Berlin 2022

Myanmar Diaries wins Berlinale Doc Award. Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to Rithy Panh for Everything Will Be Ok. Encounters Best Film: Mutzenbacher. Encounters Jury Award to See You Friday, Robinson. In Generation, key winners are Kind Hearts (Grand Prix of the Generation 14plus), Alis (Crystal Bear for Best Film, 14Plus) and Born in Damascus (Crystal Bear for Best Film, 14Plus).

Eleven highly diverse docs are selected for a 2022 Berlinale Forum Main Programme designed to demonstrate the pull of precisely observed matter. “However much the pandemic may have paralysed life in our societies, filmmakers worldwide have lost none of their inventiveness and artistic desire. The works…are a dazzling demonstration of this,” say festival programmers.

Rithy Panh’s Everything Will Be OK won a Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution in Berlin earlier this week. It’s a bleak essayistic documentary which uses both archive material and clay figurines to tell a story of cruelty and destruction. The Oscar-nominated Cambodian filmmaker discusses his documentary with Business Doc Europe.

Rithy Panh’s Everything Will Be Ok in Main Competition, three world premiere documentaries in Encounters and six docs in Berlinale Special section, including Lucrecia Martel’s Terminal norte (North Terminal) and a world prem of Andrew Dominik’s This Much I Know To Be True, with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Swedish director Magnus Gertten’s film, also nominated for the Berlinale Documentary Award, “exemplifies the necessity of queer history and queer collective memory of World War II while providing long-needed recognition of the forgotten victims and survivors of the Holocaust,” says the jury citation. The TEDDY AWARDS combine a network of over 180 queer film festivals from across the world.

With no Doc Salon in 2022, Dennis Ruh, Director of the European Film Market, and Martina Valentina Baumgartner, EFM Documentary Coordinator, answer questions posed by Business Doc Europe about how they plan to tackle docs, the needs of doccers and all issues pertaining to the documentary sector during the upcoming edition, running 10-17 February.

Young German docmaker Sarah Noa Bozenhardt has been at Berlin this week as part of the “Face To Face With German Films” event highlighting 7 up-and-coming young German talents. It was also an opportunity for Bozenhardt to talk up her recent film Among Us Women, which premiered in DOK Leipzig International Competition 2022. And as she reveals to BDE, she also grew up in the circus.

The first film selected for Berlinale from the Central African Republic, We, Students! is a complex study both of the country’s youth and a university education system which is both physically rundown and seemingly blighted by corruption. Director Rafiki and producer Boris Lojkine speak to Business Doc Europe.

Love, Deutschmarks and Death…it sounds like the title of one of those acerbic Fassbinder melodramas of the 1970s. In fact, this is the name of the new feature documentary from director Cem Kaya about the Turkish music scene in Germany and which, last month, won the Berlinale’s Panorama Audience Award. Kaya gets musical with Business Doc Europe.

Two years on from the Documentary Association of Europe (DAE) launch at Berlinale 2020, co-directors Brigid O’Shea and Marion Schmidt remind Business Doc Europe of the association’s raison d’être, explain its modus operandi, underline the importance of docfests both as thought hubs and venues for business/creative interaction, and give an overview of DAE activities during Berlin 2022.