‘Suzume’ Director Shinkai Makoto on Hand-Drawn Animation and the Importance of Original Stories

Yoko Okumara: Growing up in Minneapolis as a Japanese-American immigrant kid. Directing was the farthest thing from my mind and my imagination couldn’t go there. It’s not like I ever saw a Scorsese film and was like, “I could be him someday.” Nobody who looked like me did this job, so, to me, it was really the love of the camera.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Sculptor turned director Wu Lang made a splash at the Berlin Film Festival with his debut feature “Absence” playing in the festival’s showcase Encounters section. With a high-profile cast headed by Lee Kang-sheng (“What Time Is It There?” “The Wayward Cloud”) and Li Meng (“The Bad Kids,” “The Guillotines”) “Absence” is an art-house romance that uses skyscapes and urban landscapes as metaphors for inner feelings. The seduction starts with a man’s return to Hainan Island after ten years in jail and ends with a flock of sheep in an abandoned construction site. Wu: Shooting the first short film for me had two purposes. First, making a film is not easy in terms of financing and finding coproducers. So, first I wanted to make a short in order to get myself started.

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor To director Mira Fornay, there are no three things more important in life than trees, water and children. And with “She-Hero,” playing as part of the Generation strand at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival, the Slovakian filmmaker gathers all three in telling the story of Romy (Rozmarína Willems), a young girl who embarks on a grand forest adventure in search of her lost budgie, Mimi. Fornay, who won the Intl. Film Festival Rotterdam Tiger Award in 2013 with her sophomore feature “My Dog Killer,” did not originally set out to make a children’s film, but was fascinated by the natural charisma of Willems. “I already knew Romy and she is immensely photogenic, but I didn’t know if she could act as well. So I tried working with her back when she was six, and she was just amazing. When COVID hit, I realized I had to shoot quickly otherwise she would grow. This is why I wrote a story for her.”

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Tapping into the Japanese national zeitgeist once again with “Suzume,” writer-director Makoto Shinkai surpasses his peers in making films for and about teenagers. Now 50 years old, the anime master christened his latest blockbuster after its heroine, Suzume Iwato (voiced by Nanoka Hara), a 17-year-old orphan on the southwestern island of Kyushu swept up in a cross-country trip to prevent a series of natural disasters. That such a responsibility should fall to someone so young is typical of his oeuvre (see “Weathering With You”), but also an apt way of illustrating the lingering trauma and vulnerability that adolescents feel in many parts of Japan. Funnier and more streamlined than Shinkai’s earlier hypercharged toon epics, “Suzume” is a massive hit in its home country, where it has earned more than $100 million since opening last November — his third film to pass that milestone. The film made its international premiere at the Berlinale, one of two animated features in official competition (the other being Chinese director Liu Jian’s “Art College 1994”). Theatrical releases are scheduled to follow in most countries on or around April 13.

With her feature debut, “The Chambermaid,” Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés materialized a graceful character study of a hardworking mother. Though enriched via the meaningful interjections of its supporting players, the narrative had a singular focus.

Actor John Malkovich is in Berlin to debut his latest pic Seneca – On the Creation of Earthquakes, and during a press conference Monday, he spoke to reporters about his relationship with his co-star, Julian Sands, who has been missing since January.

The audiences at Berlin International Film Festival tend to be respectful and engaged.

Israeli director Guy Nattiv has defended his casting of non-Jewish actress Helen Mirren as iconic Israeli Prime minister Golda Meir in his biopic Golda, which world premieres at the Berlin Film Festival on Monday.

She's brings smiles to faces of fans while presenting on This Morning and on Sunday night Alison Hammond had a new gig. The TV favourite joined legendary actor Richard E. Grant at London's Royal Festival Hall to host the BAFTA Film Awards 2023.

As the 73rd Berlin Film Festival rolls into its first weekend, one of the buzziest titles on the ground is the taut political thriller Reality, starring Euphoria and White Lotus breakout Sydney Sweeney.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Paris-based Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese says making the Berlin Film Festival competition cut with his first feature, “Disco Boy,” which toplines German star Franz Rogowski (“Passages,” ”Undine”), is “certainly a dream come true.” But he also points out that his remarkable debut was a long time coming.  A graduate of several film schools, including France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy, Abbruzzese started developing “Disco Boy” in 2013 following an encounter in a French disco with a classical dancer who had been a soldier.  

