In Contention

Tag: The Future

  • BERLIN: ‘Sleeping Sickness,’ ‘The Future,’ ‘The Guard’

    Sorry there was no Berlinale dispatch yesterday. It was my birthday, and after “celebrating” it with a triple-bill of variously despairing Competition entries — finishing with “The Turin Horse,” Béla Tarr’s impressive 146-minute ode to blizzards, boiled potatoes and dying — more traditional festivities were in order, beginning with several stiff drinks. There’s nothing like a film festival to infuse a birthday with bleaker-than-usual ruminations on mortality.

    After a dawdling start, however, the Competition really kicked into gear yesterday with a pair of substantial auteur works that will likely remain the prime topic of critical conversation for the duration of the festival: the aforementioned Tarr opus and Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s “Nader and Simin, A Separation,” now the runaway favorite for the Golden Bear for reasons both artistic and political.

    I’ll discuss both these films in due course, but neither one has quite displaced an earlier (and more critically divisive) Competition title from the top of my personal best-of-the-fest list — and indeed, if anything does in the next three days, I’ll be a very happy (and surprised) man. That title would be German director Ulrich Köhler’s third feature “Sleeping Sickness” (****), an arrestingly structured and humidly atmospheric study of immigrant living and integration in west Africa that would make a valuable companion piece to Claire Denis’s more pristine “White Material,” but also warrants discussion on its own merits.

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  • Off to the Berlinale

    In a couple of hours, I’m jumping on a crack-of-dawn flight to one of the coolest cities on earth for a week at the Berlin International Film Festival — or, to use the name that rolls more luxuriously off the tongue, the Berlinale.

    I probably should have mentioned this earlier and posted some sort of festival preview. The truth, however, is that I’ve been so preoccupied with other business that I’ve barely read through the festival programme myself — the date rather snuck up on me. I’ve never done so little homework ahead of a festival — yet after my first Berlinale experience last year, that doesn’t feel like a bad approach.

    Berlin prides itself as being a festival of discovery, with more of an emphasis on rising talent than the lofty auteur names that tend to favor the sunnier festival climes of Cannes and Venice. True to form, my favorite finds of last year’s festival were ones I knew little about in advance (like Arvin Chen’s “Au Revoir, Taipei,” which wound up in my 2010 Top 10) or ones I wasn’t aware would show up until the last minute (like “The Illusionist,” buried so deep in last year’s programme many critics missed it altogether).

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  • First Berlinale selections revealed, ‘True Grit’ to open fest

    Of all the festivals I attended this year, Berlin was perhaps the one with the most covert significance. At the time, it seemed critics were foraging for scraps amid a dismal competition lineup and a confusingly scattered selection of sidebars — and yet so many of the films I caught there (and some that I didn’t) are still with me at the year’s end.

    Prizewinners like “The Ghost Writer” and “How I Ended This Summer” continue to grow in stature in Europe, Sundance follow-ons like “Winter’s Bone,” “The Kids Are All Right” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop” are in the thick of the Oscar conversation, and you probably all know by now how I feel about the 2010 Berlinale’s most buried world premiere, “The Illusionist.”

    In other words, there’s little way of telling what treasure might be gleaned from the festival lineup until you’re actually there. That said, although that tantalizing, briefly-floated possibility of the Berlinale snagging “Tree of Life” didn’t pan out, this morning’s freshly unveiled list of the fest’s first eight official selections offers smaller notes of intrigue.

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