At the prize ceremony of the 75th Berlin Film Festival the Berlinale Documentary Award (€40,000) was won by Brandon Kramer (see below) for Holding Liat, produced by Darren Aronofsky, Lance Kramer, Yoni Brook, Ari Handel and Justin A. Gonçalves. In the film, Liat is one of the hostages taken on October 7 2023. The film follows her relatives from right up close, with a focus on her father, as he tries to stay on the path of pacifism and humanity amidst war, trauma and diplomacy.
Special Mentions in the Berlinale Documentary Award were given to La memoria de las mariposas (The Memory of Butterflies) by Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski and Canone effimero by Gianluca De Serio and Massimiliano De Serio.
The Panorama Audience Award was won by Martina Priessner for Die Möllner Briefe (The Moelln Letters). In the film, 30 years after the racist attacks in Mölln, survivor İbrahim Arslan discovers hundreds of forgotten letters of solidarity. The film follows him and his family in their struggle to foster a new, victim-centred culture of remembrance.
The Teddys Best Documentary/Essay Film went to Rosa von Praunheim for Satanische Sau (Satanic Sow).Rosa von Praunheim is the satanic sow, incarnated by the wanton actor Armin Dallapiccola. A poetic compendium of life and death with pushy fans, the Good Lord, lovers and Rosa’s horrified mother.
The Golden Bear for Best Short Film was won by the short doc Lloyd Wong, Unfinished by Lesley Loksi Chan. In the 1990s, Chinese-Canadian artist Lloyd Wong began a video work about his living with HIV. It remained unfinished. Thirty years after his death, filmmaker Lesley Loksi Chan discovers and edits the material.
In Generation Kplus, Julia Lemke and Anna Koch’s Zirkuskind (Circusboy) received a Special Mention. In the film, Santino is a circus kid. He travels round the country with his family and animals, and is here today, there tomorrow. His great-grandfather tells him stories from the past. As the old man looks back on his life, Santino’s is just beginning.
Talking to Business Doc Europe during Berlinale, Holding Liat director Brandon Kramer remembered a few “key moments” which led to him taking on this project. He is a distant relative of Yehuda and Chaya, the parents of the kidnalled Liat Beinin Atzili. On a trip to Israel years ago with his brother and filmmaking partner Lance Kramer, he stayed with them on the kibbutz and he also stayed with their daughter Tai, Liat’s younger sister, in Tel Aviv.
“They were our introduction to Israel. We had a relationship with them.”
After Liat and her husband Avid were taken captive, Kramer called Yehuda and Chaya just to offer their support and ask what they could do to help. “It became clear from that phone call that Yehuda was not getting the responses that he wanted from the Israeli government. He was going to travel to the United States to our home town, Washington DC, to advocate for Liat and Aviv’s release.”
As Yehuda and Chaya were “thrust into the epicentre of this geopolitical crisis,” Kramer realised it would be “important to document what they were going through.”
“We didn’t know that we were making a feature film at all. We just felt a historic obligation to film these early moments.”
It wasn’t until Yehuda and Chaya arrived in the States with various other close relatives in tow that the Kramers realised that there was material here for a movie. Each member of the family had their own “unique political view.” They were facing “an unfathomably horrible situation.” The filmmakers decided that telling their story could help others try to make sense of the ongoing tragedy.
This is classic verité filmmaking. Kramer records the meetings between tech Israelis and the prominent US politicians in a way that rekindles memories of celebrated direct cinema docs like Robert Drew’s Primary (1960).
“It became very clear to us at the beginning of this film that this was a story about this one family. That frame was such a critical rule for us when telling the story…there are obviously thousands of families suffering in Gaza and elsewhere from this conflict [but] we felt the lens of our film, the story we had to tell, was of this one family,” Kramer states. “That allowed a level of intimacy. When you’re a verité filmmaker, you have only one camera. It allowed us to hone in on each of the relatives and try to reach a level of depth with them.”
