Previewing Berlinale 2022

In 2020, his first year as artistic director, Carlo Chatrian and his team introduced Encounters, “a platform aiming to foster aesthetically and structurally daring works.” Last week, Chatrian and head programmer Mark Peranson took questions regarding several of the films lined up for the competitive program, including See You Friday, Robinson, in which Mitra Farahani oversees a dialogue between Jean-Luc Godard and Iranian director Ebrahim Golestan; Coma, wherein Bertrand Bonello wrestles with his anxiety regarding his eighteen-year-old daughter’s future; and Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet. Peranson suggests that Strickland has become “one of the strangest comedic filmmakers working today, always using some elements of genre in an unexpected way.”

At the blog he maintains on the Berlinale’s site, Chatrian has written entries on the comedic talents of each of the three actresses showcased in this year’s retrospective, No Angels. “While Mae West evokes the image of the boxing ring, with Rosalind Russell the ideal metaphor is tennis,” he writes. As Maria Tura in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), “a summation of an entire career,” Carole Lombard “acts, deceives, and seduces, falls in love, and keeps two relationships going at the same time, while the outside world is spinning out of control.”

Isabelle Huppert will receive an honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, and not only is she starring in Laurent Larivière’s About Joan, premiering as a Berlinale Special Gala, the Homage program will present seven more performances, including her international breakthrough in Claude Goretta’s The Lacemaker (1977); her first collaboration with Godard, Every Man for Himself (1980); Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), for which Huppert won the best actress award in Cannes; and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2017), for which she scored, believe it or not, her only Oscar nomination so far.

As for those last two, Huppert tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough that “I never thought before doing them that I was going to deliver a statement about what it means to be a woman or whatever, to have the characters be some kind of metaphor for the feminine condition, but at the end of the day, that’s what happened. I think what really defines those characters is the fact that they are never victims. That’s kind of my trademark.” Watching Huppert, Chatrian observes that “the mouth and the eyes often work in opposite directions. Their bond is dialectic: one calls to attention, the other keeps a distance. One is the gateway to a barely suppressed emotion, the other a vehicle for merciless irony. Sometimes, the roles are switched: the eyes become cold and emotionless, while the mouth produces a wide, inviting smile.”

With Come With Me to the Cinema: The Gregors, director Alice Agneskirchner will tell the story of a pair of curators, Erika and Ulrich Gregor, who have been as influential in Germany—and for that matter, throughout Europe—as Amos Vogel was in the U.S. Part of that story is the founding of the Forum in 1971 following the shutdown of the festival the year before when the jury split—it was George Stevens versus Dušan Makavejev, essentially—over o.k., Michael Verhoeven’s indictment of American engagement in Vietnam.

More than half a century later, the Forum thrives with a program that section head Cristina Nord describes as “daring, experimental, playful, funny, weird, and exciting, and also intellectually demanding.” The conversation with Nord appears in Supplément, an area on the new site for the Arsenal, the cinema that the Gregors opened in 1970. Supplément offers essays and conversations exploring some of the ideas and issues raised in the films and exhibitions of the Forum and Forum Expanded.

Michael Stütz, who heads up the popular Panorama section, says that many of the films in the program this year “unequivocally refer to extremely brutal social conditions. At the same time, a conciliatory tone unites many of the works. They show a potential for healing, even if the path to get there is painful.” Among the films Stütz discusses are two music documentaries, Cem Kaya’s Love, Deutschmarks and Death and Lutz Pehnert’s Bettina; Kazakh director Askar Uzabayev’s Happiness; Nelly & Nadine, Magnus Gertten’s documentary about two women who met in the Ravensbrück concentration camp; and Grand Jeté, “the most radical German work in the entire festival program.” Stütz is “impressed by the formal eloquence and narrative consistency with which Isabelle Stever made this film about anti-normative family relationships. And the fact that she never for a moment apologizes.”

The Berlinale also presents interviews with Maryanne Redpath, who oversees Generation, the section programmed for younger viewers; Linda Söffker, who for one last time is running the Perspektive Deutsches Kino, the showcase of new German talent; and Julia Fidel, head of the Berlinale Series, which presents episodic narratives from around the world.

During the weeks leading up to tonight’s opening ceremony, some have questioned Chatrian and festival executive director Mariette Rissenbeek’s insistence on making this year’s Berlinale a strictly in-person event during the second winter of the pandemic. Even as Omicron surged, the festival directors stood firm. There would be no streaming alternative for those who feel they can’t risk mingling with the crowds. Rotterdam went online, then Sundance, but the Berlinale would not be going hybrid, never mind virtual.

“Call off the Berlinale!” exclaimed the headline over a furious editorial by Anna Wollner for the regional broadcaster RBB on February 1. Several critics and journalists called on the Union of German Film Critics (VDFK) to take a stand, and on February 4, they did. On the one hand, the VDFK sympathizes with the festival programmers who explained that many filmmakers, producers, and distributors have had it with streaming and Zoom Q&As and wouldn’t make their films available unless they would be presented on a big screen to a physically present audience.

On the other hand, the VDFK also sympathizes with its members and other critics who essentially argue that, yes, this pandemic has been a long, harrowing nightmare of a ride, but maybe we shouldn’t step off the plane until it lands. Ultimately, the VDFK advises: You do you. All attendees—critics, cinephiles, and stargazers alike—will need to show proof of vaccination against or recovery from Covid-19 and—unless boosted and/or recovered but also vaccinated—the negative result of a test carried out within the last twenty-four hours. You’ll need your pre-reserved ticket, of course, and you’ll need to be wearing a mask that can be taken seriously. As the VDFK puts it, signing off on its statement, “We wish everyone a great festival!”