French Documentary ‘On the Adamant’ Wins Golden Bear at Berlin

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.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi’s documentary about love, memory and Alzheimer’s disease “The Eternal Memory” has scored a slew of international sales after making a splash at Sundance and Berlin. Dogwoof, the British sales company specialized in high-profile docs, has announced multiple deals on “Eternal Memory,” which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Documentary in January and was a recent standout at the Berlinale where it had its European bow. The hot doc is screening later this week at the CPH:DOX documentary film festival in Copenhagen. Dogwoof partnered with MTV Documentary Films to represent “The Eternal Memory” for international sales soon after its Sundance premiere. They have now scored sales on the doc to: Edge Entertainment (Nordics); Madman (Australia and New Zealand); Sherry Media (Canada); I Wonder Pictures (Italy); BTeam Pictures (Spain); Periscoop (Benelux); Atnine Film (South Korea); Synca (Japan); LEV (Israel), and Restart (Former Yugoslavia).

Frank Doelger’s eco-thriller drama The Swarm has made a splash on German TV.

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.

Christopher Vourlias The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival kicks off its 25th edition Thursday at a time when the nonfiction genre has arguably reached unprecedented heights. This year’s festival, which takes place March 2 – 12 in the seaside Mediterranean city, unfolds just days after veteran French docmaker Nicolas Philibert won the Golden Bear in Berlin for his documentary about a Paris mental health care facility, “On the Adamant.” The award capped a fortnight in which Sean Penn’s gonzo doc about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “Superpower,” also generated plenty of buzz (albeit lukewarm reviews). Meanwhile, Cameroon’s Cyrielle Raingou took home Rotterdam’s Tiger Award just a few weeks earlier for “Le Spectre de Boko Haram,” a riveting view of terrorism seen through children’s eyes. And one summer ago, Laura Poitras triumphed on the Lido with “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” her docu-portrait of the photographer and activist Nan Goldin, which won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion award.

Nicholas Philibert, whose film On the Adamant won the Golden Bear at the 73rd Berlinale on Saturday, has made a lifetime commitment to observational documentary, moving between interviews and long, patient takes of his subjects pursuing what it is that they do. The best known of these is Etre et Avoir (2002), which followed a year in the life of a tiny rural school where the single teacher – kindly but exacting, in the French manner – taught several grades at once. Thanks to the magnetism of this committed teacher – and of his delightful enfants, of course – Etre et Avoir became an unlikely but enduring arthouse hit.

with a bang.On February 25, the 32-year-old Berlinale jury president arrived on the red carpet for the festival's closing ceremony wearing a sheer gown with knitted black accents, including strategically. placed pockets.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The official awards ceremony of this year’s Berlin Film Festival is under way, with Kristen Stewart’s jury set to announce their winners from the Competition selections. This post will be updated as they’re announced.Previously announced: AUDIENCE AWARDS Panorama Audience Award: “Sira,” Apolline TraoréSecond Prize: “The Burdened,” Amr GamalThird Prize: “Midwives,” Léa Fehner Panorama Documentary Audience Award: “Kokomo City,” D. SmithSecond Prize: “The Eternal Memory,” Maite AlberdiThird Prize: “The Cemetery of Cinema,” Thierno Souleymane Diallo

The competition winners of the 73rd Berlinale are about to start rolling in as the festival draws to a close Saturday evening.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Trends in documentary-making have shifted radically since Nicolas Philibert’s “Être et Avoir” was a surprise arthouse hit two decades ago: That sweetly observational little film, following the ins and outs of a village elementary school over the course of a year, seems a quaintly modest proposition beside today’s more slickly immersive and narrativized nonfiction breakouts. If times have changed, however, Philibert has not. “On the Adamant,” his first feature in 10 years, finds him once more examining the human workings of a care-based institution from a reserved but compassionate distance, avoiding commentary and editorialization in favor of real-life character portraiture. It turns out to be the right approach for the institution under scrutiny: The Adamant, a day-care center in central Paris for adults with a variety of mental disorders, offering its visitors a range of therapy, education and cultural activity. The human subjects here are both expressive and highly vulnerable, open to the low-key, non-invasive presence of Philibert’s camera, and the film is content to be an undulating patchwork of their everyday moods and moments, rather than anything more strenuously conceptual. Suited to specialist distributors and streaming platforms, “On the Adamant” might not achieve the crossover success Philibert has found in the past, but it’s a warm reminder of his perceptive gifts: A premiere slot in Berlin’s main competition, alongside much sleeker, more formally ambitious fiction fare, effectively welcomes him back to the auteur leagues.

