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The Berlinale 2023: The Festival and the Market (EFM) We think the market is bouncing back. The streamers are no longer hogging the good films financed by international sales agents and distributors, international and national as well as regional film funds; they are now creating their own content, buying less. There are many new indie projects and new international sales agents. Now if only the theatrical venues would fill up again, all would be well. We wait word from the European Film Market itself to know more than anecdotally how the sales agents fared. But anecdotally, it went pretty well. You can read my Rights Roundup next up soon. Sales agents reported buyers were still very selective, while pre-sales on all but the most alluring commercial packages with name cast and director remain a tough proposition. Acquisitions teams looking for special films to fill slots in 2024 were prepared to wait until a completed feature was ready to watch. Ticket sales for this year's Berlinale 2023 totaled 320,000 by the time the festival closed on Sunday (February 26). This figure is close to pre-pandemic levels where the 2020 edition reached 330,000 tickets. Sales were up 105% from last year's festival which sold 156,472 tickets - though seating capacity was reduced by 50% due to Covid-19 restrictions. Berlinale also confirmed the 74th edition will take place February 15–25, 2024. It will be Co-Director of the Berlinale Marietta Rissenbeck's last year. In addition to the public, this year's festival saw 20,000 accredited professionals from 132 countries in attendance, including 2,800 media representatives, while the Berlinale Co-Production Market organized 1,500 meetings. Eliminated this year were festival delegates and programmers from EFM accreditation. The European Film Market (EFM), which finished on February 22, reported a record number of attendees at 11,500+ - up from the previous record of 11,423 in 2020, the last year of an on-site EFM. There were 230 stands at this year's market across the Martin Groppius Bau and Marriott Hotel sites, up from 203 in 2020; with 612 companies exhibiting, an increase of 8.5% from 2020's 564. The 612 companies originated from 78 countries, with the market participants hailing from 132 countries. The biggest increase of 57.9% was in the number of screenings, from 971 to 1,533, although this is partly explained by the 647 online screenings which took place this year. 599 of the screenings were market premieres. The number of films was up too, with 773 compared to 732 three years ago. The total number of buyers was up to 1,302. Costs are also up. Great govenment support from normal 35% of the budget to $2.3m, 45% of the budget for the Berlinale! Racism debate …Norwegian black face animated character causes film to be pulled from opening the section ___…The President of the European Film Academy, Matthijs Wouter Knol resigns his position at the Anti-Racism Taskforce Artef, citing a conflict of interest between his two positions…is it the job of the Anti-Racism Taskforce to tell a festival what it can/ should or should not show? Who is deciding what is racist and what is OK? How to find dis-interested judges? Let me be the judge. I have long experience with racism and racist and other exclusionary policies and being from the USA, I have no professional interests in the European Film Industry. And being so-called white and Jewish, my perspective is not only one race that I am particularly vested in. My credentials attest to my multi-racial preferences as I have dealt with every race throughout my professional and private life. Put me on a committee with an outside Asian, an outside African, an outside Middle Easterner and an outside Latinx and we will be set. Ties cannot happen and festivals are always free to program what they deem worthy of conversation and debate. Carlo Chatrian, artistic director, and Mariette Rissenbeek, executive director, of the Berlin International Film Festival, reflect…This is taken verbatim from Screen: You decided to pull the first screening of Norwegian director Rasmus A. Sivertsen's animated film Just Super in Generation KPlus after the Anti-Racism Taskforce for European Film (Artef) contacted the festival outlining concerns "about the film's depictions of Blackface and animalisation of Black people" to give yourselves time to work out how to proceed. Subsequent screenings went ahead with a disclaimer printed at the entrance of each cinema showing the film contextualising the concerns "so as to avoid potentially harming any viewers". Chatrian: It is very telling that the way one film is seen by one community or one group of people is not an absolute truth. The film was released in Norway and seen by hundreds of thousands of people. A film is always an encounter between you, us, the viewer, and the film itself. It changes all the time. When did both of you see first see the film? Chatrian: In this case I saw the film after it was selected. The film was selected by Generations. For me it was more about the animation style so I didn't see the film in its entirety before it was selected. I saw it afterwards. But that's not the point. It's not because I haven't seen it. It's about embracing all the different points of view. And that's part of the process. A film