Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Nader and Simina: A Separation, a drama that centers on a disintegrating marriage, won the best movie honor and swept the acting awards at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday.
A six-member jury led by actress Isabella Rossellini handed the movie the top Golden Bear prize and its ensemble cast, led by Peyman Moadi and Leila Hatami, both the best actor and the best actress awards.
“I never would have thought that I would win this prize,” Farhadi said as he collected the Golden Bear.
Photo: EPA
He added that it offers “a very good opportunity to think of the people of my country — the country I grew up in, the country where I learned my stories — a great people.”
The film highlights a clash between traditional and modern ways of living and thinking, as well as class differences.
It chronicles the events that follow a wife’s unsuccessful petition for a divorce, which she seeks when her husband refuses to leave Iran with her and her daughter. He worries about leaving behind his father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s.
The wife then moves out and the man hires a pregnant, pious young woman who agrees to take care of his father, without telling her husband. One afternoon, a blazing argument is followed by the woman suffering a miscarriage — setting off a chain of events that shakes the family.
Iran has been in the spotlight at the Berlin festival because the jury’s official seventh member, Iranian director Jafar Panahi, was unable to come after being sentenced to six years in jail on charges of working against the ruling system.
“I would like to recall Jafar Panahi — I really think his problem will be solved, and I would like him to stand here next year,” said Farhadi, speaking through an interpreter.
Farhadi was honored as best director in Berlin two years ago for his previous movie, About Elly.
This year’s best director honor went to Germany’s Ulrich Koehler for Sleeping Sickness, a film about an aid worker long based in Africa and his increasingly alienated wife.
Hungarian director Bela Tarr’s starkly minimalist, black-and-white The Turin Horse, the story of a farmer and his horse, won a runner-up Silver Bear.
Tarr, a veteran art house filmmaker, insisted that it would be his last movie. “I believe that, in this film, everything comes together,” he said after the award ceremony.
Argentina-born first-time director Paula Markovitch’s The Prize, an autobiographical film set in Argentina during the military dictatorship of the 1970s, won two prizes for outstanding artistic achievement.
They went to Wojciech Staron for his camerawork and Barbara Enriquez for the production design.
American director Joshua Marston and co-scriptwriter Andamion Murataj took the best script award for The Forgiveness of Blood, a drama set in Albania.
The festival’s Alfred Bauer prize for innovation went to German director Andres Veiel’s If Not Us, Who, a movie about the early years of some of the far-left Red Army Faction’s leading figures.
On the Net: www.berlinale.de/en/HomePage.html
Berlin film festival prize winners
Following are the main award winners:
BEST FILM (Golden Bear) :Nader and Simin: A Separation, directed by Asghar Farhadi
JURY GRAND PRIX runner-up prize (Silver Bear): The Turin Horse, directed by Bela Tarr
BEST DIRECTOR (Silver Bear): Ulrich Koehler for Sleeping Sickness
BEST ACTRESS (Silver Bear): Female ensemble in Nader and Simin: A Separation
BEST ACTOR (Silver Bear): Male ensemble in Nader and Simin: A Separation
BEST SCRIPT (Silver Bear): The Forgiveness of Blood, written by Joshua Marston and Andamion Murataj
ALFRED-BAUER PRIZE (for innovation): If Not Us, Who, directed by Andres Veiel
BEST FIRST FEATURE: On the Ice directed by Andrew Okpeaha MacLean
SOURCE: REUTERS
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby