Berlinale Round-Up 2020
First Cow, Kelly Reichardt (2020)
Perhaps the last physical film festival to be held in quite some time, the 2020 Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin unveiled an impressive panorama of world and international premieres. Newly under the stewardship of Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek—and with the specter of a global pandemic only just emerging—notable titles from the 70th Berlinale included documentary and hybrid works, films examining queer histories, an impressive slate of female-directed cinema, and features from young filmmakers in the Global South.
David France's heartbreaking and humanizing Welcome to Chechnya documents the struggle for LGBT rights in the southwestern Russian republic, interviewing Chechnyan refugees and frontline activists about their experiences in a hidden war. Benoît Delépine & Gustave Kervern's absurdist Delete History surveys the travails of quotidian existence amid the attention economy and late stage capitalism—Marco Dutra & Caetano Gotardo's Todos os mortos embraces a similarly self-reflexive tone in its examination of Brazilian society, which appears to be as stratified along lines of slavery, colonialism, and class as it was at the turn of the century.
Tracing the flows of identity, siblinghood, and cultural fragility across borders, Brazilian filmmaker Matias Mariani's lyrical debut Cidade Pássaro (Shine Your Eyes) follows a young Nigerian's search for his missing brother in the metropolis of São Paulo, while Uisenma Borchu's second film Black Milk chronicles a woman's return to her nomadic home in the Mongolian steppes, where she and her sister challenge expectations drawn by a latent patriarchy. Kelly Reichardt's First Cow, a portrait of human-bovine friendship in an American frontier town, and Eliza Hittman's eminently simple and quietly devastating Never Rarely Sometimes Always—in which two teenage cousins embark on an odyssey from rural Pennsylvania to New York City, where they can exercise their reproductive rights more freely—confirm both as among the finest American directors working today.
Below are Filmatique's Top Films of the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival:
Arctic Link, Ian Purnell
The American Sector, Courtney Stephens & Pacho Velez
Black Milk, Uisenma Borchu
The Calming, Fang Song
Cidade Pássaro (Shine Your Eyes), Matias Mariani
Delete History, Benoît Delépine & Gustave Kervern
Exile, Visar Morina
First Cow, Kelly Reichardt
Irridated, Rithy Panh
Malmkrog, Cristi Puiu
Minyan, Eric Steel
Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Eliza Hittman
No Hard Feelings, Faraz Shariat
Otak (Father), Srdan Golubovic
Saudi Runaway, Susanne Regina Meures
Servants, Ivan Ostrochovský
Seishin 0 (Zero), Kazuhiro Sôda
Shirley, Josephine Decker
Sthalpuran (Chronicle of Space), Akshay Indikar
Swimming Out Til the Sea Turns Blue, Jia Zhangke
Suk Suk, Ray Yeung
There Is No Evil, Mohammad Rasoulof
Todos os mortos (All the Dead Ones), Marco Dutra & Caetano Gotardo
Undine, Christian Petzold
Welcome to Chechnya, David France
The Ameican Sector, Courtney Stephens & Pacho Velez (2020)