festival like Berlin is great as we gather a global community. It's important to say the first screening was pulled in agreement with the [production] company. Even if one single viewer feels offended by some images we have to take this concern seriously. We cannot say, 'they read something that is not there'. When it comes to feeling you can not judge feeling. If you feel hurt, simply you feel hurt. In the end we took the right decision. The second screening took place. The filmmaker was there and introduced the film, the audience was informed so we could go with our conscience clear. We said the film might be perceived in the way that the filmmaker didn't want to. Rissenbeek: If you don't have a certain history yourself you just might not be aware of what could be an unconscious implication of the film. It's a very thin line. Will you make any change to the processes of the programming team? As you say, Artef saw something that hadn't been seen by the Norwegian audiences, the programming team, even the press who had seen the film earlier Chatrian: For sure. The problem in this case was the timing was so short [between the concerns raised by Artef and the first public screening]. At the same time we have to accept mistakes can happen on both sides. And then we have to learn from this mistake or use this mistake as an opportunity to talk about it. We could have used it as an opportunity to explain that a film can be seen differently. Did you receive any feedback from audiences after issuing the disclaimer? Rissenbeek: We didn't get any feedback from audiences after the film. Chatrian: We prepared the teachers so we know some teachers decided to go with their class and do some special work on that. Other reflections on this year's festival, their personal highlights, handling a difficult situation and what they would like their legacies to be can be read here sin Screen International. My particular professional entry into this Berlinale was through two doorways. One was through a group I have been working with for the past three years, since meeting the innovator Millie Zhou on a tour I was conducting of the Berlin Market several years ago. Zhou is a young Chinese film entrepreneur(esse?) living in London. Her business partner Zixi (CC) Zhang is a young Chinese film business entrepreneurse (?) living in Beijing. Under the mentorship of the producer Angus Finney and the Cambridge University Business School where he is a professor, each year they bring a group of emerging Chinese filmmakers living both inside and outside of China to Berlin and to Cannes. Angus and I and others share views of the film business today. We find our own views on films are shaped further by theirs; we exchange so much about cultures and visions that I am always engaged. And this year I learned so much from the participants and from Angus Finney and Simon Crowe, the international sales agent whose specialty is animation and family films. The other doorway I entered was by way of the Canadian Media Fund and Hot Docs who sent a delegation of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and 2SLGBTQ+ (2 Spirit is the Indigenous term covering the spectrum of male-female sexual identity, LGBTQ+ has become familiar to most people by now) filmmakers to the EFM. Another tour was of the Canadian Media Fund staff, Tamara Dawitt, outgoing VP of Growth & Inclusion and Marcia Douglas incoming VP of Growth & Inclusion along with Carol Anne Pilon the ED of the Association of Francophone Producers (an org which supports French producers living outside of Quebec). Carol Anne attended EFM to explore opportunities for her membership. When the first five days with the two groups were finished, though I was exhausted and though the weather was cold, cold, cold, gray, rainy, and windy, I was still up for running between East and West Berlin screenings. I caught the Opening Night film, Rebecca Miller's She Came to Me, produced by Christine Vachon among others and in all, I saw 22 films. A good number. Of them, my favorites were Sira, Art College 1994 , Kokomo City, Der Vergessener Mensch, Roter Himmel, Adentro mio, and most surprisingly, Allensworth. Here they are with my little encapsulated takes on them. She Came To Me directed by Rebecca Miller. A sweet, positive story of love and creativity. Anne Hathaway is a brilliant comedienne! And Marisa Tomei is no slack either. Peter Dinklidge plays it straight and everything ends happily. Produced by Killer Films and international sales by Protagonist, two of the best names in the business, Benelux rights are with Belga, France's are with Originals Factory, Japan's are with Shochiku. Peter Dinklidge plays it straight2. Sira directed by Apolline Traoré. Panorama Audience Award for best feature, Sira tells the story of a young nomad named Sira who refuses to surrender to her fate without a fight and instead takes a stand against Islamist terror. This is a great film to pick up and is still available for U.S.! Contact international sales agent Wide. This is a story of a real female warrior set today in Sahel, the region that stretches across the north of sub-Saharan Africa. Boku Haram kidnaps and rapes a 17 year old on a caravan going with her nomadic Fulani family to her wedding with the son of a farming family. We see Boku Haram's other young women kidnapped from