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Best known for the unexpectedly soul-shattering San Francisco suicide doc “The Bridge,” indie filmmaker Eric Steel came out and came of age in 1980s New York at a moment just before AIDS devastated the city’s gay community. Such timing must have been surreal, to assume something so liberating about one’s own identity, only to watch in fear and uncertainty as this fraternity of newfound freedom collapsed around him.

Time tugs strangely on the sleeve of “Sweet Thing,” a heartfelt, hopeful yet slightly hollow black-and-white coming-of-ager from American indie stalwart Alexandre Rockwell (“In the Soup,” “Pete Smalls Is Dead”). A lively, bittersweet meditation on an impoverished childhood that is still rich in innocence and imagination, it feels old-fashioned in a way that does not quite gel with its bid for contemporary grit.

A riveting and radical act of empathy, with actress Deragh Campbell’s unforgettably embodied portrayal of mental instability as the eye of its storm, Canadian director Kazik Radwanski’s astonishing third feature (after “How Heavy This Hammer” and “Tower”) is a brief, bracing burst of microbudget indie filmmaking at its most powerful.

Refreshing as a river dip on a hot day, but also mildly melancholic, as though perhaps it is the last swim of the summer, Guillaume Brac’s wise, witty “À l’abordage” is an optimistic portrait of gentle disappointment, the kind a youthful generation has to experience before growing up a little bit.

“You have to understand, we’re not here to be happy,” a so-called spiritual adviser counsels one of his wards in a Catholic seminary — a rare moment of truth in the shadowy morass of governmental and theological manipulation that consumes Ivan Ostrochovský’s impressively icy Iron Curtain noir “Servants.” Though happiness has never seemed the objective of priesthood so much as a kind of affectless peace, both are in short supply in a film that jitters and shivers with anti-authoritarian sentiment

An utterly bizarre, frequently grotesque, occasionally obscene singularity, Polish artist Mariusz Wilczynski’s abrasive animation “Kill It and Leave This Town” exists so far outside the realm of the expected, the acceptable and the neatly comprehensible that it acts as a striking reminder of just how narrow that realm can be.

A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s “Speer Goes to Hollywood” expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants.

A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s “Speer Goes to Hollywood” expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants.

An utterly bizarre, frequently grotesque, occasionally obscene singularity, Polish artist Mariusz Wilczynski’s abrasive animation “Kill It and Leave This Town” exists so far outside the realm of the expected, the acceptable and the neatly comprehensible that it acts as a striking reminder of just how narrow that realm can be.

In “Last and First Men,” Tilda Swinton is the literal voice of the future: a disembodied narrator from the hyper-evolved “eighteenth species” of humanity, calmly but desolately reaching out to us from a world some way past 2,000,000,000 A.D. Given that we always suspected as much about Tilda Swinton, it’s a comforting choice: the one expected, knowably strange detail in an otherwise amorphous, disorienting sci-fi meditation.

A man grieving the loss of his loved ones retreats into the safety of memory, a place where time stands still and the departed walk among him. Over the years an imaginary city grows, populated by literary idols, comic book heroes, family members and friends. But even that mysterious place is eventually threatened by the passage of time, and the protagonist must make the difficult decision to return to the real world.

With his perverse (and some might say perverted) look at the early life of Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister W. L.

Deep in the heart of the mountainous kingdom of Lesotho, the arrival of new settlers has upset the balance of power. These economic migrants from China have called old laws and gods into question, and in the uncertainty over what new way of life will emerge, only one rule holds true: eat or be eaten.

Two older working-class men, both secretly gay, meet by chance and a hidden relationship develops in “Suk Suk,” the poignant third feature from writer-director Ray Yeung. Inspired by a sociology professor’s oral history of older gay men in Hong Kong, the drama incorporates documentary-like elements about end-of-life issues for gay elders.

It would be a great mistake, sight unseen, to pigeonhole Ulrike Ottinger’s “Paris Calligrammes” as just another nostalgia-filled personal documentary about how amazing life was in Paris in the 1960s. Where others self-servingly wax lyrical about being in the nexus of the Left Bank’s Golden Age of hipness and activism, Ottinger takes us through this formative time of her life in a way that deftly balances past and present to paint a picture of a threshold era of both positives and negatives.

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.

Jan Naszewski’s Warsaw-based sales outlet New Europe Film Sales has acquired world rights for the upcoming drama “Leave No Traces,” from acclaimed Polish director Jan P. Matuszyński (“The Last Family”), produced by Aurum Film, the production house behind Jan Komasa’s Oscar-nominated “Corpus Christi.”

