The Berlinale is not yet completely over – it ends on Sunday February 20 – that the prize-giving ceremony, anticipated, has definitively closed the bets for this 72and publishing, artistically stimulating. After six days of screenings, the jury, chaired by M. Night Shyamalan, awarded the Golden Bear to Alcarras, by young Catalan filmmaker Carla Simon.
In this very inspired agricultural chronicle, a family of farmers harvests peaches on a land of which they are only sharecroppers, soon nibbled away by the installation of solar panels. With its flexible and fickle camera, the film brings to life many characters, from children to adults, who have very different ways of experiencing the territory. His realism describing peasant difficulties is filled with rural lyricism and the splendid lights of the Catalan summer.
A regular at the Berlinale, South Korean Hong Sang-soo wins a third Silver Bear, stamped Grand Jury Prize, for The Novelist’s Film, the last of his inexhaustible variations on the intermittences of the heart. A novelist out of inspiration, gone on a trip to the distant suburbs of Seoul, settles accounts with old friends, and meets a young actress who makes him want to shoot a film with her. With the starkness that we know him for, Hong Sang-soo delivers here all his poetic art: a cinema that is less concerned with telling stories than with forging links, organizing meetings, lovingly observing its actors. With three times nothing, the film reaches the splendor of certain sketches.
German double
Among a large contingent of French films, Claire Denis won the Silver Bear for best director for With love and determination, the second of his films co-written with Christine Angot, after A beautiful inner sun (2017). It describes the destabilization of the couple formed by Jean (Vincent Lindon), convict, and Sara (Juliette Binoche), radio host, following the reunion of the latter with her former companion, François (Grégoire Colin), for which she still shudders. In her, the heart and the body oppose each other, and this tearing leads her into the spiral, not of lies, but of complete contradiction.
For the rest of the list, Rabiye Kurnaz gegen George W. Bush, by Andreas Dresen, a showcase film for German production, achieved a double by winning the screenplay prize and that of the best interpretation for the German-Turkish actress Meltem Kaptan in the role of Mother Courage. In addition, a young scene from German-speaking Switzerland is beginning to attract attention and favors. first with Drii Winter, by Michael Koch, distinguished by a special mention, who offered his unusual curiosity to the competition: a pastoral and tragic love in the Swiss Alps, played by local non-professionals and cut with a cord in the escarpment of the decor. But also with the astonishing Unruehby Cyril Schäublin, also interpreted by amateurs, which examines the beginnings of industrial watchmaking in Switzerland in 1877. This remarkable fable on capitalism as a division of labor received the Prize for Best Director in the Encounters section.
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