India had three feature films — PS Vinothraj’s Kottukkaali, Raam Reddy’s The Fable, and Siddartha Jatla’s In The Belly Of The Tiger — all three being male filmmakers from the South. We also had four short films that played — Gavati Wad’s O Seeker, Utkarsh’s Remote Occlusions, Subarna Dash’s The Girl Who Lived in the Loo, and Nishi Dugar’s Anaar Daana. There was also, strangely, Allu Arjun who was presenting the teaser of Pushpa 2 at the sidelines of the festival.

Chatter Around Representation

French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop became the first Black director ever to bag the Golden Bear, the festival’s top prize, for her documentary Dahomey, on France’s return of 26 ancient artefacts to their original owners, the Kingdom of Dahomey in Benin; she accepted the award from Lupita Nyong’o, the first Black person ever to preside over the festival’s competition jury. After last year’s Sur L'Adamant by Nicolas Philibert bagging the Golden Bear, another documentary, this form’s cache seems to be at par, if not exceeding that of fictional feature films. Truth seems to move the jury more than fiction. Or at least the palatable packaging of this truth.

Dahomey, a slim film, is by no means revelatory or poignant. An electronically processed voiceover is given to the statues to ventriloquise; they speak of longing in hoary passages. We see students at the local university discussing this return with the hasty, haughty arrogance — confidence, really — that only the youth possess.

I suppose the very act of stating colonialism is considered powerful in such spaces; the very act of young people discussing it, shows that if no one else, cinema will hear you.

It is not unusual for festivals and awards to platform righteousness that is made with sincerity, whose optics — “first ever…” — spins the festival and awards some sorely lacking cultural credit; it is the festival emerging into the current moment, finally catching up.

The Identity Conundrum

Especially since some of the other “exciting” films, Viktor Kossakovsky’s Architecton and Matthias Glasner’s Sterben (Dying) were directed by white men, the former can be reduced to “white man makes a movie about rocks” and the latter, “white man deals with existentialism.” I am using these reductions because this is how these films were spoken of here, often. It is easy to negate the cinema in favour of its politics, its context, as opposed to reading it alongside it. How to hold Kossakovsky’s Architecton, largely silent, a sublime piece on concrete, framing beauty as terror, terror as beauty, from Ukraine to Yemen to Turkey to France, pulping you into insignificance, alongside the demographic advantages he embodies. Why should one overwrite the other? I would, in fact, consider the three-hour-long Sterben’s poignant, provocative investigation of death and the death-drive of a white middle-class family, with a scene at the Berliner Philharmonie that would put Tár’s meltdown to shame, one of the standouts of this festival.

But sometimes, it is just the cinematic pedigree. Would any filmmaker — lets say, female filmmaker — be allowed to make what Tsai Ming Liang made, Abiding Nowhere, where a monk walks slowly for 79 minutes?

The Awards Ceremony

Alongside Dahomey, two other documentaries were awarded top prizes — Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell’s Direct Action, on eco-activists being derided as eco-terrorists, and No Other Land, directed by a four-person Palestinian-Israeli collective, looking at Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. German director Matthias Glasner bagged the Best Screenplay prize for Sterben (Dying) while Austrian cinematographer Martin Gschlacht took the Outstanding Artistic Contribution award for his work in The Devil’s Bath.

Sebastian Stan, whose fame has been buttressed by the MCU, took the Best Leading Performance for his aching patheticness in director Aaron Schimberg’s provocative, Sundance-premiered black-comedy A Different Man — the first male performer to win at Berlin since the festival decided to degender its acting awards three years ago. Playing a man with neurofibromatosis, his face distorted, he chances upon a miraculous cure, but soon, in a marvellous moral-switcheroo realises that his problem might not have been skin-deep. Two-time Oscar nominee Emily Watson won the supporting award for her performance in the festival opener, Small Things Like These, an unnerving performance of mother superior in Eighties Ireland who is concealing the Magdalene laundry abuses.

Berlin Film Festival | FC Festival Diaries

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