Berlin Review: ‘20,000 Species Of Bees’ Starring 8-Year-Old Silver Bear Winner Sofia Otero

Ed Meza @edmezavar Estíbaliz Urresola Solaguren’s celebrated Spanish feature “20,000 Species of Bees” and Kattia G. Zúñiga’s Panamanian drama “Sister & Sister” took the top prizes at the Malaga Film Festival, garnering the Golden Biznagas for Spanish and Latin American pictures respectively.   “20,000 Species of Bees” also won best supporting actress for Patricia López Arnaiz and picked up theSpanish Cinematographic Informers Association’s Feroz Puerta Oscura award. The film’s success follows two awards in Berlin, including a Silver Bear for Sofía Otero for her portrayal of a young girl going through a gender crisis. For Zúñiga, the Golden Biznaga is sure to help further propel “Sister & Sister,” an autobiographical story about two teenage sisters who travel from Costa Rica to Panama in search of their absent father.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Kino Lorber has bought U.S. and Anglo-Canadian distribution rights to Nicolas Philibert’s poignant documentary “On the Adamant” which just won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Kino Lorber is planning a theatrical release later this year followed by a digital and home video release on all major platforms. Sold by Films du Losange, “On the Adamant” takes place at a unique day-care centre for adults suffering from mental disorders. Located in a structure floating the middle of the Seine, in Paris, the center heals these adults with a blend of therapy, education, and culture rooted in music and the arts. The affecting documentary follows the team running the Adamant as they attempt to transform and uplift the lives for these people.

Sofia Kourtesis has shared a new single – listen to the openhearted and upbeat ‘Madres’ below.The track marks the Peruvian artist’s first new music of 2023, following the release of her Manu Chao collaboration ‘Estación Esperanza’ in January last year.“This song is about my mother, her mother, my sisters who are mothers, my brothers who are mothers, and all the LGBTQIA+ members who are mothers to their communities,” says Kourtesis. “Madres has no gender.

filmmaker Jarmusch and Carter Logan, announced their debut LP ‘Silver Haze’ with the release of their new single’s video. The new song and its video features footage and music from as long-ago as the late ’80s.“Jim created the basic guitar tracks first in his home studio, with memories of living in Berlin in 1987 floating around him,” the band said in a statement, as per Pitchforck.

Sideshow and Janus Films have acquired North American rights for German director Christian Petzold’s new film Afire, following its award-winning world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.

EXCLUSIVE: The Match Factory has unveiled a slew of deals for German director Christian Petzold’s Berlin Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize winner Afire.

Bill Murray and star Jeannie Berlin set foot on the red carpet of the 2023 SAG Awards holding hands.Murray and Berlin appeared quite close when they arrived together for Sunday's soiree at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. The star wore a black tuxedo with a colorful bow tie, while Berlin sported an all-black suit and shades.Berlin, who portrayed Hadassah Fabelman in the Steven Spielberg film, was there for the film's nomination in the Best Ensemble Cast in a Motion Picture category.

Folk music icon Joan Baez, who’s now 82, came of age just as musicians’ live gigs were often recorded and thereby preserved for the record, virtues that are used to advantage in Joan Baez I Am A Noise. An up-close, intimate and mostly frank account of a career that arched across more than 60 years of musical and political expression while countless trends came and went, this elaborate documentary navigates adroitly through the professional and the personal aspects of a very full life, one marked by far more good fortune than bad. Whether you’ve followed her career for decades or are just now discovering her, the life under scrutiny is undeniably impressive and ceaselessly engaging.

Christoph Hochhäusler’s slow-burn urban noir Till the End of the Night starts with time-lapse footage of the film’s first set, a well-to-do and apparently lived-in apartment flat, being built from scratch out of an empty room. Sadly, what looks to be challenging piece of Brechtian deconstruction is literally a plot point, as well as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the layers of deceit in the story that follows.

Odd people turn up in deserts. People are also inclined to disappear. A strange moonscape of opal prospectors’ digs and slurry heaps helps to set a bleak mood in Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen’s Limbo, shot in gently faded black and white in the South Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, repurposed here as Limbo. Limbo, says the preacher whose radio show seems to be the only thing available on the local airwaves, is the edge of hell. Here, unpurged sinners may be “in friendship with God.” Damnation, however, isn’t far away.

