Berlinale Spotlight: Berlinale Shorts in Chile

The Berlinale has been presenting specially curated film programmes around the globe for many years. Berlinale Spotlight is an extension of the main festival in February and makes Berlinale activities visible throughout the year.

The 15th SANFIC Santiago International Film Festival (August 18 - 25, 2019) presents Berlinale Spotlight: Berlinale Shorts in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Chile. In 2020, Chile will be the “Country in Focus” at the European Film Market (EFM) of the 70th Berlin International Film Festival.

Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck, curator of Berlinale Shorts since spring 2019, has compiled a selection of short films from recent Berlinale Shorts programmes. It was her predecessor, Maike Mia Höhne, who initiated the cooperation. Five films will be shown, including the 2018 Golden Bear winner for Best Short Film, The Men Behind the Wall by Ines Moldavsky.

“The Berlinale Shorts radiate the full range of colours, and play with the conventions of cinematic storytelling. The programme begins with a depiction of power structures, their effects on individual biographies, and the possibilities for self-initiated change within those structures (Broken, After/Life, The Men Behind the Wall). Having left those walls behind, a flickering undertow pulls us into mysterious woods (Wishing Well). At the end of the journey we find ourselves in the hot summer of youth (Where the Summer Goes (chapters on youth)).

The Berlinale Spotlight: Berlinale Shorts programme at the SANFIC Santiago International Film Festival

Broken - The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck, dir.: Volker Schlecht, Alexander Lahl
Germany, 7 min. – Berlinale 2016
Contemporary witnesses Gabriele Stötzer and Birgit Willschütz talk about their imprisonment within the women’s prison Hoheneck. As political prisoners they were forced to work, manufacturing products that were sold by the GDR to the West. Monochromatic images make the oppression of confinement palpable to the viewer.

After/Life, dir.: Puck Lo
USA, 15 min. – Berlinale 2018
Amidst war games on military training grounds and the reality of surveillance cameras, patrols and fences, civilians attempt to reach the USA via the Mexican desert. If the patrols don’t devour their children, then the desert will. But there are also individuals here who help those adrift in a no man’s land between war games and reality – the ones who recover the dead.

The Men Behind the Wall, dir.: Ines Moldavsky
Israel, 28 min. – Berlinale 2018, Golden Bear for Best Short Film
Tinder. It could all be so easy if she, the filmmaker, were not in Israel, and the nearby men suggested by the app were not in the Palestinian territory behind the wall. Ines Moldavsky dares to cross the border to have conversations on eye level. A film about lust, power, the lust for power, and loopholes within politically enforced powerlessness.

Wishing Well, dir.: Sylvia Schedelbauer
Germany, 13 min. – Berlinale 2018
Gushing colors. A time disjointed, yet synchronous.
A transcendent turn, a quest for agency, a reunion with currents of the forest.

Where the Summer Goes (chapters on youth), dir.: David Pinheiro Vicente
Portugal, 20 min. – Berlinale 2018
The summer heat shimmers. A group of friends drives to the forest. Their bodies are packed tightly into the car. In the woods they happen upon a snake. The snake coils itself around the young man’s foot. The girl holds it in her hands. Two men eat peaches. The men kiss. After the kiss, the day is over. 
In four chapters, David Pinheiro Vicente appropriates the beginning of all of the stories of the monotheistic religions and gives it a fresh interpretation.