Berlin Film Festival Faces Future Challenges After In-Person, COVID-Era Edition
The rain came down in a cold drizzle outside the Berlinale Palast on Wednesday night as, inside, Berlin Film Festival jury president M. Night Shyamalan unveiled that Carla Simón’s sun-drenched Spanish drama Alcarràs, had won the 2022 Golden Bear for best film. It was a popular choice — most critics warmed to Simón’s bittersweet tale of a family of Catalan peach farmers taking in their last summer harvest before the farm will be taken over by developers — but the festival itself, much like the Berlin weather, felt somber and grey.
Just holding an in-person festival (last year’s Berlinale was online-only) under the current conditions — Berlin saw a peak in omicron COVID-19 infections during the same period, Feb. 10-16, that the 72nd Berlinale took place — was a phenomenal logistics challenge. Official figures from the Berlinale said it recorded 128 positive COVID cases from 10,938 tests taken at its testing stations around fest hub on Potsdamer Platz. The positive rate of 1.5 percent was lower than that recorded across the city of Berlin as a whole, the festival noted. Overall numbers could rise in the next four days, through Feb. 20, as Berlin holds repeat screenings for local audiences. But from a safety and security point of view, the festival could hardly have done better. The procedures for testing and online booking of tickets and for masking and social-distancing inside theaters were efficient and as unobtrusive as possible given the circumstances.
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“I think we managed to organize a Berlinale in four weeks, which was completely different in format from what we are used to,” Mariette Rissenbeek told THR. “But in terms of the number of screenings and admissions, it all seemed to go in a good way, from an organizational point of view.”
Rissenbeek said admissions for the 2022 Berlinale, including tickets sold to the public and those for accredited journalists and guests, topped 200,000 by Feb. 16, or roughly half of the around 480,000 Berlin sold for the full 10-day event pre-pandemic. Given that cinemas were at half-capacity due to COVID restrictions and, as co-director Carlo Chatrain points out, “we have fewer films per day,” it looks like the Berlin audience embraced this COVID-era fest.
“This is not the Berlinale we anticipated having when we were planning it last summer, but compared to the situation we had one month ago, I think it’s a great achievement,” Chatrain said. “I think it’s an important signal to the film industry that it is possible to have a festival even in pandemic times [it’s] important for the city of Berlin as a signal to keep cultural life alive [and] it can be an important signal for the festivals to come after us.”
But as a celebration of the return of cinema, Berlin 2022 was a bit of a damp squib.
When he kicked off this year’s Berlinale last week, Chatrain said the 2022 festival would be a “return to reality. Maybe not as glittery, maybe not as big … but very much real.” So maybe it was appropriate that there were few stars on the Berlin red carpet. Emma Thompson and Juliette Binoche, in town for Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and Both Sides of the Blade, respectively, were the only two true A-listers. Isabelle Huppert, who was to be honored with a lifetime achievement honorary Golden Bear on Tuesday, tested positive for COVID-19 and had to stay in Paris. Positive test results also meant Isabelle Adjani and Hanna Schygulla missed Berlin’s opening night gala and world premiere screening of Francois Ozon’s Peter Von Kant.
There were no studio or streamer blockbusters on offer, not even out of competition. Nothing to match Denis Villeneuve’s Dune or Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog in Venice or Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and out-of-competition F9: The Fast Saga premiere in Cannes. The sole studio film was Graham Moore’s chamber piece The Outfit starring Mark Rylance, a Universal production. Netflix sent Against the Ice, an English-language Scandi survival drama starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones). Both, screening out of competition, were well received, but neither is tentpole material.
“Many of the films we had in discussion with the studios in summer and fall saw their plans disrupted [because of the pandemic], and it became more complicated,” said Chatrain. “We can only select the films that are available, and it’s pretty clear that last year and this year, many productions were impacted by the pandemic. Every year I try with the selection to give an image of cinema and an image of the world. And I’m happy with the image we gave this year: It was very diverse, very modern. I’m happy to see 7 out of 9 of the main awards last night went to women, and the winning films were well received by your colleagues. But we’re not living in an ideal world.”
