Ioncinema

How to Beat the High Cost of Fascism: Çatak Flounders in Blaring Treatise Following his Academy Award nominated The Teacher’s Lounge (2023), Turkish-German director Ilker Çatak conjures a more overt political exercise in Yellow Letters (Gelbe Briefe). Set in Ankara and...

A Death in the Family: Bouzid Explores the Tolls of Open Secrets What’s most expertly encapsulated in Tunisian filmmaker Leyla Bouzid’s third feature In a Whisper (À voix basse) is the quiet cruelty of the closet, the apparently immortal mechanism...

In the Realm of Defenses: Friedrich Examines Turmoils of the Working Class Even in the democratic and social federal state of contemporary Germany, all is not sublime in the low-wage sector, relayed with an agonizing spasm in director Kilian Armando...

Love Audit: de la Rosa Defies the Odds with Star-Crossed Lovers Much like the shifting ideals and hard won identities defining the protagonists of Ian de la Rosa’s directorial debut Iván & Hadoum, the nexus of clashing intersections symbolically defines...

YouBETcha! is back, this time for our Berlinale edition, where we guess the odds of the films most likely to pick up the converted top prize: The Golden Bear. We accurately predicted the film that had the best chances of...

Up Close & Personal: Sadat Subverts the Spotlight in Stellar Melodrama In her third directorial feature, No Good Men, which is part of a five film cycle with co-scribe Anwar Hashimi, Shahrbanoo Sadat creates something of an anomaly with a...

After competing for the Golden Bear back in 2018 with The Heiress (read review), Paraguayan filmmaker Marcelo Martinessi returns to the Berlinale with the birth of authoritarianism and how one artist was snuffed out during the brutal dictatorship circa 1959....

Invisible Missiles: Blaževičius Offers Chilly Portrayal of a Couple & Country in Crisis Given its title, Andrius Blaževičius’ third outing, How to Divorce During the War, invites expectations of a very different kind of film than the one the filmmaker...

Spanish filmmaker Ian de la Rosa makes his big entry onto the film festival circuit with Iván & Hadoum – a TorinoFilmLab workshopped project that was selected for the upcoming Berlin International Film Festival’s Panorama section. The feature debut a...

Set against the awkwardness of early adolescence, 8 minuter 1981 plunges the viewer into a moment when curiosity, fear, and desire collide without warning. What begins as a seemingly innocuous suburban rite of passage quietly mutates into something far more...