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Oscar nominated Cillian Murphy will open the Berlin international film festival on Thursday with the world premiere of a drama about the notorious Irish laundries used as prison camps for “fallen” young women.
“Little Things Like These,” based on the best-selling novel by Claire Keegan and co-starring Michelle Fairley (“Game of Thrones”) and Emily Watson (“Chernobyl”), it is one of 20 films competing for the festival’s top Golden Bear award.
Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o is the first black president of the jury at the event known as the Berlinale, now in its 74th year.
With the plight of Iranian women, the Gaza war and the resurgence of the far-right expected to spark debate and possibly protests during the event, Nyong’o said she was looking forward to a challenging festival.
“I think we’re here to see how artists are responding to the world we live in now,” he told reporters. “I’m curious to see what they’re doing with this.”
The 11-day film showcase has the strongest political leaning of Europe’s big three festivals and serves as a key launching pad for films from around the world.
– ‘Oppose injustice’ –
The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough said the outgoing Berlinale director duo, Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, had faced a “tough hand” as the coronavirus pandemic had cast a long shadow over the past three years. .
He told AFP he predicted more “excitement” this year both on the red carpet and at the festival’s growing European Film Market, where film rights are bought and sold for global distribution.
“The old spirit should return to this Berlinale,” he said.
In “Small Things Like These,” Murphy, nominated for an Academy Award next month for his role in the biopic “Oppenheimer,” reunites with Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants, who directed him in the hit series “Peaky Blinders.” “.
Murphy plays a devoted father who discovers shocking secrets about his town’s convent linked to one of modern Ireland’s biggest scandals: the Magdalene Laundries, prisons run by the Roman Catholic Church from the 1820s to the 1990s.
Most of the laundromat residents were ostracized “fallen women” who had become pregnant out of wedlock. Others included rape victims, orphans, prostitutes and the disabled.
“We are sure that this story that combines kindness directed at the most fragile and the strength of will to confront injustice will resonate with everyone,” Chatrian said.
– Lifetime achievement award for Scorsese –
Adam Sandler will present his latest Netflix release “Spaceman,” about a lonely astronaut who seeks help from an alien when he becomes estranged from his wife, played by Carey Mulligan.
Mexican Gael García Bernal appears in “Otro fin,” which imagines a technology that will allow mourners to reconnect with the dead. Cannes best actress winner Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) and Berenice Bejo (“The Artist”) co-star.
The immigration drama “The Kitchen,” starring Rooney Mara, promises to be a “tragic and comic tribute to the invisible people who prepare our food” in restaurants around the world.
And in one of the poster’s most striking titles, “Pepe” imagines the inner life of a hippopotamus from the private collection of Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar.
Martin Scorsese, nominated for the tenth time for the Oscar for best director for “Killers of the Flower Moon”, will arrive in Berlin to collect an honorary Golden Bear for his career.
Iranians Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha have said they have been banned from traveling to Berlin to premiere their work in the feminist contest “My Favorite Cake.”
With far-right parties underway around the world, the festival will highlight cinema that examines Germany’s Nazi past.
“Treasure” stars Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham in a drama about a Holocaust survivor and his daughter who return together to their Polish hometown and Auschwitz.
And the German drama “From Hilde, With Love,” starring Liv Lisa Fries (“Babylon Berlin”), tells the true story of a couple at the heart of the “Red Orchestra” resistance group in 1942.
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