Canadian director Chloé Leriche discusses bringing the Atikamekw language and community to the big screen for the first time at this year’s Berlinale.
Film Festivals
Anne Zohra Berrached on 24 Weeks at Berlinale
Director Anne Zohra Berrached discusses 24 Weeks — her Berlinale Competition film about a couple who must decide whether to have a late abortion when they discover their child will have Down Syndrome — about the challenges of the subject matter and why she wanted non-professional actors for some of the parts.
Being 17 is more Sciamma’s than Techiné’s film
Berlinale correspondent Elena Lazic reviews Being 17. Although it was written by Céline Sciamma and directed by André Techiné, it’s got Sciamma’s fingerprints all over it.
The Lovers and the Despot lacks substance
The Lovers and the Despot tells what should be an interesting story without doing the work to create one. It recounts a bizarre slice of South Korean cinema history: in 1978, director Shin Sang-ok and his ex-wife, actress Choi Eun-hee, were kidnapped, separately, by Kim Jung-II from Hong Kong and held for eight years. Kim Jung-Il wanted swift improvements in the North Korean film industry, and this was his solution.
Notes on Blindness explores the soundscape
Documentarians Peter Middleton and James Spinney use segments of John M. Hull’s actual audio tape recordings to reconstruct his experience of going blind in this experimental non-fiction film.
Things to Come is a less damning portrait of misfortune than Eden
Berlinale correspondent Elena Lazic examines how Mia Hansen-Løve’s last two films, Eden and L’Avenir (Things to Come), reverse-engineer seemingly cliched stories in order to find the emotional truth and realism buried within them.