The Future of Cinema

The 76th Edition marks the second year of the Berlinale’s Perspectives competition for filmmakers making their first fiction feature films, with the films competing for a 50,000 euro award endowed by GWFF. The 14 films in Perspectives showcase exceptional new voices in international cinema, from several countries including Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, France, Germany, Macedonia, Norway, Palestine, Philippines, the United States and the United Kingdom. While each film takes a unique approach to the dramatic or hybrid fiction form, all of them showcase significant new filmmaking talents and grant us a glimpse into the future of cinema.

Rafael Manuel returns to the Berlinale with Filipiñana, a feature adaptation of his Silver Bear winning short, that has a “tee-girl” investigating the sinister underbelly of an opulent country club. Other films exploring the tensions that test the boundaries of individual responsibility are Hangar rojo, from Juan Pablo Sallato, a tense thriller beautifully shot in black and white and A Prayer for the Dying from Dara Van Dusen, a stylistically bold revisionist Western.

The women of Manon Coubia’s Forêt Ivre have chosen to lead lives, alone, in the mountains, and the film brings this poetry of communing with nature and solitude to the screen beautifully. Conversely, the young women at the heart of Kosara Mitics’ emotional 17 lack agency until they form the bonds with each other that they need to survive the unchecked sexual assaults of their male classmates. While Muriel d’Ansembourg’s Truly Naked is confident and daring in its portrayal and interrogation of teenagers’ perceptions of sexuality and desire, looking at the porn industry from a feminist point-of-view, and its young stars give breakout performances.

And there are German stories, with acclaimed short film director Kai Stänicke delivering an ambitious period piece in Der Heimatlose, and Berlinale Talent’s alumnus Assaf Machnes taking us through a series of shifting encounters while the city of Berlin sleeps with Where To? .

Distinct and intimate storytelling from direction duo Lorenzo Ferro and Lucas A. Vignale has the young protagonist of El Tren Fluvial making an escape from the countryside of Argentina to the big city of his dreams, Buenos Aires. While, the janitor of Xu Zao’s animated film Han ye deng zhu, lives in a future where space travel is no longer a dream, but he is stuck on the dilapidated lot of a bankrupt movie studio in China.

There are themes of loneliness and grief in Grace Passô’s Nosso segredo, unflinching in its portrait of a family unable to recover from the loss of their patriarch. And in the deeply personal, Take Me Home, from Liz Sargent, grief is compounded by the challenge of living with a disability. Coming-of-age in the face of the violence and brutality of youth detention centres is taken on by Ashley Walters who assembles an impressive young cast for Animol.

With his fiction debut Chronicles From the Siege, Abdallah Alkhatib takes us into a nameless city under siege where bodies and minds are equally under attack; and ordinary people are forced to reckon with starvation, inadequate medical treatment, snipers and bombs, as they continue to live, seeking friendship, love, intimacy; and the pleasure of a cigarette.

Through their films, these first-time fiction filmmakers show us that they are fluent in the languages of cinema, have bold ideas, and offer us new ways of seeing the world. That this is the future of cinema bodes very well indeed.

The Perspectives competition is comprised of 14 feature films, of which twelve are world premieres, one of which is an international premiere, and one is a European premiere.

In partnership with GWFF (Gesellschaft zur Wahrnehmung von Film- und Fernsehrechten), the Berlinale will award 50,000 euros to one film selected by the Perspectives jury for the section’s top prize, courtesy of GWFF.