Berlin 2024

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.

Director David Hinton talks to Business Doc Europe about the great filmmaking duo responsible for The Red Shoes, A Matter Of Life And Death and The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, and their influence on Martin Scorsese who both collaborated on and narrated Hinton’s new film Made In England, which screened this week as a Berlinale Special.

Additionally, Direct Action by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell won Best Film in Encounters, while the Berlinale Documentary Award went to No Other Land by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor. Faruk by Aslı Özge won the Panorama Fipresci Award while Teaches of Peaches won the Teddy for Best Doc. All doc awards…

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.”

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.

Exiled Iranian director Farahnaz Sharifi talks to Business Doc Europe about her film which tells a parallel history of Iran since the 1979 revolution, culled from personal archives. “At a time when power structures strive to narrate history in ways that hide important and popular segments, it becomes all the more crucial to share personal details and micro-narratives,” says Farahnaz. Sold by CAT&Docs, My Stolen Planet world premieres February 21.

Told in five distinct acts that span the period between the Prague Spring of 1968 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Klára Tasovská’s I’m Not Everything I Want to Be chronicles the journey towards both artistic freedom and sexual liberation undertaken by renowned Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková. Her story is told using approximately 3000 still photographs and the diaries she kept from those years.

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.”

Legendary Bronx-born US indie director Abel Ferrara was in Berlin this weekend with his new feature doc Turn In The Wound (screening as a Berlinale special). The film offers a portrait of the Ukrainian people at war and includes testimony about their horrific experiences after the full-scale invasion. “I don’t believe in the devil but when you read about and see these things up front, close up and personal, you’ve got to entertain the idea [that evil exists],” he tells BDE.

BDE spoke to Stefan Kloos, veteran doc producer (Last Men in Aleppo, Holy Cow, Hi, A.I.) and head of Rise & Shine. Founded in 2007, the German sales agency has gradually emerged as one of the leading industry players marketing and selling high-quality documentary films to broadcasters and local distributors around the world. During our chat, Kloos zoomed in on the two main titles of his company’s line-up and shared his take on the current state of the non-fiction market.