Ten Titles To Look For At Berlinale 67

With over 400 films screening over a period of ten days, the Berlinale is far and away Europe's largest film festival, (second only to Toronto worldwide). In light of this, it's not difficult to feel overwhelmed by the choice of films spread out over the festival's dozen sections, and, indeed, all over the city. Like Berlin itself, the Berlinale is sprawling, unwieldy and very nearly unmanageable. Here's a mini-guide to this year's installment, with ten titles we've got our eyes on:

"Beuys" / Germany / Andres Veiel / COMPETITION (pictured above)

German director Andres Veiel, last seen at the Berlinale in 2011 with the painfully noble "Wer Wenn Nicht Wir" ("Who If Not Us") returns to competition with a documentary about artist-provocateur Joseph Beuys, a visionary artist who, thirty years after his death, still feels like a man ahead of his time. Frequently controversial, the first German artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York was also derided at home as the ‘most expensive trash of all time’. Once asked if he was indifferent to such comments he retorted: ‘Yes. I want to expand people’s perceptions.’

Last year's Golden Bear went to a documentary, Gianfranco Rosi's urgent "Fuocoammare." In his film, Andres Veiel lets the artist speak for himself. Using previously unpublished audio and video footage Veiel creates an associative, porous portrait which, like the artist himself, opens up spaces for ideas rather than proclaiming statements. Beuys boxes, chats, lectures, explains art to a dead hare and asks: ‘Do you want to instigate a revolution without laughter?’

But we also experience the man, the teacher and the Green Party candidate. Once, shortly before his death, he consents to being photographed without his hat. Veiel’s film makes visible the contradictions and tensions which gave rise to Beuys’ Gesamtkunstwerk. Beuys’ expanded concept of art feeds directly into today’s social, political and moral debates.

"Menashe" / USA / Joshua Z. Weinstein / FORUM

Deep in the heart of New York's ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish community, Menashe, a kind, hapless grocery store clerk, struggles to make ends meet and responsibly parent his young son, Rieven (Ruben Niborski) following his wife Leah's death. Tradition prohibits Menashe from raising his son alone, so Rieven's strict uncle adopts him, leaving Menashe heartbroken. Meanwhile, though Menashe seems to bungle every challenge in his path, his rabbi grants him one special week with Rieven before Leah's memorial. It's his chance to prove himself a suitable man of faith and fatherhood, and restore respect among his doubters.

Performed entirely in Yiddish, the colloquial language of the Hasidic community, "Menashe" uses intimate, handheld camerawork to drop us inside and humanize a hermetically sealed world of black-hatted, working-class men debating in crowded shuls or seeking counsel in the rabbi's library. And yet Menashe is in many ways an outsider in this tight-knit circle, as he bucks convention and ruffles feathers to stay true to himself.

Avanti Popolo / Israel / Rafael Bukaee / BERLINALE CLASSICS

Israel is a country with a particularly robust contemporary film culture relative to its size and age. But it doesn't have a long history of auteur cinema. One of the earliest is "Avanti Popolo," a thirty-year-old tragicomedy about the absurdity of war from director Rafael Bukaee, which will screen in the Berlinale Classics series of recently restored films. Israeli's entry for the 1986 Oscars, "Avanti Popolo" follows two Egyptian soldiers wandering through the Sinai desert in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Bukaee played with the stereotypical images of Israelis and Arabs, and turned clichés on their heads. Largely in Arabic, the film was the first time in the history of Israeli film that Arab protagonists were portrayed by Arab actors. No less controversial was the scene in which one of the Egyptians appeals for sympathy from the Israelis by reciting Shylock’s famed lines from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”: “I am a Jew [...] If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

"Call Me By Your Name" / Italy - France / Luca Guadagnino / PANORAMA

Italian director Luca Guadagnino is one of today's most stylish or vacuous directors, depending on your point of view. His latest, an adaptation of André Aciman's autobiographical "Call My By Your Name," arrives in Berlin straight from its Sundance premiere. It’s the hot, sun-drenched summer of 1983 and Elio is at his parents’ country seat in northern Italy. The 17-year-old idles away the time listening to music, reading books and swimming until one day his father’s new American assistant arrives at their large villa. Oliver is charming and, like Elio, Jewish; he is also young, self-confident and good-looking. At first Elio is somewhat cold and distant towards the young man but before long the two begin going out together on excursions. Elio begins to make tentative overtures towards Oliver that become increasingly intimate – even if, as Oliver says, ‘one can’t talk about such things’. As the short summer progresses, the pair’s mutual attraction grows more intense. Guadagnino transposes the memories of the book’s first-person narrator Elio into quietly atmospheric images. Besides the two main characters of this unexpected coming-out story (played by Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer) the film also boasts a third leading role in the shape of the seductive landscape.

