Berlinale 2015: A Q&A With The Filmmakers & Star of Koza
A bleak, beautiful entry from Slovakia in the year’s Berlinale, Koza starts off slow and static and stays that way, even as worlds heap themselves on the titular main character. An uncommon blend of reality and fiction, the film stars the real life Koza, birth name Peter Baláž, more or less as himself. The Roma boxer competed in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games for Slovakia, returned home, and over the ensuing years, slipped back into the chronic poverty that’s typical of what many Roma face across Europe.
Berlinale 2015: Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert
Werner Herzog’s portrait of Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman), the early 20th century British adventurer who was instrumental in creating the boundaries of much of the modern Middle East in Queen of the Desert , omits her real-life role as a clandestine intelligence agent for the British Empire to explore her interior life, as Herzog put it. In Herzog’s version of events, Kidman’s luminous, head-scarf wearing Bell swears up and down to trusting sheiks that she is not a spy —
Berlinale 2015: Jack Pettibone Riccobono’s Phenomenal The Seventh Fire
The first time the director Jack Pettibone Riccobono filmed the Ojibwe tribe at northern Minnesota’s White Earth Indian Reservation, it was to document the tribe’s efforts to preserve their local wild rice, considered sacred for centuries. Riccobono returned to the reservation in 2010 to show the short documentary about their efforts, The Sacred Food, but also to find someone to talk to him about a different, quietly growing problem at the reservation.
Berlinale 2015: Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night
The 65th Berlinale opening film is a female-led, stressful adventure movie, set around a snowy, ill-fated journey loosely based on the memoirs of Josephine Peary, wife to Robert Peary, who aggressively, inaccurately claimed to be the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909. Director Isabel Coixet’s Nadie Quiere La Noche/Nobody Wants the Night is a tribute to Josephine’s singleminded journey through godforsaken northern hinterlands to be as close as possible to her husband as he (thinks he) achieves his incredible goal.
