For the first time I'm attending the Berlin Film Festival not as a journalist but as a guest of honour, having won the Berlinale Camera lifetime achievement award. This year I therefore want to open my letter from Berlin with an expression of limitless, sincere gratitude to colleagues and readers who, feeling it was deserved, were happy for me to receive the award. I seldom attend opening or closing ceremonies at festivals, since I attend the films they feature at special press screenings. But it was necessary to attend the Berlin opening last Thursday to meet with the festival director Dieter Kosslick on the red carpet, and thank him for the award. The opening took place at minus six degrees Celsius, but the German actress Anke Engelke, best known for her wildly successful comedy roles – who presented the evening – managed to raise the temperature with her unaffected style and her comments combining novelty and depth. The new American president Donald Trump had cast a long shadow over the festival with his extreme right populist decisions worrying the whole world. The morning of the opening, referring to the president's infamous slur on Meryl Streep, Kosslick declared that it's Trump who is “the most overrated president in history”. At the jury press conference, what is more, the American actress and jury member Maggie Gyllenhaal said, “I want to let the world know that there are many, many people in my country who are ready to resist.” At the opening ceremony Anke Engelke too sarcastically asked the audience, “Are you here for the festival? Or, is someone keeping you from going back to your home country?” It was only natural that politics should loom large in the speeches of both the Minister of Culture Monika Grütters and the Berlin mayor Michael Müller, both of whom reaffirmed the principles of freedom and democracy and Germany's historic stance as the one country in Europe and the world that took in over a million refugees in the last two years. One cannot but remark, in this context, that the barbaric 19 December attack that left 12 Berliners dead when a terrorist drove into a Christmas market has not affected Germany's position, although it did result in tighter security for the festival, which as Kosslick announced would remain as hidden as possible. I found myself sitting between the great German director Volker Schlöndorff – whose latest, Return to Montauk, was being screened in the official competition – and FIPRESCI General Secretary Klaus Eder. This was no coincidence: the organisers had placed me between an old friend, Eder, and a new one, Schlöndorff, to whom I grew close when he accepted my invitation to be honoured at the Cairo Film Festival when I directed the event in 2014. The coincidence, rather, was the that right behind me was the American superstar Richard Gere, whose The Dinner, directed by Oren Moverman, is the only American film in the competition. Gere had met with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, not as a Berlinale participant but as the chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet which started in 1988. *** Django The choice of Etienne Comar's directorial debut Django as the opening film of the 67th Berlinale (9-19 February) was entirely apt, although being a conventional film it stands out only for the performance of its Algerian-French star Reda Kateb as the gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt (1910-1953), one of the musical icons of the century, who fled Nazi-occupied Paris in 1943, having declined Goebbels' invitation to go on tour in Germany, possibly performing for Hitler himself. Following Django's flight, the Sinti community to which he belonged was attacked by the Nazis, who burned down their wooden houses and killed many of them. It is appropriate since it is full of music and will be embraced by music lovers as well as cinephiles, but it is especially appropriate as a reminder of the horrors of Nazism – one of the strategic objectives of culture and education in Germany, especially since unification in 1990 – ending as it does with liberation in 1945. After graduating from La Fémis film school, Comar was a producer for many years; his credits in this capacity include Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men (2010), about the Islamist massacre of monks in Algeria during the civil war, and Abderrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu (2014), also on the crimes of political Islam, for which he won the César Award for Best Film as producer in 2011 and 2015. He is as it seems a filmmaker who interacts with the realities of the age, and defends freedom against all forms of oppression and dictatorship. Ending with a series of still shots of