Shayeza Walid Acclaimed New York-based theater director Tina Satter has worked on productions on and off Broadway for more than a decade. Now, in her first ever venture into film, Satter makes her directorial debut with “Reality,” starring Sydney Sweeney, based on Satter’s play “Is This a Room.” The film premiered Saturday at the Berlin Film Festival with Variety critic Jessica Kiang calling it a “clever, gripping docudrama.” For Satter, who co-wrote the screenplay with James Paul Dallas, making this movie was always in the books. The film, based on the real-life FBI interrogation transcript of whistleblower Reality Winner, is one Satter could envision the first time she came across the documents of the conversation between Winner and the Federal Bureau.

Colm Bairéad’s appearance at Deadline’s Contenders: The Nominees event marks a year since his film The Quiet Girl first debuted at the Berlin Film Festival. A dual release in the UK and Ireland followed in May, and a slow international rollout has kept the director busy ever since. Indeed, as the film’s Oscar campaign enters the final stretch, The Quiet Girl is only now going wide across America: not bad going for a film with no stars that’s shot almost entirely in Irish, a language spoken by fewer than 2 million people worldwide.

Martin Dale Contributor Portuguese director Susana Nobre’s first scripted fiction film, “Cidade Rabat,” is about a producer who grew up in the Cidade Rabat neighborhood in Lisbon, and who suddenly has to come to terms with the death of her mother. The title is partly inspired by her own life, since she grew up in the “Cidade Rabat” district of Benfica in Lisbon. Much of the action takes place in the nearby mixed-race neighborhood, Reboleira. Nobre describes the film as a “melancholic comedy about a woman who is about to turn 40, whose life enters a period of chaos when she loses her mother and suddenly lives a second adolescence.” There is a nostalgic feel to the film, of a district that was once brimming with energy but is now crumbling. This nostalgia is mixed with hope for a new life, embodied by the main character Helena’s 12-year old daughter, for which Nobre cast her own daughter.  

Jessica Kiang It is not unprecedented to have a Sundance-premiering film play in the Berlinale competition. Yet director Celine Song’s journey with “Past Lives,” which received raves in Park City and makes its international bow in Berlin, feels like a fresh phenomenon. She’s a first-time filmmaker. Her movie has no big names. And it is unapologetically personal. Breakthrough status suits Song, who told Variety, “Everything I do, I have to believe it is the first time I’m doing that kind of thing.” Her recent resumé bears that out: Since her Off Broadway play “Endlings” closed early due to the pandemic, she has written for Amazon’s “The Wheel of Time” and mounted a production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” entirely within the Sims 4 universe on Twitch. 

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.

Ed Meza @edmezavar Lars Kraume, who explores Germany’s 19th-century, bloody colonization of Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) in his latest work, “Measures of Men,” has lined up his next project, a feature film inspired by a California prison program that brings together young inmates with aging prisoners suffering from dementia. Developed at the California Men’s Colony State Prison in San Luis Obispo, the Gold Coat program selects inmates, known as Gold Coats, to assist severely cognitively impaired inmates. Kraume’s story is set in a Berlin prison with a multi-ethnic population, where a young man signs up for the program in an effort to get early parole only to realize that he has first the first time in his life started to love and care for someone.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky and the production team behind his Oscar-shortlisted feature “Gunda” will follow up with the second instalment in his “Empathy Trilogy.” AC Independent will handle the North America sale and Cinephil will be selling international rights. They will be kicking off sales this week at the European Film Market in Berlin. The new film focuses on the health of the oceans and the effects of industrial fisheries. The “Empathy Trilogy,” of which “Gunda” formed the first part, looks at the sentience of non-human animals.

Christopher Vourlias “Perpetrator,” director Jennifer Reeder’s provocative new horror noir that she describes as a “celebration of the girl gone wild,” world premieres Feb. 17 in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival. Written and directed by Reeder, “Perpetrator” follows an impulsive teenage girl who must unlock a mysterious power to survive when the young women in her town continue to go missing. The film stars Kiah McKirnan (“Mare of Easttown”), Christopher Lowell (“My Best Friend’s Exorcism”), Melanie Liburd (“The Idol”), Ireon Roach (“Candyman”), and Alicia Silverstone (“Clueless”). It is produced by Gregory Chambet for WTFilms and Derek Bishé for Divide/Conquer.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Brazilian animated feature “Perlimps,” Alê Abreu’s follow up to Oscar-nominated “Boy and the World,” has been sold in key territories by Best Friend Forever ahead of the European Film Market. “Perlimps” has been picked up for Japan (Child Film and New Deer), China (DDDream), CIS and baltics (Kinologistica), Sweden (Njutafilm) and Portugal (Films4you). BFF is in advanced discussions to close German Speaking territories, Benelux, Spain, Italy and North America. As previously announced, UFO Distribution will release the feature in France. “Perlimps” was just released last week in Brazil by leading independent outfit Vitrine Filmes and Sony Pictures, which holds Latin American rights.