Tagged Berlinale 2021

Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love, and they set up a date before knowing the other’s name. Viewers know them as Giorgi (Giorgi Ambroladze) and Lisa (Oliko Barbakadze). Lisa walks home alone, and...

Sometimes, a story is less about whether someone is guilty or innocent than it is about the pressures and perceptions surrounding and following an ambiguous action. The local police chief, Laurent (Jérémie...

In Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas’ portrait of an artist as a young man, migration, love, art, and family variously take centre stage. Young Parisian Labidi declares that he wants to write his first novel for...

Night Raiders begins with a prophecy, narrated in Cree over the images of sweeping North American forests. It tells of a swarm of giant mosquitoes and a saviour coming from the North to guide their people to...

Jonas Bak’s feature grows from the intimate domestic sphere to the overwhelming grandeur of world stages without ever losing sight of its central figure. In Germany’s Black Forest region, Anke is fresh...

At 66 minutes, Hong Sangsoo’s latest film is a masterclass in trimming fat from narrative bones. Introduction immediately pulls viewers into its lovable characters’ world, where their family- and...

Faruk is stuck. The teenager’s family lives among Sarajevo’s poorest, and he strikes out with older family members’ semi-legal dealings in an attempt to inject some excitement, if not escape, into his...

Denis Côté has embraced the challenge of pandemic cinema with a socially distanced look at the sound, fury, and nothingness of words. Social Hygiene plays out in five scenes, all centred around the writer...

In times of a global pandemic, the film industry necessarily has to adapt. Productions face greater hurdles than before, and while these surely seem insurmountable to some, they inspire others to find...

As its title suggests, Avi Mograbi’s documentary presents like a textbook: with the director as narrator and guide, speaking directly into camera like a lecturer, the film interpolates talking heads from...

Memory requires active cultivation to exist: what we remember depends on the narratives we tell ourselves and others. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Memory Box is a beautifully textured ode to the...

Rhayne Vermette’s feature is deeply embedded in family and place. The director plays Renée, a woman returning to her rural family home in the Métis Nation, and the community welcomes her back with lively...

In 1990, a land dispute between the Mohawk people and the Canadian government caused an armed stand-off between the two parties. Writer-director Tracey Deer witnessed the so-called Oka Crisis and weaves her...