gypsy victims of Nazism to the sound of a Django composition named Elegy for my Gypsy Brothers, the film suffers not so much from its conventional style as its weak script. Written with Alexis Salatko and based on the latter's eponymous book, it features a stereotypical depiction of the demonic Germans and their angelic victims and does not clarify the hero's connection with the French resistance or whether his agreeing to collaborate might've saved the gypsies. It also suffers from extended music-playing scenes unrelated to the drama, which make what should really be a 90 minute feature 117 minutes long. The sets and costumes, sound and photography are all beautifully evocative of the 1940s, but they are not enough to make a major film. *** No film festival is now without one or more films on the Syrian tragedy. The world has awoken, but too late, after Syria turned into an arena for world conflicts, with most of its towns and villages reduced to ruins and over half its population becoming refugees, whether internally displaced or forced out of the country. The 67th Berlinale Panorama includes the Belgian-French-Lebanese production Insyriated, which is purely Arabic-language from beginning to end. After the 2009 The Day God Walked Away – also written by him – it is the second full-length feature by Philippe Van Leeuw, who was born in Brussels in 1954 and studied at INSAS as well as the American Film Institute in LA. Van Leeuw's debut as director of photography was Bruno Dumont's 1997 The Life of Jesus. The film takes place in a badly damaged Aleppo over 24 hours from one morning to the next. In the residential building where it is set, only one family remains. It is made up of Oum Yazan (Hiam Abbass), her father-in-law Abou Monzer (Mohsen Abbas), her young son Yazan (Mohammad Jihad Sleik) and two daughters Yara (Alissar Kaghadou) and Aliya (Ninar Halabi). The family have also been joined by their neighbours Halima (Diamand Abou Abboud), her husband Samir (Moustapha Al Kar) and their baby after the latter's apartment on the top floor was shelled. Throughout the 85 minutes of the film we never leave Oum Yazan's flat. When Samir steps out to arrange for his and his family's departure via Beirut, he is shot by a sniper (we see only his feet from a distance): this is the principal event of the film, around which the whole drama is structured. Samir is spotted by Oum Yazan's Asian servant Delhani (Juliette Navis), she reports it to Oum Yazan who instructs her not to tell Halima. But when the security forces arrive at the building to see if anyone remains there, Oum Yazan manages to hide her family and Halima ends up being raped and Oum Yazan is forced to tell her about Samir. Yara and her friend Karim then drag Samir's body into the house and it turns out he is still alive; Monzer, Oum Yazan's husband arrives with a number of armed militants towards the end and they take him away for treatment. The film is a model of classic structure, with all the Aristotelian unities achieved, and its subject matter is purely human without any political analysis or bias. It shows rather how houses turn into prisons and life becomes hell in wartime. This does not mean, however, that it is a neutral film, as evidenced by what the regime's men do to Halima. The opening shot is of Abu Monzer looking out of the window and smoking, and it's the same shot with which the film ends, creating a closed circle. But hope is nonetheless maintained in the fact that Samir stays alive. The film's weakest point is in the details of the daily life and relations between characters, which are not dramatically convincing. Its strongest point is Hiam Abbass's performance as Oum Yazan: the woman who courageously defends her family without compromise, knowing when to be silent and when to express herself. This is no surprise considering the Palestinian actress's impressive track record across Europe and America and her status as one of the symbols of contemporary Arab creativity. *** Only one short film participated in any of the festival's six competitions, the German-Lebanese film Street of Death by Karam Ghossein, which was screened in the short films competition. In an interview with Radio Berlin on the occasion of my Berlinale Camera award, I said that Tamer Al-Said's The Last Days of the City, which was screened in the Forum section last year, would've made an excellent full-length competition contestant. Though technically a documentary on the street leading to Beirut Airport, alongside which shanties have sprung up, The Street of Death is in fact a work of savage poetry, as it were, which uses the street to express an audiovisual poet's discontent and anger without a single complete shot in 23 