‘Alcarràs’ Wins High Prize at Berlin Movie Pageant

The runner-up prize was given to the prolific South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo for “The Novelist’s Movie,” a delicate, conversation-driven drama centered on a collection of encounters by a author fascinated by making a film. Hong had received the award for greatest director on the Berlinale (because the competition is thought in Germany) solely two years in the past. A particular jury prize was awarded to “Gown of Gems,” a debut movie set in rural Mexico from the director Natalia López.

The award for greatest director was given to Claire Denis for “Each Sides of the Blade,” a searing melodrama starring Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon. Laila Stieler received one of the best screenplay award for the German movie “Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush,” a forceful drama a couple of Turkish-German lady’s real-life authorized battle to have her son launched from detention in Guantánamo Bay. The latter movie additionally garnered the competition’s greatest lead actor award for Meltem Kaptan, a Cologne-based comic who portrayed Kurnaz. Greatest supporting actor was given to Laura Basuki of “Earlier than, Now & Then,” for enjoying a girl who befriends her lover’s spouse in Sixties Indonesia.

This 12 months’s competition had been dominated by considerations concerning the coronavirus. Not like the Sundance Film Festival, which moved on-line in January, the Berlinale, co-directed by Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek, caught with an in-person occasion, together with crimson carpets, information conferences and public screenings, albeit with lowered capacities and stringent testing and masks protocols. (In a compromise, the competition’s commerce truthful, the European Movie Market, was moved on-line.)

The choice prompted pushback from some observers, who nervous that, regardless of the measures, the competition would spur infections and burden Berlin’s hospitals amid a wave of Omicron circumstances of the coronavirus. In a commentary for RBB, a public broadcaster, one critic argued that attending the competition could be akin to enjoying a recreation of Russian roulette. Writing in the newspaper Die Zeit, one other commentator, the journalist Wenke Husmann, argued that the choice “sounded prefer it was making a mockery” of public well being considerations.

Correspondingly, the temper on the opening gala final week was subdued and a contact defensive, with organizers, politicians and leisure figures making impassioned pleas from the stage concerning the significance of going to the films. In a speech, the German tradition minister, Claudia Roth, argued that the expertise of attending film theaters was vital for social cohesion and democracy, and that, “With out this, we don’t simply lose each other, we lose ourselves.”