CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Berlin Film festival
Europe dominates the programme – and the awards
INTRIGUING: A Cop Movie
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
THIS YEAR’S Berlin film festival, with a competition line-up including just three films made outside Europe and a jury consisting entirely of white people, all previous winners of the Golden Bear, offered no representation from Latin America or Africa. It was a markedly Eurocentric, if not incestuous, affair.
The Golden Bear prize went to Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn by Romanian director Radu Jude, a clumsy and chaotic social satire shot during the pandemic with actors wearing anti-viral masks.
In it, a schoolteacher finds her career and reputation on the line after a personal sex tape is leaked online and while this take on her plight might resonate nationally, it lacks universal appeal.
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