Moviebreak Interviews und Festivals

Already his fictional feature debut Suicide Room earned him a name with audiences and critics. His daring drama Corpus Christi premiered at the Berlinale and received an Oscar nomination for best foreign film. In his first English-language feature, Jan Komasa once again tests audiences' moral boundaries with a provocative premise that blends psycho thriller with social satire and dark humor. Good...

War, patriarchal structures, and the absence of an established local film industry couldn’t hold Suzannah Mirghani back from realizing her first feature film which is a special kind of debut: the first fiction feature from Sudan directed by a woman and only the second Sudanese feature production to screen at the Venice Film Festival. From there Cotton Queen went on a prestigious festival journey,...

What happens when nature is reduced to a problem that needs solving and a capitalizable attraction at once? Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman explore that question in their captivating feature documentary debut, taking a close look at the relationship between humans and polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba. Its status is complicated in the proclaimed Polar Bear Capital of the World, where the aw...

Social pressure, professional strains, and emotional tension come together in Viv Li’s personal and disarmingly humorous portrait of herself at a crossroads. Witty and visually arresting, her feature documentary debut finds the universal in individual issues and vice versa while meditating on identity, insecurity, and ideals. Just a couple of weeks after premiering at the Berlinale and MoMA’s ND/N...

In a world shaped by militarized conflict and displacement, Janay Boulos and Abd Alkader Habak manage to find the love that overcomes violence and repression - on a personal and a cinematic level. Both come together in their intimate chronicle of a romance against all odds. Birds of War tells their very own love story during the Syrian Civil War and the Lebanese war, witnessing the devastation and...

Just a few weeks ago, her gentle feature film debut, meandering between cinéma vérité and rural fairytale, won Dongnan Chen the main prize at Copenhagen's renowned CPH:DOX film festival. Now the Chinese filmmaker continues her successful festival journey at Visions du Réel where her imaginative coping-of-age story about three young girls from the Yi minority screens in the Grand Angle section. On...

Still a bit overwhelmed by the splendid success their debut documentary achieved with its Sundance premiere, Rebecca Zweig and Efraín Mojica already have graced over a dozen film festivals with their intimate look at gay Mexican cowboys at the titular traditional rodeo event. Equally gentle and daring, Jaripeo explores the multilayered tension - social, sensual, and symbolic - evoked by the perfor...

After giving relatable instructions on mundane topics in his successful series How to with John Wilson, the American documentary filmmaker and producer struck festival gold with his first feature-length documentary. The History of Concrete takes the omnipresent material as a thematic prism to explore very different kinds of structures, industrial, sociological, and emotional. After premiering at S...

In the increasingly competitive landscape of international film festivals, few artistic directors have shaped theirs as decisively as Emilie Bujès. Her nine year at Visions du Réel saw the Swiss festival grow into one of the ost important international platforms for non-fiction film, attracting an impressive range of renowned filmmakers focused on realit stories as well as a exciting new talents....

In an increasingly authocratic political climate in the US, where trans kids are systemically targeted by and barred from essential medical care, Amy K. Jenkins together with her son Adam presents a tender portrait of family love, growing-up, and being truly oneself. Just about a week after Adam's Apple debuted at SXSW, the US-American director as well as co-creator and writer Adam are at Copenhag...

After 12 intense days of film festival and with theatrical screenings of festival films continuing for several days after the official end of the event, CPH:DOX Artistic Director Niklas Engstrøm has any reason to be exhausted. But that is not at all like the founding member who has been with the growing platform for international non-fiction cinema for more than 20 years. In this time, CPH:DOX has...

After debuting at Sundance where it won the prestigious World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazićs powerful portrait of resistance, community, and the beleaguered balance between progress and preservation celebrates its European premiere in the Highlights section of CPH:DOX. To Hold a Mountain shows a mother’s fight for the lands of her remote mountain commu...

A timely, profoundly humane portrait of medicine at the frontlines and the journalistic responsibility to force the public to acknowledge the realities of war, Poh Si Teng’s intense documentary arrives at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX, just weeks after its celebrated premiere at Sundance. American Doctor follows Dr. Mark Perlmutter, Dr. Thaer Ahmad, and Dr. Feroze Sidwa, a medical collective with different...

