Ein a floating elliptical building clad in wooden slats on the Pont Charles de Gaulle in Paris, just a few steps from the Gare de Lyon and the French National Library. Here, in the water of the Seine, is the psychiatric day center L’Adamant, which is run jointly by several hospitals. The director Nicolas Philibert, who became known in Germany for his documentary “Sein und haben” about a village school in Auvergne, visited L’Adamant with his camera almost every day for six months. The result is a film that takes a close-up look at the psychiatric patients at the floating day center: their group sessions, their artistic workshops, their film club, their lunch breaks, but also those moments in which they are alone and provide information about their self-image and their perspective on the world. The film watches them for two hours and, in doing so, gently and unobtrusively manages to make us no longer perceive the people it shows as patients, but as people.
73rd Berlin Film Festival
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Now “Sur l’Adamant” has won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale – after a competition that was characterized by a lot of mediocrity and few highlights. The fact that the jury, headed by the American actress Kristen Stewart, awarded its main prize to a documentary film is also a statement about the quality of the feature films in the official programme: the jurors, among whom the Spanish director Carla Simón was also the winner of last year’s Golden Bear, obviously have was, could not find a fictional cinematic narrative that they wanted to reward with their most important award.
The only feature film that came very close to the coveted trophy was Christian Petzold’s “Red Sky”. The jury awarded him their grand prize and thus the silver medal of the festival, so to speak. It is the long overdue honor for a director who has stood out from the average in the German cinema industry for many years – and who once again proves his class. In “Red Sky” he combines the group portrait of four vacationers who meet in a house on the Baltic Sea with the Time.news of an announced fire disaster. The closer the wildfires get to the idyll, the more the tension between the characters increases. Balancing their quarrels and lusts with the unstoppable tide of evil is an art in itself, and Petzold has mastered it perfectly.
The strength of German cinema, which was represented this year with five entries in the competition, is also reflected in the awards. Angela Schanelec received a Silver Bear for the best screenplay, and even if one wonders whether in her film “Music”, an updated version of the Oedipus myth, the staging, i.e. the direction, is not the decisive factor, the Decision for Schanelec (and not for Margarethe von Trotta’s Ingeborg Bachmann film) was okay overall. The Austrian actress and trans activist Thea Ehre received the award for the best supporting actress for her performance in Christoph Hochhäusler’s Frankfurt thriller “Until the end of the night”, and this award also hit the mark: without honor the story of love would have betrayal and death, which Hochhäusler wants to tell, doesn’t work.
The other awards fit the picture of an ambitious but overall lackluster and ultimately disappointing festival selection. The “small” jury prize went to João Canijo’s Portuguese women’s drama “Mal Viver”, the director’s prize to the French doyen Philippe Garrel for his film “Le grand chariot”, which tells of the joys and sorrows of a Parisian puppet theater family. On the stage in the Berlinale Palast, Garrel dedicated the award to his great role model Jean-Luc Godard, who died last year, and in doing so also recalled the history of the Berlinale, which awarded its bear to “Alphaville” in 1965. Finally, the Best Actress award went to eight-year-old Sofia Otero for her portrayal of a trans girl in the film 20,000 especies de abejas by Basque director Estibaliz Solaguren, and Best Artistic Achievement went to cinematographer Hélène Louvart for her work in Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy” award.
There is little to complain about in all of this, apart perhaps from the jury prize, which would have been better for the Mexican director Lila Avilés, who demonstrates an unusual talent for psychological depth in a confined space in “Tótem”, the bitterly happy story of a family celebration. What one can accuse this Berlinale of is that it has lived up to its own claim even less than usual: in addition to showing the aging auteur film, to pave the way for the new, young, uncompromising cinema into the future. This cinema ran this time, if at all, in the side rows. But it belongs in the competition. The jury can do nothing for this imbalance. Fixing them is up to the festival directors. They’ll get their next chance next year.