Fresh Face: ‘Disco Boy’ Director Giacomo Abbruzzese On His Long Journey To Making The Berlin Competition Cut With His First Feature

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Locarno Film Festival is launching a first-of-its-kind contest, offering a free complete restoration service to a selected vintage cinema classic. The contest is part of The Swiss fest’s Heritage Online program that was launched in 2021 when its Locarno Pro industry side branched out into vintage cinema creating a platform that serves as a database of film titles that premiered prior to 2005. The goal of the fest dedicated to indie cinema is to play an active role in restoring older films to their former glory and also to become a business facilitator between rights holders and classic film distributors, streaming platforms and other outlets.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Khaby Lame, the Senegalese-born Italian social media personality who is the world’s most followed content creator on TikTok, has joined “Italia’s Got Talent” as a juror. Lame is a former factory worker in Italy who after being laid off from his job in March 2020 launched a TikTok channel in which he performed absurdly comic skits that went wildly viral. The TikTok star whose comedy bits started with ironic takes on “life hacks” relies on iconic facial expressions and body language in videos delivered without speaking so that the humor is understood universally. The short-form comedy video virtuoso, who has more than 154 million followers on TikTok, will now be making his debut as an Italian TV personality on the hit talent show.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian actor-turned-director Andrea Di Stefano, whose gritty police drama “The Last Night of Amore” is launching from the Berlin Film Festival’s Berlinale Special Gala section, reps an Italian anomaly. “Amore,” which refers to a police lieutenant named Franco Amore, oddly marks Di Stefano debut directing an Italian-language film after helming well-received U.S. indie thrillers “Escobar: Paradise Lost,” with Benicio del Toro, and “The Informer.”  Sumptuosly shot in 35mm film and set in present-day Milan, “Last Night of Amore” harks back to Italian genre films of the 70s and 80s but has a fresh contemporary feel. The plot sees the good lieutenant, played by Italian A-lister Pierfrancesco Favino (“The Traitor,” “Nostalgia”) being called on the night before retirement to investigate a crime scene where his best friend and long-time partner Dino has been killed during a diamond heist. Complications ensue, things get very frantic, and we learn how his love for his wife Viviana, played by Linda Caridi (“The Ties”) will help Amore survive the longest and most challenging night of his existence.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Berlinale competition film “Music” opens with gray clouds racing across the face of a Greek mountain as a storm prepares to break. It is a suitably dramatic prelude to the tumultuous events that will unfold, albeit rendered in an understated manner by German director Angela Schanelec, who won the Berlinale best director award in 2019 for “I Was at Home, But.” As the storm lifts, an abandoned baby boy is rescued a paramedic, who names him Jon. Years later, Jon, now a young man, kills another man, accidentally, and ends up in prison. Here, he is tended to by a female guard, Iro, as his eyesight begins to deteriorate. When he is released, the two get married and have a child. But several years later, his wife discovers a terrible secret.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent In the first few months of 2020, huge swathes of Northern Italy were hit by the COVID-19 virus. Soon the death toll in the city of Bergamo reached such heights that an army convoy had to transport coffins out because its cemeteries and crematoriums were full. In his powerful doc “The Walls of Bergamo,” which world premieres on Friday in Berlin’s Encounters section, prominent Italian documentary director Stefano Savona – whose “Samouni Road” won the Golden Eye prize in 2018 at Cannes – and a team of student filmmakers take the pulse of the city when it is on the brink of collapse and, subsequently, as Bergamo begins its healing and recovery process.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian animation auteur Enzo D’Alò – whose globally known works include “The Blue Arrow,” “Lucky and Zorba,” “Momo” and “Opopomoz” – is back with Roddy Doyle adaptation “A Greyhound Of a Girl” launching from the Berlin Film Festival’s Generation Kplus section. “Greyhound of a Girl,” which is D’Alò’s first English-language film, is about four generations of Irish women who embark on a car journey. One of them is dead, one of them is dying, one is driving, and the fourth is twelve-year old Dublin school girl Mary O’Hara. Mary shares her grandmother’s rebel spirit and love of cooking and is bravely dealing with the fact that her granny’s days are drawing to a close.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Veteran auteur Mario Martone, whose Naples-set drama “Nostalgia” launched last year from Cannes, has quite a lot in common with Massimo Troisi, Italy’s beloved late comic actor-director who is best known internationally as the star of Oscar-winning film “Il Postino.” Which is why Martone was well-suited to direct the multi-layered doc about Troisi’s legacy “Somebody Down There Likes Me” that is screening in the Berlinale Special sidebar. For starters, they are both Neapolitan, and were born only a few years a part. Troisi – who in “Il Postino” played the simple postman who rides his bicycle on a sandy Italian island to deliver mail to his sole client, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda – died tragically of congenital heart failure at age 41 in June 1994, the day after “Il Postino” finished shooting at Rome’s Cinecittà studios.

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.

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 Sales agency Memento Intl. has unveiled the first clip and poster from Liu Jian’s Berlin competition title “Art College 1994,” which world premieres on Feb. 24. The film is a portrait of youth set on the campus of the Chinese Southern Academy of Arts in the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of reforms opening China to the Western world, a group of college students live in full swing as they take their first steps into adulthood, where love and friendships are intertwined with artistic pursuits, ideals and ambitions. Caught between tradition and modernity, they now have to choose who they want to become. It is the director’s third animation feature after 2010’s “Piercing I” and “Have a Nice Day,” which premiered in competition at the Berlinale in 2017, and quickly built a cult following. “Have a Nice Day” was also honored with the best animated feature award at the Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan.

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.

