How festival films reflect pandemic
– The 71st Berlin film festival awarded its Golden Bear top prize yesterday to Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn by Romania’s Radu Jude, a satire skewering pandemic-era social hypocrisy with the story of a teacher whose sex tape winds up on the internet.
This year’s event was held online for critics and industry buyers but judged by a jury made up of previous winners, who watched the 15 contenders in a specially reserved cinema in the German capital.
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 festival 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 festival’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 organisers hope to hold a gala awards ceremony in June if pandemic conditions permit.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, part of Romania’s vaunted new wave of cinema, makes the case that corruption, pettiness and discrimination are more obscene than graphic sex.
Opening with a real-looking hardcore porn video, it was perhaps the most daring of this year’s films in competition.