For the first time at Berlin Critics’ Week, we will be showing a series of films as Special Screenings, which will complement the official film selection and our debates. These programs will expand our discussions; they also underscore the openness towards historical films of the curatorial approach at this year’s festival. Additionally, from February 24 to 26, the official programs of Berlin Critics’ Week can be viewed as re-runs. With the exception of those re-runs, all of our film programs are open to anyone accredited for the Berlinale.

In 2020, the author Anatol Regnier published Jeder schreibt für sich allein, a book that examines the life and work of writers in Nazi Germany. In collaboration with Regnier, Dominik Graf, Constantin Lieband (script), and Felix von Boehm (production) have adapted this book into a polyphonic essay film of the same name (intl. title: Melting Ink) – almost three hours in duration – that takes a meticulous look at the contradictory biographies of Hans Fallada, Gottfried Benn, Erich Kästner, Ina Seidel and Will Vesper. What made critical authors like Kästner, whose books were burned, decide not to emigrate after the fascist seizure of power? Which now-respected artists actually sympathized with the Nazis at the time? What internal and external contradictions were posed by the experience of living and working under the regime, not only for authors but also for institutions like Berlin’s Akademie der Künste? The film makes extensive use of interviews with the likes of editor, author and publisher Florian Illies, art critic and historian Julia Voss and film producer Günter Rohrbacher. Running all the way into the present, it thematizes the trust placed in art and artists – and, ultimately, the complicated relationship between aesthetic positions and political actions.

Masao Adachi’s 1969 film AKA Serial Killer is a cinematic investigation of the places in the life of Norio Nagayama, who in 1968 at the age of 19 murdered four people in different Japanese cities using a gun he had stolen from a U.S. military army base. Masao Adachi was well recognized at the time for his collaborations with Nagisa Ōshima and Kōji Wakamatsu in addition to his own projects. He used Nagayama’s biography as a starting point for the cinematic realization – achieved together with cultural theorist Masao Matsuda and screenwriter Mamoru Sasaki – of the fūkeiron theory of landscape in film: This theory adopts a Marxist perspective on the effects of (urban) landscape on the individual. It examines how power relations are concretely manifested in a place and the people that live there, and asks how these relations might be exposed through the camera. In the film, Adachi, Matsuda and Sasaki (and the other artists they collaborated with) interpret Nagayama’s actions in decidedly political terms, taking them to be the result of forms of social oppression in Japan. To the sounds of an intense free-jazz score, they chart the trajectory of a young man who responded to capitalism’s profound transformations with violence. Yet they intentionally avoid portraying his acts, focusing instead on the violent nature of the landscape itself.

Both of these films, building off our film program Reaction Shot, add depth to a broader debate about the possibilities – and responsibilities – of art as it uses aesthetic means to respond explicitly to political developments and social phenomena.

During the closing night of this year’s Berlin Critics Week we will discuss resistance and tenderness in film aesthetics under the title Softly Surreal. In conjunction with the evening we will show two additional films by Lucía Seles, Weak Rangers and Saturdays Disorders, in a matinée on Sunday, February 26. Seles has designed these as sequels to her ensemble film Smog in Your Heart, which will be screened at Critics Week on February 23. All three films center on the trials and tribulations of a seemingly unremarkable tennis court complex and its operators, all presented in a daring cinematic form. With her radical editing choices and an edgy choreography, Seles reinvents the genre of absurd comedy from the ground up.

Cooperative Program: Artistic Differences – Ghosts of a Damned Earth

This year, building on an initiative by the festival organizer Cíntia Gil, we are cooperating for the first time with the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art in New York. Since July 2022, the Artistic Differences program series has been hosting international debates and film screenings in collaboration with film festivals around the world such as the Open City Documentary Festival, FICValdivia and the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival. At the heart of the series is an engagement with challenging films and artists who address questions of collective development and forms of togetherness. Within the framework of Artistic Differences, Cíntia Gil and Victor Guimarães (film critic and member of the 2023 Berlin Critics’ Week selection committee) have curated a program of four films – all of which run counter to simplistic ideas about contemporary history – that will be screened at this year’s festival: Ghosts of a Damned Earth.