With his integral interest in the LGBTQ+ community and its struggles Sébastien Lifshitz has become an equally essential and empathetic chronist of a history often ignored by conventional accounts. A Very Good Boy shines both as an intimate portrait of one of its overlooked personalities and the era reflected in his life. The tender documentary allows former gay porn icon Claude Loir to tell his li...

Ihrem zwischenmenschlichen Fokus und wachen Blick bleibt Eva Trobisch in ihrem Ensemble-Stück ebenso treu wie dem Gespür für emotionale Nuancen. Bereits ihr erster Spielfilm Alles ist gut wurde in Locarno als bester Debütfilm ausgezeichnet. Nachdem sie vor zwei Jahren Ivo in der kurzlebigen Berlinale Sektion Encounters präsentiere, kehrt die Regisseurin nun zurück zum Festival - diesmal in den Wet...

Over the past decade, Emin Alper has established himself as one of contemporary Turkish cinema’s most incisive observers of politics, power, and the dangerous dynamics of populism. With Salvation, he returns to the Berlinale with an atmospheric competition entry examining a society on edge, crafting a story that is equally intimate and allegorical. A remote community in the Anatolian mountains bec...

Few tragedies have left as deep a scar on European football as the events at Brussels’ Heysel Stadium on 29 May 1985. In Heysel 85, filmmaker Teodora Ana Mihai revisits that night, reframing the catastrophe of the 1985 European Cup Final between Liverpool F.C. and Juventus F.C. through an intimate, human lens, that focus on the dynamics that lead to questionable moral decisions and on the ordinary...

Few artists have interrogated time, memory, and authorship as rigorously as Douglas Gordon. For more than three decades, the Turner Prize–winning artist has redefined the language of contemporary art through works that fracture and reframe cultural memory. Filmmaker Finlay Pretsell turns his camera toward the artist at a moment of personal and creative transition, crafting an intimate portrait tha...

Almost two decades after his last feature Ballast, Lance Hammer returns to screen in the spotlight of the Berlinale Competition. There the US-American director turns his contemplative gaze at dementia and the devastating toll it takes, both on the elderly character suffering from the illness and her deeply conflicted relatives. Set against the fragile social and familiar worlds of its characters,...

With her first cinematic feature, renowned Brazilian theater actor, director, and writer Grace Passô announces herself as a compelling new voice, attuned to the delicate emotional undertones beneath everyday life. Premiering at the 76th Berlinale’s Perspectives section, Our Secret explores the weight of what goes unsaid in a family after a devastating loss and listens for the ghosts that linger in...

Following the neuropsychological dread of Relic and the occult paranoia of Apartment 7A, Natalie Erika James’ latest feature continues her exploration of the emotional fallout of social pressure and painful family histories. Brutal beauty standards and toxic diet culture literally threaten to consume the young protagonist of Saccharine which premiered in Sundance’s Midnight section before running...

Seine Dokumentarfilme laufen regelmäßig auf internationalen Film Festivals und brachten Tobias Nölle zahlreiche Preise, darunter in Locarno einen Goldenen Leoparden für seinen Kurzfilm René. Nun kehrt der Schweizer Regisseur zurück zur Berlinale, wo sein jüngstes Werk im Panorama Weltpremiere feiert. Tristan Forever balanciert auf der Grenze zwischen Dokumentation, Fiktion, Erinnerung und Traum in...

Right after premiering her intimate feature film debut at Sundance in the U.S. Dramatic Commpetition, Liz Sargent presents Take Me Home at the Berlinale. Fictional, but very close to life, the story follows Anna and her aging parents as they navigate increasing challenges in their delicate balance of caregiving. On site at the festival, she reflects in conversation with Lidanoir on the personal na...

For A Family, which looks at divorce through the eyes of a sister and her younger brother, putting their individual perspectives beside and opposite one another, director Mees Peijnenburg drew on his own experience of divorce as a kid. At the Berlinale, where his personal family drama debuts in the Generation section, the director and lead actress Carice van Houten open up about their collaboratio...

Rising filmmaker Ryan Machado keeps his cinematic lens on challenging subjects. After exploring queerness through a bittersweet nostalgic lens in his previous feature film, Huling Palabas, which premiered in 2023 in Berlinale’s Generation section, the Philippine director returns to the festival with a visceral, tonally dark drama. Set in the 90s on a provincial Philippine island, Raging touches up...