The audience of the 73rd Berlinale, one of Europe’s most prominent film festivals, was able to fill an entire day with Dutch premieres on Sunday – and at the same time absorb a touch of Berlin cinema history.
In the afternoon became the youth film Kiddo by Zara Dwinger. This debut, in which 11-year-old Lu (Rosa van Leeuwen) is kidnapped from her foster family by her eccentric mother, had its world premiere at the Urania cultural centre. For the German youth, not used to subtitles, the film was dubbed live. In the announcement, Lu’s mother was no longer a self-proclaimed ‘Hollywood star’, but ‘eine berühmte Hollywoodschauspielerin’. The Dutch original could be heard through headphones.
Two hours later and a few subway stops away, Fiona showed Tan for the first time Dearest Fiona in the restored 1920s cinema Delphi Filmpalast. Tan’s film exists, as does installation Footsteps previously shown in the Eye film museum, from archive footage of the Netherlands, often from the 1920s and 1930s. Think: hard-working women in traditional costumes, fishing men, spinning children. At the same time, the viewer hears the letters that Tan’s father sent to his daughter from the 1980s, when she had moved from Australia to Amsterdam to study there. The musings about domestic affairs, political, economic and other developments and the archaic-looking manual labor on the screen provide a stimulating contrast. The nostalgic room full of red velvet gave an extra layer Dearest Fiona which, as Tan put it after the screening, gives the feeling that time is ‘a bulldozer’ rumbling along.
Dream place for youth films
Kiddo, Dear Fiona and Silver Haze are three of the seven Dutch (co-)productions that can be seen at the German festival this year, about the same number as pre-corona. It is mainly women who put Dutch film on the map in Berlin; five of the Dutch productions were made by female directors.
None of them made it to the main competition, so there is no need to count on a gold or silver bear. But as in previous years, the Netherlands is very well represented in the festival section for youth films, the ‘Generations’, where crystal bears are awarded.
For example, the opening of the Generation Kplus (6+) was the Belgian-Dutch co-production Sea Sparkle and is the short film Ma mere et moi by Emma Branderhorst selected for the section for fourteen years and older. For films aimed at a younger audience, the Berlinale is “a dream place” to premiere, explains director Dwinger van Kiddo out. Being selected by the leading festival is a quality label for your film. In addition, the festival tries more than other festivals to get a young audience into the cinema through the Generation programs, she says. And that seems to work. The hall with more than eight hundred seats for the premiere of Kiddo sold out in no time. Dwinger: “My film is about an 11-year-old girl, but now it is really seen by people of that age.”
In the afternoon Sacha Polak’s drama went Silver Haze premiered in the 1960s cinema Kino International, where the red carpet had been rolled out under the enormous ‘floating’ facade that protrudes from the retro-futuristic-looking building.
Polak’s previous film, also in English Dirty God, premiered at the prestigious American Sundance festival. But for Silver Haze Polak sees advantages in a premiere in Berlin. Silver Haze is a small, personal film – loosely inspired by the life of British actress Vicky Knight. She played the leading role in Polak’s previous film and suffered serious scars as a child during a café fire, of which it has never been clarified whether it was started and, if so, by whom. While running and promoting Dirty God director Polak realized that there was a lot to tell about the real life of her leading lady. “Then I came to her house and I got to know her sister, for example, and thought they were such a nice couple that I also wanted the sister in the film.”
Several of Knight’s relatives end up playing themselves Silver Haze in which fact and fiction mingle and the incendiary bomb that is regularly joked about in Knight’s family is now really thrown for revenge.
At a premiere at a public festival like Berlin, the entire cast and crew can come over and be in the spotlight. That is a big difference with festivals such as Cannes or Sundance, which mainly target people from the film industry. Polak: “Certainly with a project like Silver Haze it is important that people who have given so much of themselves are also there themselves.”
Also read this report the opening of the Berlin 2023 Film Festival
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