It would be unfair to judge Chatrain and co-director Rissenbeek based on their first three years running the Berlinale. In addition to dealing with a global pandemic, the duo has had to adjust to timetable shifts as the Oscars moved back and forth on the calendar. Their debut festival in 2020 was in late February, after the Academy Awards. The same plan for 2021 —starting the Berlinale on March 1, the week after the 93rd Oscars — was disrupted when the Academy shifted their event to April 26, citing COVID concerns. Holding an international festival in the weeks between Oscar nominations and the ceremony, and trying to attract top stars away from award campaigning to walk the red carpet in Berlin, is a thankless task. Berlin hasn’t set its dates for 2023 yet but, while Chatrain said they “don’t want to conflict with the Oscars” he admitted they can’t be as flexible in their dates as festivals (like Cannes) which don’t have to work around the schedules of a major metropolitan city. “We’re not planning to radically change the dates [for Berlin 2023],” he noted.
A repeat of last year’s summer festival is not in the cards.
“The city and the [Berlin] audiences really like the summer event,” said Rissenbeek. “But last June was a special case. We had all in-person premieres [of films shown in the online festival]. That won’t happen again. If we do something in summer, it won’t be a big premiere event.”
The downbeat feel at the Berlin festival this year contrasted with the optimism and bustling business of Berlin’s European Film Market. Virtual again this year, the EFM racked up a record deal —Sony Pictures’ $60 million worldwide buyout of Tom Hanks project A Man Called Otto —and there was strong business across the board, with international distributors betting on a box office bounce back post-pandemic.
But the growing gap between the mostly mainstream productions on offer at EFM and an increasingly art house and esoteric official selection is a troubling sign for those who would like Berlin to use the festival as a platform for marketing and distribution. The first two Golden Bear winners under the Chatrain/Rissenbeek regime —Mohammad Rasoulof’s powerful Iranian drama There Is No Evil (2020), and Radu Jude’s madcap Romanian mash-up Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn (2021) —failed to cross over, even to arthouse audiences. There Is No Evil grossed around $755,000 worldwide, thanks almost entirely to a successful French release, where the film earned around $659,000. Bad Luck Banging took just $72,000 in its initial U.S. release via Magnolia Pictures, and $450,000 worldwide.
Admittedly, it’s a small sample size, and global disruptions to the indie film industry over the past two years, with cinemas shut and viewing increasingly shifting online, makes it hard to draw any conclusions. It’s also the case that Berlin is not really known for picking box office champs. Nadav Lapid’s 2019 Golden Bear winner Synonyms earned just $500,000 in theaters worldwide. Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, the 2018 Berlin winner, grossed less than $100,000 globally. But in a rapidly-changing independent film industry, where theatrical releases for indie films are increasingly scarce and studio blockbusters taking up larger and larger shares of the global box office, it’s fair to ask: what is the Berlinale for?
Under its new duo, Berlin has come to resemble the Locarno Film Festival, where Chatrain was artistic director from 2012-2018. A place to discover and celebrate “aesthetically and structurally daring works from independent, innovative filmmakers” —the stated goal of the Encounters section, the new competition sidebar Chatrain introduced after taking over in Berlin. But Berlin, like the other two top European festivals, Venice and Cannes, was always also an event designed to promote and celebrate mainstream films that have distribution in place, a spot for junkets and paparazzi star photos. Touch Me Not, arguably the most radical film ever to win Berlin, came in a year that also saw the likes of bold faced names Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Robert Pattinson, Joaquin Phoenix, Bryan Cranston, Claire Foy, and Daniel Brühl walk the Berlinale red carpet. (As well as 2022 no-show Isabelle Huppert and Hanna Schygulla).
Berlin, over the past three years, has yet to match that sort of star power. But Chatrain insists he wants bigger and more mainstream movies at his festival.
“It would be my pleasure to include this films, either in a special screening or gala or in competition,” he told THR, noting that his first Berlin in charge, in 2020, included the “world premiere of a Disney film [Onward]. “[Post-pandemic] we hope we can come back to a more normal situation,” he said. And include more blockbusters on the program.
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