Berlin

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeTreasure, a gentle character-based drama starring Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham, addresses the Holocaust very differently to other recent films, among them Jonathan Glazer’s stark and terrifying The Zone of Interest or Bianca Stigter’s equally disturbing archive-based Three Minutes – A Lengthening. The film, adapted from Lily Bret’s novel and a world premiere at the Berlin Festival this…

Writer-director Aaron Schimberg has created a diverting, if contrived, noir satire-parable about the faces we prepare to meet the faces that we meet. I’m not sure that, finally, it says as much as it thinks it’s saying, and I’m also not sure if the resemblance to early Woody Allen is intentional or not. But it is arresting and challenging with an exhilarating performance from Adam Pearson, from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and whom Schimberg has in fact already directed in his previous feature Chained For Life.The…

Sasha Nathwani is a UK-based director of award-winning short films, of Iranian and Indian heritage, stepping up here to his feature debut. It opens the Generation strandin Berlin and is a sweet-natured, heartfelt and earnestly acted film; a little precious maybe, but saved from emo-sentimentalism by irreverent humour and a wittily self-aware final image of his leading actor’s face.Last Swim is the story of Ziba, played by Deba Hakmat, an Iranian-British teen who has just stormed her A-levels and landed a place at…

As well as everything else, this wonderfully sweet and funny film will contribute to the debate about whether repressive regimes are the nursery of artistic greatness. The Iranian government has prevented the film’s two directors, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, from travelling to Berlin to attend their own premiere; six months ago, their production offices were raided and computers and hard drives confiscated. But, fortunately, the police couldn’t find the film itself, whose gentle humanity is a compelling rebuke…

To prepare for her role in From Hilde, With Love, a Nazi-era period drama that premieres at the Berlin film festival on Saturday, actor Liv Lisa Fries met the person she would have to cradle in her arms as a baby.In the film, by veteran German director Andreas Dresen, Fries plays Hilde Coppi, an anti-fascist resistance fighter who was arrested for treason by the Gestapo and sentenced to death along with her husband Hans. ‘It was immense, the sense of responsibility I felt’ … Liv Lisa Fries. Photograph: Tristar…

As producer and lead actor, Cillian Murphy has brought to the screen a piercingly painful and sad story with a very literary intensity, juxtaposing the detail of the present with flashback memories of the past. It is about Ireland’s notorious Magdalene Laundries: the church’s homes for unwed mothers who were made to work in an atmosphere of wretchedness and shame and had their babies taken away and sold to foster parents. Enda Walsh has adapted the much admired novel by Claire Keegan and the director is Tim Mielants.This…

Matt Damon first heard about Small Things Like These, the latest effort from his and Ben Affleck’s Artists Equity, while filming Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, working opposite Cillian Murphy. “I was out in the New Mexican desert with Cillian. I was sitting across from him, watching what he was doing in Oppenheimer,” remembers Damon during a press conference at the Berlin Film Festival, where the film is acting as the fest opener. “I had already called Ben and told him what I was witnessing and how…

The most political of the big international film festivals is bracing for an even more “spicy” edition than usual, Berlinale jury president Lupita Nyong’o said, as geopolitical tensions bubbled to the surface during the opening press conference.Berlin traditionally prides itself on its status as the most argumentative of the big three European film festivals, but this year’s event is being buffeted by multiple storms. Bloodshed in the Middle East, the rise of far right parties across Europe, as well as a war in Ukraine…

Learning about the abuses of the church in the “dysfunctional Christian society” of 1980s Ireland amounted to a “collective trauma” that has still not been fully processed, actor Cillian Murphy said as a new film set against the backdrop of the Magdalene Laundries scandal premiered at the Berlin film festival.In Small Things Like These, the Oppenheimer star plays Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man who accidentally becomes aware of abuse happening at the local convent in New Ross, southwest County Wexford,…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeWatch live as Cillian Murphy attends a press conference for Berlins International Film Festival, known as ‘Berlinale.’After landing a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the Irish actor is in Berlin on Thursday, 15 February, for the opening night premiere of his latest film.The Oscar nominee will open the Berlin festival with the world premiere ‘Small…