schools to use as sex slaves, breeders and servants hopelessly trapped, but she survives and in the end, carries the day. Music by Cyril Morin is, as all his music, unique and perfectly fitted to the film. This coproduction of Burkina Faso, France, Germany and Senegal runs a bit long at 122 minutes but its heart is pure as it traces the fight to survive by this Fulani woman. At the Berlinale party, Jacqueline Lyanga, the Berlinale's new U.S. delegate programmer introduced me to the producers Verena Kurz and Sara Boekemeyer of Sira who live in Berlin. They work with the Twkvers' company in Kenya. In 2008, Tom Tykwer and Marie Steinmann-Tykwer founded the production company Some Fine Day Pix, to give young African filmmakers the opportunity to create their own films. This film will surely get Kenya's push for Academy Award nomination. The problem will then be finding strong enough publicity on their shoestring budget to get it seen widely enough to be shortlisted, which it clearly deserves. Perhaps the below-the-radar Academy campaign of Andrea Riseborough for her role in To Leslie can offer some lessons and perhaps a U.S. distributor will pick up the film and make a decent campaign for it. The film went on to Burkino Faso where it played in FESPACO, Africa's top film festival and its oldest, founded in 1969. Since the bi-annual festival was last held in 2021 the West African nation has had to deal with the political fallout from two coups within eight months and spiraling violence driven by groups linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State. In BerlinApolline Traoré spoke so eloquently to the audience afterward that they did not want to let her go but were forced to leave the theater so the next film could play. She began this film eight years ago. Five countries are still being terrorized by Boku Haram: Nigeria, Chad, Niger, northern Cameroon, and Mali. Only Mauritania has rid itself of them. She hopes that this tale of resistance brings hope to the people of the region. She spoke of the Fulani people, who the star represents. They are divided by color and don't mix with each other, nor do Muslims usually marry Christians so this story is complicated in ways Westerners may not wholly understand. The topic, very near and dear to Apolline, may also not find a home with Burkino audiences. And there is something else close to her heart: portraying women as strong characters. Watch the Berlinale Meets interview with Apolline Traoré, director of Sira. "I simply have to give them a voice. Most of the time, they are portrayed as victims: People show women in refugee camps who have lost their fathers or husbands. But it's these same women who protect their children. Who have used dangerous escape routes to save them." Women, in fact, who have demonstrated how to survive. According to Traore, it is precisely these women who play a major role in the fight against the jihadists in Africa. Watch the discussion of women filmmakers in Africa here. Director and writer Apolline Traoré was born in 1976 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Her father's profession, a diplomat, led to her travelling the world. At the age of 17, her family moved to the United States and she began her studies at Emerson College in Boston, a well known institution in the field of art and communication. This is her fourth feature film. Its international sales agent (ISA) is Wide Management. TV5Monde has worldwide TV rights. Why isn't Wide pushing this film? 3. Art College 1994 directed by JIAN Liu. Remember how much we cared about art, revolution and the world and had no idea about what life was like in college? So these students live lives of art until the real world enters their existence and they go their ways into real life. This captures the purpose and aimlessness of our college days. The animation itself is not only beautiful but the story makes you forget these are animated characters, so real they become as people. ISA: Memento 4. Kokomo City directed by D. Smith. One of the smallest subsets of a subset of society: sex workers who are black trans women with dicks and the men who love them. These are the ultimate of the street hos but the women on camera are elegant and eloquent. Able to have made small nests that seem safe, though life for such beings is always precarious, these women are further marginalized by the wives of the men who frequent their beds. They are rightfully proud of their achievements, having made a decent life from less than nothing and, while still remaining underground, their pride in themselves as queens of their domains elevates us as we witness their beauty. This is a documentary about life as very, very few of us will ever know or could have even imagined. It made a great impression in Sundance and when it showed at the Berlinale, it won the Panorama Audience Award. The director D. Smith, trans herself, makes her debut with this film but is a veteran of the music industry and a Grammy-nominated producer, singer, and songwriter. In encounters and interviews, D. Smith portrays four Black trans sex workers in New York and Georgia. The protagonists discuss their lives with relish and without any sugar-coating. The conversations that emerge are deep and passionate reflections on socio-political and social realities as well as perceptive