Berlin fest shines again
Oscar nominee Cillian Murphy opened Berlin’s international film festival yesterday with the world premiere of a drama about Ireland’s notorious laundries used as prison camps for “fallen” young women.
Small Things Like These, based on the best-selling novel by Claire Keegan and co-starring Michelle Fairley
(Game of Thrones) and Emily Watson (Chernobyl), is one of 20 pictures vying for the festival’s Golden Bear top prize.
Kenyan-Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o will serve as the first black jury president at the event known as the Berlinale, which is now in its 74th year.
The 11-day showcase, which ranks up with Cannes and Venice among Europe’s top festivals, serves as a key launchpad for films from around the world.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough said the festival’s outgoing director duo, Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, had been dealt a “difficult hand” with the coronavirus pandemic casting a long shadow over the last three years, keeping many US and Asian participants away.
He predicted more “excitement” this year on both the red carpet and at the festival’s sprawling European Film Market, where movie rights are bought and sold for global distribution.
“The old spirit should be back again,” he said.
An eclectic line-up promises a heady mix of A-list stars, hard-hitting political movies and documentaries and quirky arthouse fare to set filmgoers’ hearts a-flutter.
In Small Things Like These, Murphy, who is nominated for an Academy Award next month for the biopic Oppenheimer, reunites with Belgian film-maker Tim Mielants, who directed him in the hit series Peaky Blinders.
Murphy plays a devoted father who unearths shocking secrets about the convent in his town, linked to one of modern Ireland’s biggest scandals: the Magdalene laundries, penitentiary workhouses run by the Roman Catholic church from the 1820s until the 1990s.
Most of the laundries’ residents were ostracised “fallen women” who had become pregnant outside marriage. Others included rape victims, orphans, prostitutes and the disabled.
“We are confident that this story that allies the kindness to be directed to the more fragile, and the willpower to stand up against injustice, will resonate with everyone,” Chatrian said. –