"Black Gravel" / Helmut Käutner / Germany / BERLINALE CLASSICS

Helmut Käutner's 1961 B movie "Black Gravel" ("Schwarzer Kies") is a pessimistic view of post-war West Germany that openly criticizes the US occupying forces. Set on a US air base the is a major hub for black marking dealings and previously available only in tidied-up versions that omitted the film's references to anti-Semitism and softened the original bleak ending, this hard boiled drama will screen here in the original theatrical version for the first time in 56 years.

"The Other Side of Hope" / Aki Kaurismäki / Finland / COMPETITION

Finland's master of deadpan despair Aki Kaurismäki is back in Berlin for the first time in with a film about Syrian refugee and a depressed-salesman-turned-restaurateur whose paths cross in Helsinski. When the authorities turn down his application, the refugee decides to remain in the country illegally, like so many other people who share his fate. Going underground in the Finnish capital, he lives on the streets and encounters all kinds of racism, but also some cool rock ’n’ rollers and genuine friendship. The refugee and restauranteur join forces to create one of Kaurismäki’s typical communities where a down-to-earth version of utopia seems possible based on friendship and human goodness.

"1945" / Ferenc Török / Hungary / PANORAMA

Hungarian cinema seems to have gotten a new lease on life since "Son of Saul" became the country's first Oscar win in over three decades. At this year's Berlinale, Ildikó Enyedi's "On Body and Soul" will compete for the festival awards. Representing Hungary in Panorama is Ferenc Török with the WWII-drama "1945." The set-up sounds like something out of Bela Tarr. Rural Hungary in August 1945. A kind of torpor envelops a village preparing for a wedding. Two strange men descend from the train, clad in black. They walk in silence behind a waggon on which they are transporting two boxes. Rumours spread like wildfire through the village. Are they relatives of the former shop owner, a Jew who was first denounced and then deported? Fear soon spreads throughout the community, for many of them were involved in the crimes of the recent past – whether it be betrayal, silence or theft. In "1945," a Hungarian village becomes a mirror for the failure of an entire society.

"ORG" / Fernando Birri / Italy / FORUM

A rare screening of Fernando Birri's complete, uncut "ORG", slotted in this year's Forum - traditionally the most daring section of the Berlinale - promises to be a festival highlight for serious minded cineastes.

Birri's experimental 1979 opus, nearly three hours in length, is ostensibly based on Thomas Mann's story "The Transposed Heads," although any resemblance to Mann's original is hard to discern in this behemoth montage of 26,000 edits and nearly 700 audio tracks, which stars the Italian cult actor Terence Hill, a loyal friend to Birri - now 91 - during the Argentine director's exile in Italy.

"Fluidø," / Shu Lea Cheang / Germany / PANORAMA

Taiwanese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang "Fluidø," described as a"parapornographic work of underground science fiction," seems posed to bring home the Berlinale's non-existent statue for "Strangest in Show." Cheang’s dystopian film revolves around a struggle to gain control over bodily fluids in a world where AIDS has been eradicated and HIV has mutated into a gene that can be synthesized into a highly profitable drug. The Berlinale site description likened the film to an "orgiastic opera": "A breathless round of bodies, secretions, performances and sexual acts often performed in the service of an overriding economy. An unusual, largely experimental and deliberately parapornographic drama in which the borders between the sexes as well as homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans- or intersexual are constantly blurred." We really have no idea what to expect. But let us say that our interest is piqued.

"Eight Hours Don't Make a Day" / Rainer Werner Fassbinder / BERLINALE SPECIAL

After "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (2007) and "World On A Wire" (2010), the Berlinale will screen another rarely-seen TV miniseries by Germany's most prolific modern auteurs, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Like the director's science fiction serial (to screen in the festival's sci-fi retrospective, along with Fassbinder's "Kamikaze '89"), the Berlinale's latest restoration presentation is of a virtually-unknown work, "Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day" ("Acht Stunden sind kein Tag"), a social melodrama from 1972 that is a prime example of the Worker Film genre developed by German broadcaster WDR in the late 1960s. The short-lived genre allowed filmmakers to address social realities and economic constraints in West Germany.

Personal quarrels and domestic disputes were cornerstones of the Worker Film. Fassbinder transposes a family of toolmaker's disputes onto society, showing the interconnectedness of their private lives and issues like collective bargaining, union meetings, strikes and the struggle for workers’ participation. Fassbinder uses his typical melodramatic tone - part Douglas Sirk, part Robert Wise - as he deconstructs the optimistic atmosphere that pervaded early post-war films and focuses on women struggling not only for solidarity, but also for personal happiness.

#berlinale67 #berlinale #beuys #menashe #forum #competition #panorama