analyses of belonging and identity within the Black community and beyond. The protagonists also tell us about their lovers, friends and families, and how these relationships are marked by taboos and fetishisation, and also by their own desires. This vibrant portrait gives them space for their uninhibited and defiant narratives. Interestingly, as each reaches a level of self-sustenance and comfort, they reflect and begin to imagine their next level of development which will take them beyond earning their livings so precariously as sex workers in a very dangerous milieu. These are the lucky ones, chosen, no doubt by D. Smith because they had reached levels of success and even love, something so many of us miss. International sales agent and U.S. distributor: Magnolia Films. Spain: Filmin. Scandinavia: NonStop. U.K.: Dogwoof 5. Der vermessene Mensch/ Measures of Men directed by Lars Krause (The People vs. Fritz Bauer) A Berlinale Special Screening. You could say this is a conventional period drama, but the place, in Namibia as a German colony is entirely unusual and extremely engrossing as it is witnessed through the eyes of a young idealistic ethnologist who doubts social Darwinism in favor of love. It tells a tale of genocide and is enacted by two very talented actors Leonard Scheicher (The Silent Revolution, TV series Das Boot)and Girley Charlene Jazama. Alexander Hoffmann is determined to continue the legacy of his father, a pioneering ethnologist. At university, he gets caught up in the maelstrom of the evolutionist race theory of the late 19th century. Hoffmann is disgusted by the measuring of skulls, which has no other purpose than to pseudo-scientifically legitimize the superiority of the white race - but he goes along with it. He wants to find counter-evidence and seeks contact with Kezia Kambazemi, the interpreter of a delegation of Nama and Herero in Berlin who have been forced to take part in a "peoples show". Shortly after the delegation leaves, an uprising against the German colonial power begins in what was then "German Southwest Africa". As an ethnologist, Hoffmann becomes a member of an expedition and travels all over the country under the protection of the imperial army in search of skulls - and of Kezia. Leonard Scheicher and Girley Jazama in Der vermessene MenschLars Kraume's topical film provides answers to some of today's most pressing questions for turn-of-the-century German history, such as why the first concentration camps were built in what is now Namibia and how so many Nama and Herero skulls ended up in German museums. ISA Picture Tree. Studio Canal has German rights. 6. Afire/ Roter Himmel directed by Christopher Petzold. My favorite German director brings us his favorite actress, Paula Beer, once again. The magical element of Transit or of Ondine is missing here as four young adults find their loves and their destinies on the Baltic coast of Germany as fires are raging. There is a humor…and sadness…and it is the Winner of the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. The story follows novelist Leon (Thomas Schubert), who has escaped the city with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), intending to put the finishing touches on his second book. Instead, the two become romantically enmeshed with Nadja (Paula Beer), a literary scholar who spends the summer selling ice cream, and the local lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs). Unlike the others, Leon cannot embrace the season's lighthearted self-abandonment. The raging fires lighting up the sky bring the entire entourage to a level of reality to be revealed to the viewer but not here. Enno Trebs, Langston Uibel, Paula Beer, and Thomas Schubert in Afire (2023)After acquiring Lila Avilés' Tótem at the Berlinale, Sideshow and Janus Films acquired up their second title, Christian Petzold's Afire, which will receive its theatrical release this summer. Great distributors! We'll watch for it! ISA: The Match Factory has sold the film to Australia/ N.Z. to Madman; Austria to Stadtkino; Baltics to A One; Benelux, Surinam, Dutch Antilles to September; Brazil to Imovision; Canada to Films We Like; Czech, Hungary and Slovakia to Vertigo; Denmark to Camera; Germany to Piffl; Greece to One from the Heart; Italy to Wanted; Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay to ifa; Norway to Arthaus; Poland to Aurora; Romania to Independenta; Serbia to Five Stars; So. Korea to M&M; Spain to Filmin; Switzerland to Filmcoopi; Taiwan to Light Year Images; Turkey to Bir; USA to Sideshow and Janus. Read more of rights bought and sold in EFM here. 7. The Klezmer Project/ Adentro mio estoy bailando directed by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann. Premiering in the Encounters Competition, this is a suprising fun contemporary rom com, a film within a film and a concurrent folk tale about a young Argentinian man trying to win the love of an accomplished young musician who is also the daughter of a rabbi. He fakes making a music about the roots of klezmer and wins funding to make it from Austrian Broadcasting. As he travels to Ukraine and Moldovia, he and the crew find no remaining traces of Klezmer roots but we discover a lot about other local music roots while he gets to see his beloved. The film won the German Collection Society GWFF's Best First