The Berlin Film Festival has made one of its highest priorities this year to stand with “the courageous protesters in Iran as they defend themselves against a violent, undemocratic regime.”

The Good Mothers, Disney+’s hard-hitting mafia drama series, has won the first ever Berlinale Series Award.

Steven Spielberg was presented with the Berlin Film Festival’s Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement by U2 frontman Bono, who made a surprise appearance at the rousing special ceremony on Tuesday.

Dame Helen Mirren ditched her signature bob for ageless platinum waves as she attended the Berlin premiere of Golda.The actress, who last year admitted to still loving her former boyfriend, Liam Neeson, stunned as she attended the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival in Germany on Monday and was pictured with long flowing hair extensions. Helen, 77, sported an off-the-shoulder floor-length black dress that featured a low-cut ruffled neckline, which she paired with gold chandelier earrings as she walked the red carpet.

Guy Lodge Film Critic On stage, drag artist Aphrodite Banks is a femme fatale: Caked in war paint, with a waterfall of braids whipping around her waist, she’s possessed of the white-hot glare and forthright confidence to match her Amazonian height and bearing. Off stage, as Jules, he’s simply femme: that term for gay men who present or express themselves in a more feminine way, too often used as a slur or a dismissal even by their community brethren. (Open up a cruising app like Grindr and see how frequently “no fems” comes up as a requirement.) The former identity connotes swaggering strength; the latter, to many, delicate weakness. How those associations and stigmas battle each other in one man’s body is the driving conflict in “Femme,” a tense, sometimes startling revenge drama from British freshmen Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.

Young Belarusian Aleksei (Franz Rogowski) is impatient for a better life in Europe. Coming from a country under dictatorship and with very strong Russian ties, the political isolation of which has made it suffocating for the younger generations, he is seduced by the idea of a borderless, communal whole where everybody counts for something.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Berlin Film Festival has returned to its first fully in person edition since 2020. But this year, the Berlinale has come back with a vengeance, and added something that it wasn’t especially known for in its pre-pandemic days: star power. Indeed, it’s been hard not to bump into a famous person in the German city — almost giving this previously mostly auteur driven gathering a vibe that more closely resembles the latest versions of Sundance or Toronto. Artistic director Carlo Chatrian told Variety Sunday that A-list names help raise awareness for the festival’s core mission – to celebrate movies and encourage audiences to return to theaters.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature is a hazily seductive, frequently dreamlike study of life in the French Foreign Legion, fixated on masculine bodies in synchronized and sometimes violently clashing motion. It is also called “Disco Boy.” You almost certainly wouldn’t choose that subject, tone and title for a film if you didn’t want viewers’ minds to immediately wander to “Beau Travail,” Claire Denis’ seminal Foreign Legion cine-ballet, with its climactic solo number set to a thumping Eurodance classic; even if you somehow made that error, you wouldn’t compound it with electro-scored terpsichorean interludes of your own. Choosing homage this direct for a first feature is a brazen move, but notwithstanding its openly derivative qualities, “Disco Boy” doesn’t want for boldness or surprise — Abbruzzese’s hot, fluxional command of sound and image keeps us curious.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor When Frank Doelger, a six-time Emmy award-winning showrunner, whose credits include “Game of Thrones,” “John Adams” and “Rome,” was preparing to adapt Frank Schätzing’s 900-page novel “The Swarm” into an eight-part eco-thriller, he resolved to place it in a different genre. Whereas the novel read like a “disaster movie,” Doelger wanted the series to be a “monster movie” — but with a twist, the monster was us. In the first few episodes of the show, which premieres at the Berlin Film Festival on Sunday, seemingly random, unconnected events occur in different parts of the world in which marine creatures start behaving in abnormal ways that threaten the lives of those who come in contact with them. After each event, scientists are given the task of finding the cause of the change in behavior, and they slowly start to wonder whether the events are connected, and ask what is triggering them.

There is a particular kind of audacity reserved for the wealthy and the well-meaning. Multi-award-winning actor and humanitarian Sean Penn co-directs “Superpower” with Aaron Kaufman, known mostly for his commercial work and his collaboration with writer-director Robert Rodriguez.