Lavra Dor (1968) features Brazilian plantation workers on the eve of agricultural reform and the military coup of 1964: Paulo Rufino and Ana Carolina adopt the words of poet Mário Chamie and make cinema into a means of critique, as their film calls into question the political conditions of its time. Today, the film challenges our own attitude towards history. In O Tigre e a Gazela (1977), Aloysio Raulino brings texts from Frantz Fanon to bear on images of drunk, homeless and dreaming people in a Direct Cinema style until questions about inequality and social progress begin to emerge from faces, gestures, bodies and movements. Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade undertakes a profound examination of the history of slavery in Brazil with The White Death of the Black Wizard (2020), which employs stylistic devices from the horror genre to develop an impactful essay form. The fourth film in the program will be announced shortly.

Re-run screenings at Berlin Critics’ Week

From February 24 to 26, several films and programs from Berlin Critics’ Week will be shown again as re-runs. These repeat screenings will take place without guests and discussions; seating will be significantly reduced. Berlinale accreditations are not valid on these dates. Free access for members of the industry is possible by prior arrangement.

All Special Screenings at a glance

FR 17 Feb
5 PM
ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES: GHOSTS OF A DAMNED EARTH

LAVRA DOR
Dir: Ana Carolina, Paulo Rufino, BR 1968, 10 min.

O TIGRE E A GAZELA
Dir: Aloysio Raulino, BR 1977, 14 min.

WHITE DEATH OF THE BLACK WIZARD
Dir: Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, BR 2020, 11 min.

SA 18 Feb
4 PM

MELTING INK (JEDER SCHREIBT FÜR SICH ALLEIN)
Dir: Dominik Graf, DE/FR 2023, 167 min. – World premiere

TH 21 Feb
5.30 PM

AKA SERIAL KILLER
Dir: Masao Adachi, JP 1969, 86 min.

SU 26 Feb
10.30 AM

SATURDAYS DISORDERS
Dir: Lucía Seles, AR 2022, 97 min. – International premiere

SU 26 Feb
12.45 PM

WEAK RANGERS
Dir: Lucía Seles, AR 2022, 126 min. – International premiere

All Re-runs at a glance

FR 24 Feb
6 PM

THE FILM TO COME (LE FILM A VENIR)
Dir: Raúl Ruiz, FR/CH 1987, 8 min.
 
MOON NIGHT
Dir: Manaka Nagai, DE 2022, 15 min.
 
SMOG IN YOUR HEART (SMOG EN TU CORAZÓN)
Dir: Lucía Seles, AR 2022, 112 min.

FR 24 Feb
8.30 PM

SHIN ULTRAMAN
Dir: Shinji Higuchi, JP 2022, 113 min.
 
SERRÃO
Dir: Marcelo Lin, BR 2021, 18 min.

SA 25 Feb
6 PM

¿DÓNDE ESTÁ MARIE ANNE?
Dir: Yaela Gottlieb, AR/PE 2022, 6 min.
 
DE NOCHE LOS GATOS SON PARDOS
Dir: Valentin Merz, CH 2022, 110 min.
 
LUST (EIN PERFEKTES PAAR ODER DIE UNZUCHT WECHSELT IHRE HAUT)
Dir: Valie Export, AT/DE 1986, 12 min.

SA 25 Feb
8.30 PM

CAFÉ FLESH
Dir: Stephen Sayadian, US 1982, 73 min.
 
MISSION TO MARS (MISIÓN A MARTE)
Dir: Amat Vallmajor del Pozo, ES 2022, 71 min.
 
THE FIFTH THORACIC VERTEBRA (DASEOS BEONJJAE HYUNGCHU)
Dir: Syeyoung Park, KR 2022, 65 min.

SU 26 Feb
6 PM

MAPUTO NAKUZANDZA
Dir: Ariadine Zampaulo, BR/MZ 2022, 60 min.
 
SUCH A LONG MARCH (UNE SI LONGUE MARCHE)
Dir: Dominique Loreau, BE 2022, 62 min.

SU 26 Feb
8.30 PM

SOLMATALUA
Dir: Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade, BR 2022, 15 min.
 
STILL FREE
Dir: Vadim Kostrov, RU 2023, 31 min.
 
REVOLUTION+1
Dir: Masao Adachi, JP 2022, 80 min.