fascism) scenarios of cosmopolitan cities suddenly subject to state terrorism, which makes the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck-produced film coincidentally timely, for all its belatedness. In a sense, “Kiss the Future” is the story of a long-distance romance, between a superstar rock quartet reaching its peak and a once-grand metropolis that’s bottoming out. In the early ’90s, genocidally minded Serbian president Slobodan Milošević tried to subject the happily mixed population of Sarajevo to ethnic cleansing by any means necessary. The area’s young people fought back in whatever spirit-lifting way they could — including founding underground discos, forming punk bands and otherwise keeping the arts alive as they dodged shelling and snipers. An American activist, Bill Carter, had the idea to enlist the stadium-filling U2 in publicizing their plight, which led to nightly satellite appearances by Sarajevo locals on the giant screens of the “Zoo TV” tour’s European leg.

The first promo spot for Woody Harrelson’s fifth stint as an SNL host this weekend takes a turn away from the show’s usual staged bits between host, musical guest and a cast member.

Donna Summer could hit notes more thrillingly beautiful than any other pop singer of her time, or since. I’m not sure even Whitney Houston, as great as she was, quite reached the glistening heights that culminate “Last Dance” (though she comes very close in “I Will Always Love You”). Mariah Carey (no relation to me) performs impressive vocal acrobatics, yet to my ear she can’t match the bell-like shimmer of Donna in the higher registers. And Donna in the lower registers – well, the voice thrums with visceral resonance.

What do a Belarusian emigrant and an African freedom fighter have in common? It’s a question that Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut, which had its world premiere in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, answers in a beguilingly magic-realist and digressive way that sort of adds up, even though it requires a lot of good faith from the viewer to make it do so. To illustrate its strangeness, Disco Boy could be loosely described as a mash-up of Beau Travail and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, two very different movies. While both are firmly anchored in arthouse history, neither resembles the other, and it’s that contrast—the rich potential opened up by the space in between—that’s in play here.

Willem Dafoe gets a dream role with Inside, a combo of art film in more ways than one, psychological thriller, heist movie, and survival tale all rolled into one in which Dafoe’s Nemo is center stage, alone, the entire time.

The Irish director and musician John Carney once made a movie under the working title “Can a Song Save Your Life?,” though the name was changed before it was released. And another batch of Dublin musicians of note ask a similar question in the documentary “Kiss the Future,” which premiered on Sunday at the Berlin International Film Festival and finds U2 using music to aid the occupants of a city under siege, Sarajevo.Directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain, produced by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Sarah Anthony and written by Bill S.

War is coming in Guy Nattiv’s Golda, onscreen and off. But despite the media’s best efforts to turn the casting of British, non-Jewish actor Helen Mirren as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir into an explosive example of cultural appropriation, both Nattiv’s direction and Mirren’s performance are low-key and careful enough to rise above the controversy. In retrospect, it does seem a little strange that no other candidate was deemed suitable, and the movie won’t do much extra business on account of Mirren’s star power, but those anticipating a tone-deaf disaster will be sorely disappointed.

Femme, a queer thriller written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choo Ping, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and stars George Mackay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. The film explores the price of vengeance, the toll it can take on the psyche, and how that pressure can lead to some questionable decisions that may leave the viewer looking for explanations for these character’s actions.

“They treat you like a movie star,” says an admirer to Ingeborg Bachmann at one of her celebrated readings. She smiles graciously and agrees, thus establishing the baseline for her story.

Most big Korean action movies are backloaded, wrapping up with three to five endings, but Byun Sung-hyun’s Kill Boksoon, which premiered as a Berlinale Special, has everything going on up front. So much so that it initially seems too much, to the extent that it sometimes feels as though there’s actually a mini-series in there bursting to get out. Surprisingly, that’s not such a crazy idea, since, once you get past the far-fetched premise—an underground network of professional contract killers, presided over the glossy conglomerate MK Ent—there’s a lot of rich character work to supplement the superbly choregraphed violence that we’ve come to expect from the region.

Matt Damon revealed he is in the early stages of research in a documentary project tackling the war in Ukraine at the Berlin Film Festival on Sunday.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Matt Damon revealed he was in the “early stages” on a project about Ukraine during the press conference for “Kiss the Future” at the Berlin Film Festival. Damon is a producer on the documentary which chronicles the struggle of Sarajevo citizens during the Bosnian War. World premiering in the Berlinale Special section, the politically minded documentary is directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain and based on “Fools Rush in: A Memoir” the memoir of Bill Carter, an aid worker. It shows how his determination resulted in the enlistment of the world’s largest rock band, U2, to help shine a light. Fifth Season and WME handling worldwide sales. Asked if he was considering following the footsteps of Sean Penn with “Superpower” with a film on the war in Ukraine, he said he’s “watched as everyone has with horror that unfolded there in the last year,” and although they “don’t have anything on it right now there isn’t any doubt that we’ll be doing.”

There’s a rich history of movies being entirely at odds with their cryptic titles—step forward Quantum of Solace—but for his follow-up to The Wound, South African director John Trengrove has picked a doozy, a title that sounds more like a dystopian Adam Sandler comedy than the dour story of urban disintegration that it actually is. Images of star Jesse Eisenberg sporting a mop of red hair for the film have been also something of a misdirect, perhaps giving some the impression that Manodrome, which premiered in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, could be some kind of satirical emo Fight Club for sad-sacks. Fight Club comparisons actually do turn out to be (lightly) relevant, as are callbacks to Taxi Driver, but Manodrome is so achingly laborious and serious that it won’t be encroaching on either for virtual shelf space in the Toxic Masculinity section of anyone’s streaming library.

With this year’s selection, the Berlinale seems to be creating space in the festival calendar, between Sundance and SXSW, for a particular type of American indie: the melancholy, slight, intensely personal and hence rather divisive kind, in which vaguely famous actors—usually the comedic kind—play downbeat iterations of their more familiar selves. It may not be a coincidence that Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg debuted here rather than home turf in 2010, but Dustin Guy Defa’s The Adults, which premiered in the festival’s Encounters strand, makes Baumbach’s problem child seem positively commercial by comparison. Fortunately for all involved, Universal have already picked it up; this is definitely not the type of movie to thrive in today’s marketplace.

Brent Simon There’s no shortage of movies that gauzily peddle the notion of art as a balm. Few, however, are as invested in the charged immediacy of art’s relationship to real-life pain as “Kiss the Future,” a documentary enjoying its world premiere Feb. 19 in the Berlinale Special slot, with Fifth Season and WME handling worldwide sales. Directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain, and based on American-born aid worker Bill Carter’s “Fools Rush in: A Memoir” (the pair share a screen story credit), the film is a savvy mélange of history and cultural portraiture that affectingly chronicles the struggle of Sarajevo’s besieged civilians during the Bosnian War of the 1990s.