Berlinale 2017
I've just come back from 67th edition of Berlinale (my second time since 2014). I had a great week of watching new and old films at the film festival.
There's always a feeling of missing out no matter what you see becauase of the number of films screening at Berlinale, so you just have to go with the flow and see what you can each day.
The misses are usually more than the hits at Berlinale and out of the 19 new films I watched, I only loved/really liked six of them:
- Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino)
- A Fantastic Woman / Una mujer fantástica (Sebastián Lelio)
- I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck)
- In the Intense Now / No Intenso Agora (João Moreira Salles)
- On the Beach at Night Alone / Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja (Hong Sangsoo)
- The Other Side of Hope / Toivon tuolla puolen (Aki Kaurismäki)
As for the Homage and Retrospective sections, I loved most of it and it was more or less what actually made me go to the festival. The Homage section was dedicated to year is dedicated to costume designer Milena Canner, and it included a screening of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, a film I have been holding off to see because I wanted my first viewing to be on the big screen. Glad I waited all this time, because the film is exquisite and deserves to be only watched on the big screen. It truly is a masterpiece.
The Retrospective section was dedicated science fiction films and was titled "Future Imperfect: Science - Fiction - Film". It included a fantastic list of films, many were screened on 35mm and I was glad to discover lots of old films I had not seen before. One screening even included live piano, it was for A Trip to Mars (Holger-Madsen, 1918). One of the highlights from this section was watching my first Rainer Werner Fassbinder, World on a Wire / Welt am Draht from 1973. Quite apt to see my fist Fassbinder film in Berlin.
Below is the complete list of films I watched and my rating for each one. I will share my thoughts of some of the films in the next post.
Films I watched, listed according to the sections they were in:
Competition:
Django (Etienne Comar) ★★
A Fantastic Woman / Una mujer fantástica (Sebastián Lelio) ★★★★
On Body and Soul / Testről és lélekről (Ildikó Enyedi) ★★★
On the Beach at Night Alone / Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja (Hong Sangsoo) ★★★★
The Other Side of Hope / Toivon tuolla puolen (Aki Kaurismäki) ★★★★
Panorama:
Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino) ★★★★★
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck) ★★★★★
In the Intense Now / No Intenso Agora (João Moreira Salles) ★★★★★
The Taste of Betel Nut / Bing Lang Xue (Hu Jia) ★★
Untitled (Michael Glawogger, Monika Willi) ★★★
Vazante (Daniela Thomas) ★★★
Forum:
Aimless Bullet / Obaltan (Yu Hyun-mok, 1961) ★★★
Casting (Nicolas Wackerbarth) ★★★★
Dayveon (Amman Abbasi) ★★★
El Mar La Mar (Joshua Bonnetta, J.P. Sniadecki)
House in the Fields / Tigmi n Igren (Tala Hadid) ★★
Mama Colonel / Maman Colonelle (Dieudo Hamadi) ★★★
Not Everyday is Spring (Haig Aivazian) ★★★★
Oh The Days / Alyam, Alyam (Ahmed El Maanouni, 1978) ★★
The Sea Stares at Us from Afar / El mar nos mira de lejos (Manuel Muñoz Rivas) ★★★
The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue / Yozora ha itsu demo saikou mitsudo no aoiro da (Yuya Ishii) ★★
Homage:
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) ★★★★★
The Cotton Club (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984, 35mm) ★★★★
Retrospective:
1984 (Michael Anderson), 1956, 35mm) ★★★★
Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998, 35mm) ★★★
Ikarie XB 1 (Jindřich Polák, 1963) ★★★
Letters from a Dead Man / Pisma mjortwowo tscheloweka (Konstantin Lopuschanski, 1986, 35mm) ★★★★★
Oil Gobblers / Ropáci (Jan Svěrák, 1988, 35mm) ★★
On the Silver Globe / Na srebrnym globie (Andrzej Żuławski, 1978/1989) ★★★
Seconds (John Frakenheimer, 1966, 35mm) ★★★★
Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995, 35mm) ★★★★★
THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971, 35mm) ★★★★★
A Trip to Mars / Himmelskibet (Holger-Madsen, 1918, 35mm) ★★★
World on a Wire / Welt am Draht (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973) ★★★★★
If you are interested, these are the posts I shared on Twitter whilst I was in Berlin:
www.berlinale.de