Martin Dale Contributor Portuguese producers Pandora Cunha Telles and Pablo Iraola, of Ukbar Filmes, are bringing a delegation of six Portuguese women helmers to the Berlinale, to showcase their ambitious project “Told by Women,” – a slate of 10 TV movies by 10 first-time women filmmakers – coproduced with Portuguese public broadcaster, RTP. The producers have lined up an intensive mentoring experience with leading international women producers that aims to endow them with the tools to embrace new challenges. The first season of five films of “Told by Women” was broadcast by RTP in October 2022, to strong ratings, and the second season of five films will bow this spring.

Naman Ramachandran Berlin’s just concluded European Film Market (EFM), which had a physical edition this year after two online editions in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic, has reported “record results” according to the organizers. There were 230 stands and 612 companies from 78 countries and more than 11,500 market participants from 132 countries. Some 773 films were shown in 1,533 screenings, including 647 online screenings and 599 market premieres. The total number of buyers also rose to 1,302. 629 film projects were presented on the new Producers & Project Pages. “After the past two irregular years, we’re pleased to return to the physical in full force, and with a vibrant, bustling and strong market. The exhibition areas at Gropius Bau and the Marriott Hotel were sold out, and the exhibitors reported strong sales and good business. The decision to group all the market happenings together with the Berlinale Series Market and the market screenings at Potsdamer Platz, and to provide the industry with an efficient infrastructure, was extremely well-received by our market participants,” said EFM director Dennis Ruh.

Donna Summer could hit notes more thrillingly beautiful than any other pop singer of her time, or since. I’m not sure even Whitney Houston, as great as she was, quite reached the glistening heights that culminate “Last Dance” (though she comes very close in “I Will Always Love You”). Mariah Carey (no relation to me) performs impressive vocal acrobatics, yet to my ear she can’t match the bell-like shimmer of Donna in the higher registers. And Donna in the lower registers – well, the voice thrums with visceral resonance.

What do a Belarusian emigrant and an African freedom fighter have in common? It’s a question that Giacomo Abbruzzese’s feature debut, which had its world premiere in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, answers in a beguilingly magic-realist and digressive way that sort of adds up, even though it requires a lot of good faith from the viewer to make it do so. To illustrate its strangeness, Disco Boy could be loosely described as a mash-up of Beau Travail and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, two very different movies. While both are firmly anchored in arthouse history, neither resembles the other, and it’s that contrast—the rich potential opened up by the space in between—that’s in play here.

Willem Dafoe gets a dream role with Inside, a combo of art film in more ways than one, psychological thriller, heist movie, and survival tale all rolled into one in which Dafoe’s Nemo is center stage, alone, the entire time.

War is coming in Guy Nattiv’s Golda, onscreen and off. But despite the media’s best efforts to turn the casting of British, non-Jewish actor Helen Mirren as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir into an explosive example of cultural appropriation, both Nattiv’s direction and Mirren’s performance are low-key and careful enough to rise above the controversy. In retrospect, it does seem a little strange that no other candidate was deemed suitable, and the movie won’t do much extra business on account of Mirren’s star power, but those anticipating a tone-deaf disaster will be sorely disappointed.

Femme, a queer thriller written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choo Ping, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and stars George Mackay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. The film explores the price of vengeance, the toll it can take on the psyche, and how that pressure can lead to some questionable decisions that may leave the viewer looking for explanations for these character’s actions.

For almost four years of siege in the 1990s, the city of Sarajevo concussed from shelling, the rumblings of armored vehicles and the repeated pop of sniper fire.

“They treat you like a movie star,” says an admirer to Ingeborg Bachmann at one of her celebrated readings. She smiles graciously and agrees, thus establishing the baseline for her story.

Most big Korean action movies are backloaded, wrapping up with three to five endings, but Byun Sung-hyun’s Kill Boksoon, which premiered as a Berlinale Special, has everything going on up front. So much so that it initially seems too much, to the extent that it sometimes feels as though there’s actually a mini-series in there bursting to get out. Surprisingly, that’s not such a crazy idea, since, once you get past the far-fetched premise—an underground network of professional contract killers, presided over the glossy conglomerate MK Ent—there’s a lot of rich character work to supplement the superbly choregraphed violence that we’ve come to expect from the region.