minutes. The frame rather moves freely from an underwater to a fishing scene and onto a plane in the sky, showing people who act with spontaneous violence even as they celebrate. The soundtrack, which is not directly connected with the picture, features the artist's narrative of his memories and commentary on the Lebanese way of life. GOLDEN BEAR FOR BEST FILM (awarded to the film's producer) Testről és lélekről On Body and Soul by Ildikó Enyedi SILVER BEAR GRAND JURY PRIZE Félicité by Alain Gomis SILVER BEAR ALFRED BAUER PRIZE for a feature film that opens new perspectives Pokot Spoor by Agnieszka Holland SILVER BEAR FOR BEST DIRECTOR Aki Kaurismäki for Toivon tuolla puolen (The Other Side of Hope/Die andere Seite der Hoffnung) SILVER BEAR FOR BEST ACTRESS Kim Minhee in Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja (On the Beach at Night Alone) by Hong Sangsoo SILVER BEAR FOR BEST ACTOR Georg Friedrich in Helle Nächte (Bright Nights) by Thomas Arslan SILVER BEAR FOR BEST SCREENPLAY Sebastián Lelio and Gonzalo Maza for Una mujer fantástica (A Fantastic Woman) by Sebastián Lelio SILVER BEAR FOR OUTSTANDING ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTION in the categories camera, editing, music score, costume or set design Dana Bunescu for the editing in Ana, mon amour by Călin Peter Netzer GWFF BEST FIRST FEATURE AWARD GWFF BEST FIRST FEATURE AWARD endowed with € 50,000, funded by GWFF Estiu 1993 Summer 1993 Sommer 1993 by Carla Simón GLASHÜTTE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY AWARD GLASHÜTTE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY AWARD endowed with € 50,000, funded by Glashütte Original Istiyad Ashbah Ghost Hunting by Raed Andoni SILVER BEAR FOR OUTSTANDIN G ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTION in the categories camera, editing, music score, costume or set design Dana Bunescu for the editing in Ana, mon amour by Călin Peter Netzer GWFF BEST FIRST FEATURE AWARD Members of the Jury: Jayro Bustamante , Clotilde Courau and Mahmoud Sabbagh GWFF BEST FIRST FEATURE AWARD endowed with € 50,000, funded by GWFF Estiu 1993 Summer 1993 Sommer 1993 by Carla Simón GLASHÜTTE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY AWARD Members of the Jury: Daniela Michel, Laura Poitras and Samir GLASHÜTTE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY AWARD endowed with € 50,000, funded by Glashütte Original Istiyad Ashbah Ghost Hunting by Raed Andoni PRIZES OF THE INTERNAT GOLDEN BEAR FOR BEST SHORT FILM Cidade Pequena Small Town Kleine Stadt by Diogo Costa Amarante SILVER BEAR JURY PRIZE (SHORT FILM) Ensueño en la Pradera Reverie in the Meadow Träumerei in der Prärie by Esteban Arrangoiz Julien AUDI SHORT FILM AWARD endowed with € 20,000, enabled by Audi Street of Death by Karam Ghossein SPECIAL MENTION Centauro Centaur Zentaur by Nicolás Suárez BERLIN SHORT FILM NOMINEE FOR THE EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS Os Humores Artificiais The Artificial Humors Die Künstlichen Humore by Gabriel Abrantes PRIZES OF THE JURIES GENERATION Children's Jury Generation Kplus CRYSTAL BEAR for the Best Film Piata loď Little Harbour Das fünfte Schiff by Iveta Grófová SPECIAL MENTION Amelie rennt Mountain Miracle - An Unexpected Friendship by Tobias Wiemann CRYSTAL BEAR for the Best Short Film Promise Versprechen by Xie Tian SPECIAL MENTION Hedgehog's Home Das Haus des Igels by Eva Cvijanovic THE GRAND PRIX OF THE GENERATION KPLUS INTERNATIONAL JURY for the best feature-length film Becoming Who I Was Werden wer ich war by Chang-Yong Moon and Jin Jeon ex aequo Estiu 1993 Summer 1993 Sommer 1993 by Carla Simón THE SPECIAL PRIZE OF THE GENERATI ON KPLUS INTERNATIONAL JURY for the best short film, Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk Aaba Grandfather Großvater by Amar Kaushik SPECIAL MENTION Sabaku by Marlies van der Wel Youth Jury Generation 14plus CRYSTAL BEAR for the Best Film Butterfly Kisses by Rafael Kapelinski SPECIAL MENTION Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n'ont fait que se creuser un tombeau Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves by Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie CRYSTAL BEAR for the Best Short Film Wolfe by Claire Randall SPECIAL MENTION SNIP by Terril Calder THE GRAND PRIX OF THE GENERATION 14PLUS INTERNATIONAL JURY for the best feature-length film Shkola nomer 3 School Number 3 by Yelizaveta Smith and Georg Genoux SPECIAL MENTION Ben Niao The Foolish Bird by Huang Ji and Ryuji Otsuka THE SPECIAL PRIZE OF THE GENERATION 14PLUS for the best short film The Jungle Knows You Better Than You Do by Juanita Onzaga SPECIAL MENTION U Plavetnilo Into the Blue by Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović
