Berlin 2024

Filmmaker Abel Ferrara takes a personal journey into the heart of Ukraine as he attempts to deal with own confusion about what is happening in the country. Blending interviews with those who have experienced the conflict close up, archival footage and material of Patti Smith recording songs and poetry, Ferrara’s Turn in the Wound is a meanderingly personal examination into the nature of war and oppression.

This year, the European Film Awards ceremony will be held for the first time in Switzerland. The 37th edition of Europe’s leading awards event will be presented Saturday, 7 December 2024 at the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre (KKL Luzern). A varied support programme of screenings, debates and events will be held throughout the year in Switzerland which will take visitors on “a journey of discovery through Swiss and European filmmaking.”

The 2024 Panorama programme comprises 31 titles, ten of which are documentaries (all world premieres). “Essentially, it’s about communicating experiences and realities of life, history, understanding and empathy,” says section head Michael Stütz. “The films in this year’s programme express their attitudes in many voices, building bridges between lived experiences and cinematic possibilities that inspire us to look to the future.”

Direct Action, which world-premiered this week at Berlin, documents the everyday lives within one of the most high-profile militant activist communities in France. The filmmakers’ intentions were straightforward. As co-director Russell puts it, “the goal was to spend time with people we really admired and to spend time in a place that is mysterious, and to understand [it] for ourselves.”

Rotterdam-based filmmaker Sara Rajaei’s City of Poets is a short hybrid work that reflects on the countless inequities suffered by women. It is a film both deeply melancholic and shot through with a magical realist aesthetic. “At the same time the film is addressing something real. Something of our contemporary history and things that I experienced during my childhood and that I still experience. So yes, it is a fairy-tale, but it is about something much larger, much more universal.”

Master docmaker Victor Kossakovsky spoke to Business Doc Europe before the Feb 19 world premiere of his Berlinale Competition pick Architecton, a lyrical, hypnotising and often disturbing documentary on architecture that includes everything from massive landslides to shots of bombed out Ukrainian buildings, from ancient monuments to scenes of Italian architect Michele De Lucchi creating a stone circle in his garden.

Berlinale published February 6 the entire programme of the 2024 festival running 15-25 February. Documentaries are selected across most festival sections, including two in Berlinale Competition (Architecton by Victor Kossakovsky and Dahomey by Mati Diop) and dozens more across the Encounters, Forum, Panorama, Generation, Berlinale Special, Retrospective and Short programmes.

In Subject: Film-making, acclaimed German filmmaker Edgar Reitz, maker of the much-lauded Heimat trilogy and recipient of the Berlinale Camera 2024, reunites with the former pupils of a unique film class he taught at an all-girls school in 1968. Jumping back and forth in time, Reitz’s love of cinema proves remarkably enduring, having marked these enthusiastic students for life.

Earlier this month incumbent DAE executive board members Brigid O’Shea and Julianna Ugrin were re-elected for another 3-year term following the online vote of DAE members. Speaking to Business Doc Europe at Berlinale (where DAE was launched in 2020) O’Shea underlined once more the organisation’s raison d’être. “We are vocal, outspoken and in the ears of decision makers on our members' behalf; we are fighting for the best conditions for documentary filmmaking every day!”

Victor Kossakovsky’s new documentary Architecton, about the architectural use of stone and concrete (and a companion piece to Aquarela, his 2018 doc about water), is beautifully solemn and visually awe-inspiring, even sublime. But it suffers from a muddled narrative. The film is one of two documentaries selected for Berlinale Competition in 2024.