Berlin Film Festival: a nine-year-old girl who played a boy among the winners

Latin American documentaries about indigenous peoples or lost music, Spanish girls playing transsexuals and transsexuals playing themselves: cinema from the margins and from the South surprised and gained ground in the 73rd Berlin Film Festival.

A girl playing a nine-year-old boy who wants to be a girl Sofia Oterowithout any previous experience, moved and made history at the film festival by winning the Best Performance award.

The movie is called 20,000 species of beesand its director, the height of timemade a casting of 500 girls to select Sofia.

The film, set in the Spanish Basque Country, received critical acclaim from critics in Berlin and was a sales success, according to its distributor, Inicia Films.

“When I gave Sofía Otero the final test, her ability and the versatility with which she went through different scenes was so overwhelming… it was like proof,” stated Urresola, 39, in an interview with the AFP.

It was the first time that a feature film debut by a Spanish director participated in the Berlinale.

Documentary Awards

Tatiana Huezo is a Mexican documentary filmmaker who won the award for best documentary for her work the echoand to the best address in the Encounters section.

The documentary chronicles the daily life and hardships of an indigenous community in the state of Puebla (center).

Old age, poverty, the special relationship between humans and animals are strikingly portrayed. Huezo gets stuck in the faces, in the hands, in the looks of its protagonists.

“Cinema is actually an act of love, faith, resistance”, he exclaimed as he received his award.

Huezo dedicated her work to “all the women in Mexico who find their way” in the world of cinema.

In that space of the documentary, Paul B . Preciado surprises with Orlando, my political biographywho also won two prizes: the special (ex aequo) from the jury of the Encounters section and a special mention in the documentary section.

It is a work aimed at this Spanish transsexual, born as a woman and who became a man, and essayist with a certain echo in the French press.

An Argentinian duo, Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmannalso won a small prize (GWFF, awarded 50,000 euros) for their documentary In me I dance.

This gem, shot in Eastern Europe, tells with an ironic tone and full of tenderness the search for klezmel music artists.

Klezmel music, which is still performed at weddings and special occasions by the Argentine Jewish community, is a style of music full of energy and joy.

But that music almost completely disappeared in the countries of origin after the Holocaust, and the emigration to Israel of the Jews who managed to survive.

the Portuguese João Canijo he also intrigued with two works in competition, something unusual at the Berlinale.

bad lifehis film, in competition for the Golden Bear, eventually won the Jury Prize.

bad life bill the story of a trio of women (grandmother, daughter and granddaughter) who run a hotel in the north of Portugal and drown in a sea of ​​mutual resentment and family secrets never resolved.

The second part, live badlywho participated in the Encounters section takes in and brings out exactly that background.

The guests become protagonists, and in the background, like a familiar but intriguing backdrop, these three women wander captive by their toxic relationship.

“When we were filming, we knew exactly what went in one movie and what went in the other,” Canijo insured the AFP. It was a real ‘chronological jewel’, he explained proudly.