Atanas Georgiev, producer of North Macedonia’s dual Academy Award nominee “Honeyland,” is prepping two new projects.

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.

It’s a strange feeling to be among the earliest audiences — and who can tell just how many more such a disturbing, hard-sell film will reach — for a project destined for notoriety.

Two only glancingly connected stories of street-level life in Lagos form the ostensible backbone of “This Is My Desire,” the engaging, earnest, loose-limbed debut feature from Nigerian twin-brother directors Arie and Chuko Esiri. But the shape of those lives is vaguely similar.

Some were bemused earlier this month when Joaquin Phoenix used his entirely expected Oscar win as a less predictable occasion for an impassioned animal-rights plea: It was certainly the first time bovine artificial insemination had been discussed amid the glitter and glistening tears of Hollywood’s biggest night.

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

“Father” begins with a mother. Dragging her two sullen, uncomprehending kids along with her, Biljana (Nada Šargin) strides onto the grounds of the factory from which her husband was let go more than a year before and harangues the foreman about the severance package they still have not received.

Early in “Irradiated,” a powerful but troublesome documentary howl of despair from Cambodian director Rithy Panh, the narration describes an act that must be familiar to anyone similarly transfixed by history.

In Iran, executions are often carried out by conscripted soldiers, which puts an enormous burden on the shoulders of ordinary citizens. And what are we to make of the condemned, for whom guilt can sometimes be a capricious thing, dictated by a severe and oppressive Islamic regime — the same one that accused Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof of “endangering national security” and “spreading propaganda” against the government?

At several points in “Charlatan,” the camera looks glossily on as our protagonist holds small bottles of amber liquid to the light, academically scrutinizing their contents as they beam a light golden glow onto his features: an effect both ennobling and almost romantic. The man is Jan Mikolášek, a famous Czech herbalist and healer with almost uncanny powers of intuitive diagnosis; the radiant bottles, meanwhile, contain various samples of human urine.

Time moves slowly, as ever, for Malaysian director Tsai Ming-liang’s, as seconds become minutes, minutes become hours, and hours become “Days,” a gentle return to form in which Tsai’s longtime star, Lee Kang-sheng, is shown suffering from some unknown physical ailment, finding short-lived solace in the hands of a stranger (28-year-old Laotian immigrant Anong Houngheuangsy) in Bangkok.

Cate Blanchett has said that on the back of Harvey Weinstein’s conviction, the industry must move forward and ensure a new culture is established, particularly when it comes to parity.

At a surprise party for his daughter, a randy Italian homeowner studies a neighbor’s wife through the sliding glass door and describes all the ways he’d like to violate her. In the bathroom, his 14-year-old son sits with his best friend, studying the hardcore porn sites listed in the browsing history of dad’s cell phone.

Three distant mountains; three chatty encounters between long-acquainted women; three comically tiresome intrusions from self-important men shot only from behind. Prolific South Korean arthouse staple Hong Sangsoo has dealt in playful, internally rhyming triplicate before, but never with such a gently sardonic female focus, and seldom as straightforwardly as in his airy, charming Berlin competition trinket “The Woman Who Ran.” (Spoiler alert: No women run.)

Young Italian director Chiara Bellosi is at the Berlinale with “Ordinary Justice” which examines the lives of two families on opposite sides of a murder case who intersect on the benches outside the room where the case is being tried. This first work, screening in Generation14Plus, is produced by Carlo Cresto-Dina who discovered Alice Rohrwacher (“The Wonders,” “Happy as Lazzaro”) and is known for nurturing the cream of Italy’s new cinematic crop.

Netflix and other streaming giants might be setting the pace for a global TV landscape upended by video-on-demand technology, but European players are shaking up domestic markets by ramping up investment in original production, forging unlikely partnerships, and looking to beat Netflix at its own game by finding innovative ways to personalize the VOD viewing experience—even while bringing Netflix original content to their own platforms.

Beta Cinema has sold the German box-office hit “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit” by Oscar-winner Caroline Link to the U.S. Greenwich Entertainment picked up the rights to the feature, which has attracted almost one million admissions since its Christmas release in Germany alone.

For the past decade, Ethiopia has boasted the world’s fastest-growing economy, and its new reform-minded government seems determined to harness that growth to transform an already vibrant creative sector.