berlinale 2021 – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Women at Berlinale 2021 Wrap Up – Alexandra Heller-Nicholas reports

Released at the end of the festival, the “Gender Evaluation 2021” report is a revealing document, which both highlights the progress being made when it comes to gender and equity at the Festival, while also acknowledging there is still clearly some way to go yet. While it includes the frank observation that “in all of the examined professions and disciplines, the most common team composition is wholly or predominantly male”, the report also gets into the fine statistical nitty gritty of what this breaks down to not only when it comes to directing, but to other areas such as cinematography, screenwriting, editing and producing.

Festivals Reviews

PETITE MAMAN (Berlinale 2021) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

March 3, 2021March 3, 2021 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas berlinale 2021, Céline Sciamma, Gabrielle Sanz, Joséphine Sanz, Nina Meurisse, Petite Maman

Speculation has been running high since Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire about where the French filmmaker would go from there; what, precisely, can one do to top something so immaculately crafted, perfectly structured, and which carried the impact of a sledgehammer to even the most unmovable hearts? With its world premiere at the 2021 Berlinale, Petite Maman provides a satisfying answer.

Festivals Reviews

BALLAD OF A WHITE COW (Berlinale 2021) – Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

March 3, 2021March 5, 2021 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Alireza Sanifar, Ballad of a White Cow, Behtash Sanaeeha, berlinale 2021, iranian films, Maryam Moghaddam

Ballad of a White Cow is an uncomfortable, sad film where hope sits in frequently complicated tension with a sense of inevitability that things are destined to get worse once the truth comes to light. But it is also an unmissable film, a powerful film and an important film that does not flinch – not once – in its exposé of how a great injustice cannot be magically fixed by bureaucrats; rather, its trauma spirals outwards, endlessly and unnecessarily, ruining the lives of all it touches.

Festivals Reviews

CELTS (Berlinale 2021) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

March 3, 2021March 5, 2021 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas berlinale 2021, celts, Dubravka Duda Kovjanić, Katarina Dimić, Milica Tomović

Set in Belgrade in the early 90s, tired, sexually-repressed Marijana is throwing a party for her beloved daughter Minja (Katarina Dimić), who is turning eight. Family, friends, random partners (and exes) and a gaggle of costumed children arrive to drink, dance, gossip, discuss politics and complain about the food, the latter a result of the harsh economic climate.. As the evening unfolds, secrets are revealed, betrayals escalate and – for some – unexpected decisions begin what will be new chapters of some characters’ lives long after the final credits roll.

Festivals Reviews

COPILOT (Berlinale 2021) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

March 3, 2021March 5, 2021 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Anne Zohra Berrached, berlinale 2021, Canan Kir, Copilot, german films, Roger Azar

Anne Zohra Berrached constructs a powerful, moving love story where politics hovers inescapably around the edges as young lovers struggle against external factors to find a way through together. The electricity between her two leads grants the film its emotional core. While their individual performances are admirable, it is the many scenes in which they appear together that light up the screen. Copilot is a captivating political love story, where all that is pure and good lies in precarious tension with a world gone mad.

Festivals Reviews

SOUAD (Berlinale 2021) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

March 3, 2021March 5, 2021 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Ayten Amin, berlinale 2021, egyptian films, souad

In Souad, Egyptian filmmaker Ayten Amin presents an absorbing portrait of her 19-year-old title protagonist, a young woman negotiating her cultural traditions, family responsibilities and her own sense of self as a young woman in a social sphere heavily dominated by social media and pressures on appearances. Juggling these different versions of herself, Souad struggles to know who she really is at a time of vital transition in her life as she moves into adulthood.

Festivals Reviews

THE SEED (Berlinale 2021) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

March 3, 2021March 5, 2021 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas berlinale 2021, Dora Zygouri, Hanno Koffler, Mia Maariel Meyer, the seed

What filmmaker Mia Maariel Meyer brings to life in The Seed is not as much the story of the exploited worker himself, in this case an aspiring building site manager called Rainer (Hanno Koffler), but that of his young 13-year-old daughter Doreen, played in a dazzling performance by young actor Dora Zygouri which in largely carries the film.

Festivals Reviews

NINJABABY (Berlinale 2021) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

March 3, 2021March 3, 2021 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas berlinale 2021, Kristine Kujath Thorp, Nader Khademi, Ninjababy, norwegian films, Yngvild Sve Flikke’s

Based on Inga H Sætre’s graphic novel Fallteknikk, Norwegian filmmaker Yngvild Sve Flikke’s Ninjababy takes the narrative nuts and bolts from the most banal after school special and turns it into something unambiguously magical. Playing in the Generation 14plus section of the 2021 Berlinale, Ninjababy‘s story is uncouth, touching, and laugh-out-loud funny, a high-energy and thoroughly unladylike tale of unexpected, unwanted pregnancy and the surprising paths it can lead you down.

Festivals Reviews

THE SCARY OF SIXTY-FIRST (Berlinale 2021) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

March 2, 2021March 3, 2021 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas berlinale 2021, Betsey Brown, Dasha Nekrasova, horror, Jeffrey Epstein, Madeline Quinn, The Scary of Sixty-First

Dasha Nekrasova’s debut feature film follows two young women who fluke the real estate deal of a lifetime, a dream duplex on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is only after moving in, however, that they discover that their home’s previous owner was Epstein who used it, as one character notes, as an “orgy flophouse”. They together become Nancy Drew like conspiracy theorists who fall increasingly into paranoid obsession. The Scary of Sixty-First does exactly what horror film does best: it gives us a way of speaking about the very real nightmares of the world we live in when we struggle to find the words.

Festivals Reviews

CENSOR (Berlinale 2021) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

March 2, 2021March 5, 2021 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas berlinale 2021, Berlinale Talent Campus, Censor, horror, Niamh Algar, Prano Bailey-Bond, Video Nasties

At the heart of Censor lies Enid (Niamh Algar), an almost prissy and visibly uptight bureaucrat who works 9-5 deciding what scenes to cut from a seemingly never-ending torrent of extreme film content, set during a period where the so-called Video Nasties moral panic put enormous pressure on censors to be the social barriers between corrupting screen media and Britain’s impressionable youth.

← Previous