Feature Award with a cash prize of €50,000. ISA: Films Boutique. Austria is sold to Filmgarten. Another find for a U.S Distrib! Fabulous as in Fable! The Klezmer Project/ Adentro mio estoy bailando by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann8. Allensworth directed by James Benning. Apparently James Benning is well known because this Forum screening was sold out. And the Q&A was extensive. How the audience could sit still for one hour without moving (nor did the pictures move!) for tableaus of 12 buildings through 12 months of the year with two songs, "Blackbird" sung by Nina Simone, "In the Pines" sung by Huddie Ledbetter, and a Lucille Clifton poem read out by a someone with a special dress directly to camera was a shock to me. And by the end I was transfixed. What a great discovery and he is so close to my home! Allensworth by James Benning"ALLENSWORTH is about a lost town in California's Great Central Valley, built by and for Black Americans in the early 20th century. It was shot over a full year and positions the town in a veiled political and social context, hoping to bring attention to its historical importance."– James Benning Benning wants the story of Allensworth to be known; it is near where he lives in California's Tulare County, an unattractive part of Central Valley. Founded in 1908, Allensworth was the first independent Black governed municipality in California created in reaction to and migration from the restrictive Jim Crow laws of the South. As we pass through the year and around the settlement - a lonely tree before a winter sky, wood frame houses and a plain brick hotel from the early 20th century, passing trains heard-before-seen, elements of this specific heritage begin to accumulate as echoes in a place that is now a state park museum, a space for reflection as only cinema can make it, a place to think about what was, like the graveyard shown in the final shot. Allensworth faced racism and was closed down after 25 years, though as today's news of storms and flooding in California have made us aware, it does still exist and is still being victimized once again by the more powerful. See article on "Ugly deeds, politics and high drama swirl amid the waters of a re-emerging Tulare Lake": "Someone illegally cut the banks of Deer Creek in the middle of the night causing water to rush toward the tiny town of Allensworth." The Tulare County sheriff issued evacuation orders for the towns of Alpaugh and Allensworth. SJV Water, an independent, nonprofit news site serving the San Joaquin Valley, reported that a levee was intentionally cut, sending floodwaters into the low-income rural area, as agricultural interests in the basin attempt to avoid what seems like inevitable flooding this spring. James Benning was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 1942 and has been acutely aware of racism all his life. He studied film and has been making films since 1972 and has created numerous art installations. Since 1977, he has been a frequent guest at Berlinale Forum and Forum Expanded. He teaches at the California Institute of the Arts where, through his works, he continues to greatly influence younger generations of artists. One particularly important aspect of his oeuvre is his engagement with the American landscape and with racism engrained in the U.S. Using durational, fixed-frame shots, Benning's films often study nature and humankind's encroachment on the world. 9. I Heard it Through the Grapevine directed by Dick Fontaine. The title belies the story. Created by filmmaker Dick Fontaine who is well-known for his passion for music, this particular song has little to do with the story of James Baldwin on his return in 1957 from Paris to spend his last 20 years in the USA, although it does have an interesting history. "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" is a song written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for Motown Records in 1966. Whitfield had started to write the song in Chicago, where the idea had come to him while walking down Michigan Avenue where people were always saying "I heard it through the grapevine". The phrase is associated with black slaves during the Civil War, who had their form of telegraph: the human grapevine. James and David BaldwinFontaine met James through his brother David Baldwin who had a New York jazz club. While this has the usual doc interviews and archival footage, the special use of music as the connective tissue makes this special. The soul's underpinning of Black society is related to the jazz musicians of that day, all of whom knew the Baldwin brothers in one way or another and were known by them. The documentary's urgency today as the loud emergence of white supremacy takes more and more of the stage and its viewpoint of 1980 when it was shot bares the roots of our society. Anything featuring James Baldwin should be seen by all who care about an equal and just society. It will be released theatrically in the U.S. in September 2023. 