Kenyan touch at Berlin Film Festival

 

Kenyan touch at Berlin Film Festival. (Courtesy)

The 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, popularly known as Berlinale, held between February 16 to February 26 this year was unlike those held in previous years.

The festival attracts thousands of entries and this year, about 300 films that were selected from the entries screened across different venues in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin including in cinemas, theatres, film schools, and conference halls featured.

Having travelled for hours from Aurich to Berlin, I managed to catch the last screenings on the second last day of the festival, a day on which, coincidentally, Berlin decided to put on a show for everyone by snowing heavily.

Unfortunately, there were no African titles in the main competition. Most of the works from the African continent were featured in the Panorama and Forum sections.

Notably, some of the films, shot in Kenya (featuring Kenyan actors and even in some cases a Kenyan script writer) were submitted as entries by Germany.

For instance, 'Mwanamke Makueni' a short story about a man who while wandering in the city lost meets a woman willing to help him with some gentle magic was submitted by Daria Belova and Valerie Aluskina under Germany.

Wanjiru Kinyanjui's entries - 'A Lover and Killer of Colour' and 'The Battle of the Sacred Tree' (Der Kampf um den heiligen Baum) were also submitted as Germany's entries (perhaps because they were shot during Wanjiru's years studying film in Germany).

'A Lover and Killer of Colour' is a fiction short film, 10 minutes long, about a black painter in West Berlin in the 80s that draws its power from "its atmospheric night scenes and self-confident stream of consciousness."

'The Battle of the Sacred Tree' (based on Barbara Kimenya's short story) on the other hand is a feature film about a young woman, Mumbi, who leaves Nairobi for her ancestral village and gets into a quarrel with a Christian women group seeking to eradicate the remains of pre-colonial belief systems.

After the screening, Wanjiru, who is currently, a lecturer and chairperson in the department of Film and Animation at Multimedia University in Kenya had a Q&A session with the audience.

The Kenyans in the audience, among them Julian Manjahi, photographer and filmmaker, Fritsie and Fanuel Dawkins, both of whom were in Berlin for a programme by Kulturweit and German Unesco) took the chance to have a patriotic moment.

They resorted to conversing and asking questions in Swahili, Sheng and Kikuyu and for that brief moment the world shrunk and Kenya was front and centre.

Having coincided with the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this year's Berlinale had special events and screenings that were dedicated to the war in Ukraine and Iran.

It opened with a live video address by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, which was followed by a screening of a documentary, called 'Superpower' by Sean Penn in which he covers President Zelensky's life in action during the war.

Other highlights included a documentary by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko, called Eastern Front filmed directly on the frontline last year; a poetic essay film by Roman Liubyii, Iron Butterflies that takes the downing MH17 flight over Eastern Ukraine in 2014 as a starting point; and 'In Ukraine' by Piotr Pawlus and Tomasz Wolski.

On the other hand, 'Woman, Life, Freedom' was a panel discussion dedicated to exploring the role of cinema and arts in the protest in Iran. Out of the 300 films screened, 19 contested for the festival's top awards, the Golden and the Silver Bears.

Nicholas Philibert's On the Adamant won the coveted Golden Berlin Bear, while Les Chenilles won the Best Short Film in a category that had shorts such as Terra Mater - an entry from Rwanda and Mwanamke Makueni.

Other notable awards went to Philippe Garrel, who won Silver Berlin Bear's Best Director for the Plough. Steven Spielberg got the honorary Golden Berlin Bear and nine-year-old Sofia Otero won the Best Leading Performance award for her role in 20,000 Species of Bees, making her the youngest-ever winner in that category.