Marta Balaga Director: Vita Maria Drygas Producer: Vita Żelakeviciute Production companies: Drygas Film Production Sales: Dogwoof Documentary is a journey to places devastated by military conflicts, seen through the eyes of thrill-seeking tourists. (Generation 14plus) Director: Asaf Saban

Naman Ramachandran Acclaimed “Phantom Thread” actor Vicky Krieps’ latest film, “Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert,” directed by German cinema legend Margarethe von Trotta, has its world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. Krieps plays the titular Austrian Bachmann, one of the most renowned German-language poetry and prose writers of the 20th century. The film follows her life and career and her relationships with Swiss playwright (Ronald Zehrfeld), Austrian author Adolf Opel (Tobias Samuel Resch) and German composer Hans Werner Henze (Basil Eidenbenz) during a six-year period in her life from 1958. The actor was familiar with the writer from her formative years. “I knew about Bachmann because in Germany she’s very famous. I grew up with her in school,” Krieps told Variety. “I was very into poetry when I was younger, so I knew her poetry.” Krieps familiarized herself further with Bachmann’s work once she was cast.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The life of Turkey’s most famous photographer, Ara Guler, known globally for his portraits of scores of 20th century icons ranging from Pablo Picasso to Winston Churchill, is set to become a biopic directed by writer-director duo Aren Perdeci and Ela Almayanac (“Lost Birds”). Guler worked for many years for the photo agency Magnum, after its co-founder, celebrated photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, personally signed him up. Besides documenting top 20th century personalities, Guler, who died in 2018, gained fame for his images of a bygone Istanbul, which earned him the moniker “Istanbul’s Eye.” He established a long collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. Guler’s photographs were included in the 2003 Pamuk book “Istanbul: Memories and the City.” He also directed the 1975 doc “End of the Hero,” about a World War I battle cruiser.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The Berlinale red carpet on Saturday became a protest platform against Iran’s repressive regime when a group of Iranian filmmakers and talents, joined by jury president Kristen Stewart, chanted “Women, Life, Freedom!” and demanded the release of imprisoned journalists and an Iranian rapper. Actress Golshifteh Farahani, who is also on the jury; “Holy Spider” actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi; and “The Siren” director Sepideh Farsi were among dozens of Iranian film professionals participating in the protests hosted by Berlinale co-directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian. Protesters with signs demanded freedom for female Iranian journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi who are behind bars, accused of “conspiring against national security” for being the first to report on Mahsa Amini’s death, and for the release of dissident Iranian hip hop artist Toomaj Salehi who has been accused of spreading propaganda and could face the death penalty.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent The wave of protests sparked across Iran by the death of Mahsa Amini by Iranian morality police in September came amid a banner year for Iranian cinema.  But as 2023 kicks off, more than 500 people who have protested her death and called for justice have been killed while prominent members of the Iranian film industry were either arrested, put on trial or banned from making movies. The result being that the country’s cinematic community has largely ground to a halt.  Which raises the question: unless something changes, how many films actually shot in Iran will be surfacing on the international festival circuit going forward?  

John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Filmax has boarded “The Sleeping Woman,” the new film from Spain’s Laura Alvea, who helmed episodes of Netflix hit series “The Snow Girl,” which has run up over 100 million global views in three weeks. Filmax will present first images of the film, along with a promo, at Berlin’s European Film Market. A horror thriller with supernatural elements, “The Sleeping Woman” turns on Ana (Almudena Amor), a nursing assistant who starts to feel an attraction towards Agustin (Javier Rey), the husband of the woman in a coma whom she’s caring for.  It won’t be long before Ana begins to get harassed by strange, paranormal phenomena that seem to be trying to kick her out of the house and separate her from Agustin.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italy’s Kino Produzioni, the indie shingle that co-produced 2022 Berlin Golden Bear winner “Alcarràs,” is ramping up production with new films by emerging Italian filmmakers Carlo Sironi, Laura Luchetti and Irene Dionisio, as well as also Dutch director Michiel Van Erp and Argentine filmmakers María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat.  “We reached a turning point last year that started out well with the ‘Alcarràs’ victory,” said Kino chief Giovanni Pompili, speaking at the EFM. He noted that in 2022, the Rome-based outfit shot four films, “which for us was pretty challenging, but worked out well.” Meanwhile, the Kino team has grown. Producer Lara Costa-Calzado, who has been working for a decade between the U.S. and Europe on films such as Eliza Hittman’s Silver Bear winner “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” Sally Potter’s “The Roads Not Taken” and Halina Rejin’s “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” has joined Kino as head of production.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Emily Atef, the outspoken French-German filmmaker, may have stepped into a minefield with her latest movie, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” which looks to be one of the Berlinale’s most divisive movies in competition. With such a cute title, one might expect a flowery romance drama, but the movie goes far to break deep-entrenched taboos about female sexuality. Based on Danielle Krein’s novel, the film is set in the summer of 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, in the countryside of former East Germany. Marlene Burow plays Maria, who is about to turn 19, lives with her boyfriend at his parents’ farm. She engages into a passionate and lustful affair with Henner (Felix Kramer), a reclusive neighbor who is twice her age.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The intersection between Black Lives Matter and a COVID-like pandemic plus a standout performance from non-professional actor Mwajemi Hussein is sure to make “The Survival of Kindness” one of Berlin’s most talked-about films. The film is deliberately obscure – the little dialog that is heard involves each performer speaking in a language of their own invention with the meaning known only to that actor and the film’s director, Australia’s Rolf de Heer. And it is minimalist. Character names are purely functional. Location filming was done with a crew of just nine people who walked extensively across Tasmania and the deserts of South Australia and cooked for each other between set-ups.