10. Irgendwann werden wir uns alles erzählen/ Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything directed by Emily Atef. A farm on the East German-West German border that recently stopped being a border, in the summer of 1990. A young woman stays at the home of her boyfriend and discovers a neighbor, an older man, with whom she has a torrid romance. Having loved Emily Atef's Cannes competition film More Than Ever (2022) (See my blog), and having been impressed by 3 Days in Quiberon (2018), I was eager to see this. However, I found it reminiscent of French films made by middle aged male directors and could not find the feminist angle to the romance of the young woman and the older man. The ending, putting a coda of her looking back at this tragic romance as a mature writer, did not improve it for me. While I did not not enjoy it (I did), I was disappointed by it. 11. Ingebord Bachmann - Journey into the Desert directed by Margaret von Trotta, another of my favorite directors, also disappointed me. Depicting the relationship between well-known writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch, it meandered and I never saw Ingeborg, whose poetry I do not know, writing anything, only complaining about not being able to write. So sorry that the now 80 year old Margarete von Trotta, director of 27 films, did not make a more remarkable or memorable film this time, especially so since Vicky Krieps was playing Bachmann. After her star roles in Emily Atef's More than Ever and Corsage, both of which played in Cannes last year, this was especially disappointing. But maybe it is how Margarete herself felt during her years married to Volker Schlondorf. 12. Golda directed by Guy Nattiv. Another star turn for Helen Mirrin and another disappointment for me, the story of Golda Meir, as told and directed by Guy Nattiv, gave little background into the Yom Kippur War during her tenure but gave a lot of attention to Golda as she made decisions about the soldiers fighting which pained her as if she were their mother. I learned that she herself had no children and no husband and that she was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation while directing the war. But for all that dramatic action, the movie was rather dull. I was also surprised to hear her real voice and that she had a completely American accent. There could have been more humor because she did have a well developed sense of humor, though these were the darkest days of Israel (up to that time). We face darker days now and there is no Golda Meir to mitigate matters. Helen Mirren as Golda MeirI also spent alot of time during the move trying to see Helen Mirren behind the prosthetics that made her look like Golda Meir. 13. A Golden live/ Or de vie directed by Boubacar Sangare. A slice of life look at young men (and some women) who, completely on their own, mine for gold in Burkino Faso. The documentarty centers on 16-year-old Rasmané, who barely seems like a teenager any more as he looks for a better future as he and other minors work in the 100 meter abyss of small scale mining to exhaustion, armed only with pickaxes to get the desired gold. 14. Joan Baez: I am a Noise directed by Karen O'Connor, Miri Navasky, and Maeve O'Boyle. Baez allowed her trusted friend, filmmaker Karen O'Connor to delve into her archives which she could never approach herself. They are very well organized by diaries, audio tapes of her music and of her therapy sessions, art, home movies, papers. Intertwined is her 2018 Fare Thee Well final concert tour which was initially to be the focus of this film. But the archives allow her to talk of her father and some sexual childhood recollections and of her panic attacks, of the tragedy of her sister's death and of her love affairs (Dylan "broke my heart"), drugs and political activism. All this is impressive as her private life was rarely revealed during her 60 year career. Here she is shown as human; during her career she appeared more as a Saint Joan, or perhaps the Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. It was a relief to learn she has a human side and is compassionate with herself as with others. This Berlinale was the first film festival she ever attended. 15. On the Adamant directed by Nicolas Philibert is a crowd pleaser and enables the audience to come to understand and love the people who visit this day care center for the mentally ill which sits in a boat on the Seine in Paris. It won the Golden Bear this year. Frankly I was surprised that Kirsten Stewart and her jury awarded this feel-good movie top prize and completely ignored Past Lives, the most acclaimed and loved movie of the festival judging from all I have heard. 16. Why Try to Change Me Now directed by Dalei Zhang shows China from its early days of socialism in a factory quarter of town and grows with its characters into the more mechanized/ digitized factories of today. We know the child will become a sociopath if not a psychopath, though we only see the first three episodes of this engrossing TV series where a grisly murder upsets the working class apartment building inhabitants and will become more and more of a problem. This is a series I want to see! 17. Absence directed by Lang Wu is a beautiful meditation on society and its changes in China seen through the eyes of an ex-convict returning to society and the woman he loved then and still loves. As the returned ex-convict Han Jiangyu focuses his attention on the dead fish and the lobsters slowly dying on the grill, he asks his childhood friend Kei if the animals have a soul. Kei's restaurant business is booming. The island of Hainan, to which Jiangyu has returned after