Movie on woman’s fight with unfair society wins Golden Bear
For the first time, the Berlinale awarded a ‘gender neutral’ best acting prize to Germany’s Maren Eggert for her performance in the sci-fi comedy ‘I’m Your Man’
The 71st Berlin film Festival ended on Friday after a pandemic-era edition unlike any before, with the awarding of its Golden Bear best picture prize and its first “gender neutral” acting gongs.
The Romanian director Radu Jude’s ‘ Bad Luck Banging or Loony P**n’, a dark comedy of the everyday aggression experienced by a female teacher in contemporary Bucharest, won the Berlin film Festival’s Golden Bear award.
Judges hailed the film, starring Katia Pascariu as the teacher whose private tape is leaked, triggering a witch hunt by parents of the children at her school, as a “lasting artwork” that had an important message to convey about the Zeitgeist. Israeli director Nadav Lapid announced the award for Jude, one of Eastern Europe’s most acclaimed directors, saying his movie had the “rare and essential quality of a lasting artwork”.
For the first time, the Berlinale awarded a “gender neutral” best acting prize, to Germany’s Maren Eggert for her performance in the sci-fi comedy “I’m Your Man”.
In the film by “Unorthodox” director Maria Schrader, Eggert plays a museum researcher who signs up to test a humanoid robot, played by British actor Dan Stevens from “Downton Abbey” using his fluent German, as a romantic partner.
The runner-up best film gong went to Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi whose “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is made up of three stories of women looking for connection in modern Japan.
Maria Speth’s German documentary “Mr Bachmann and His Class,” about an empathetic teacher on the cusp of retirement who takes pupils from a range of immigrant backgrounds under his wing, claimed the third-place jury prize.
Indiewire said it was “one of the year’s most hopeful movies” while Britain’s Screen Daily said the affable Bachmann seemed like “Bill Murray’s German cousin” with a knack for boosting his pupils’ self-esteem in the face of poverty and discrimination.
Hungary’s Denes Nagy clinched best director for “Natural Light,” a harrowing drama about an atrocity committed by Hungarian soldiers in the Soviet Union during World War II.
Prolific South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang- soo, who won the Berlinale’s best director prize last year, was awarded best screenplay for “Introduction” about young lovers and their feuding families which was set partly in Berlin.
Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios’s Netflix feature “A Cop Movie,” which mixes documentary and narrative techniques to look at the struggles of police work in the country’s capital, won a Silver Bear for artistic contribution.
The festival’s organisers hope to hold a gala awards ceremony in June if pandemic conditions permit.