ten years in prison, has changed dramatically. It has become a flagship site of intensive housing construction - and therefore also a paradise for rip-offs and fraud. Jiangyu's old love now has a daughter, possibly his. Together with his central character - a marvellous performance from Lee Kang-Sheng, who even manages to crack a smile - debut director Wu Lang searches for traces of the old and familiar in the new. The camera captures his wanderings through various places with very little grandstanding but abundant sensitivity for people in spaces, relationships in limbo and societies in flux. Almost every shot is unexpected and seems unspectacular at first, yet the delicate way with which they unfold always contains, alongside visual precision, the urge to tell a story (without words), one such story being that every reunion is also a farewell. 18. Passages directed by Ira Sachs who lovingly and nonjudgmentally tells a story of an egocentric director and the lovers whose love he squanders. Very gay, very Ira Sachs. As Peter Debruge puts it, "captures the shrewd, soul-piercing quality we've come to expect from Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, who've now collaborated on five films together, resulting in the richest stretch of the director's career." Thought provoking and an enjoyable foray into the private lives of people we do not know. 19. Manodrome directed by John Trengove made me so nervous I wanted to leave, but I forced myself to stay because I thought the cruelty and non-consciousness it was portraying had something to tell me. And it did. Difficult as it was to watch, it was also mesmerizing. Adrien Brody playing a (crazy?) father figure cult leader to the lost and confused Ralphie, an Uber driver and amateur body builder played by Jesse Eisenberg made me squirm in my seat when he is inducted into a libertarian masculinity cult. Ralphie is a very, very angry young man who on Christmas was to become a father and whose own father abandoned him on Christmas. This is a violent and sad movie. The results of fathers leaving their children are the devastating consequences the children experience when they leave and which we see here. While male bonding and female hating are not my forte, the experience watching this movie reminded me of my feelings as I watched Taxi Driver. The feeling was anger that I was being manipulated against my will to watch something that made my stomach churn and I was unable to stop watching in spite of my disgust. South African director John Trengove's debut feature The Wound opened in Sundance and Berlin and was named "the most important LGBT film you will see in 2018" by i-D magazine. The controversial film, briefly banned in his home country went on to collect 28 international awards, including Best First Feature at the BFI London Film Festival and Best International Feature at Outfest and was shortlisted for the International Feature Oscar. John trained as an actor and studied film at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. His television miniseries Hopeville was awarded the Rose d'Or and received an International Emmy nomination. He has received 2 best director SAFTA's and an honorary award from the South African Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on the drama series Swartwater. John lives between Johannesburg and São Paulo with his husband and filmmaker Marco Dutra. Manodrome is his second feature. International sales agent Capstone is selling it. 20. Silver Haze directed by Sacha Polak is a sort of a traditional British working class drama like I have not seen in several years. It is about Franky, 23 who, fifteen years after she got burnt when the pub where she slept as a child caught fire, she seeks revenge because she still hasn't found any answers. It is not Ken Loach nor is it Mike Leigh, but its working class milieu reminds me of them. The director and writer Sacha Polak was born on July 29, 1982 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is known for Dirty God (2019), Hemel (2012) and Silver Haze (2023). ISA New Europe Film Sales has licensed the film to Cineart for Benelux and The Jokers for France 21. Jacob the Liar directed by Frank Beyer was remade in 1999 starring Robin Williams. This original 1974 version takes place during World War II in a Jewish ghetto in Central Europe and tells about an ordinary inhabitant who fakes news about Allied offensives to inspire hope for other victims of the Nazi regime. Jacob the Liar was the winner of Silver Bear at the Berlinale 1975 and nominated for Oscar in 1977. Director Frank Beyer worked as a director for the East German film studio DEFA since 1958 and received numerous decorations for his work until his film Trace of Stones in 1966 was immediately banned in the GDR. As a consequence he worked only for a period of about 10 years. In 1991 he received the Bundes Film Prize for his complete works in the reunified Germany. 22. Blackberry directed by Matt Johnson is a straightforward story about a smart man who cannot change his ways, thus bringing the Blackberry cel phone into prominence and thereby losing its pre-eminence. ISA XYZ sold Blackberry to Paramount Global Content for all international rights except for US which is owned by IFC, Canada by Elevation, MENA by Falcon, Scandinavia by NonStop and Skeye for Airlines.