Northern Skies Over Empty Space by Alejandra Márquez Abella
The 72nd Berlin International Film Festival has announced the complete lineup for its 2022 edition including substantial selections of Latin American titles and films by Latin American or U.S. Latinx directors across six competitive and non-competitive sections.
The festival will go ahead as an in-person event, albeit with reduced theater capacity, and will run for an adjusted period from February 10 to 16 rather than for the full eleven days through February 20 as previously planned.
Announced this morning, Mexico’s Natalia López Gallardo’s debut feature film Robe of Gems / Manto de gemas will have its world premiere in the International Competition for the highest awards given at the festival, the Golden and Silver Bears. A co-production between Mexico, Argentina, and the United States, Robe of Gems follows Lopez Gallardo’s previous work as an editor on several Carlos Reygadas titles including Silent Light (2007) and Post Tenebras Lux (2010), and Jauja (2014) by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso. The emerging director also starred in Reygadas’ 2018 film Our Time.
The latest documentary short from critically-acclaimed Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, North Terminal, will play in the Berlinale Special Films Section, while Argentina’s Gastón Solnicki’s newest feature A Little Love Package (co-produced with Austria) will represent the Southern Cone in the festival’s Encounters section for aesthetically and structurally daring works.
Two Latin American feature films have been selected in the Generations section for innovative and heartfelt coming-of-age stories: New York-based Afro-Latinx director Rebecca Huntt’s debut non-fiction feature Beba, a moving exploration of the artist’s own roots and creative mission statement, and Argentine director Mariano Biasin’s debut fiction feature Sublime, a tender portrait that hones in on the turbulent emotions of a 16-year-old musician who falls in love with his best friend. In the Shorts section of the same category, Argentine director Emilia Herbst will present her work Una aprendiz invisible.
The Mexican film The Realm of God / El reino de dios by director Claudia Sainte-Luce will have its world premiere in the Generation Kplus Features competition, while the Colombian documentary film Alis by Clare Weiskopf and Nicolas van Hemelryck will have its world premiere in the Generation 14plus Features section. The Latin American lineup in the Generation Kplus section is completed by the Mexican short Alma and Paz Alma y Paz by Cris Gris in its international premiere.
The Berlinale has also announced that its Panorama strand will present two bold Latin American titles by female directors alongside a selection of twenty-four other international features. The two films, Mexican director Alejandra Márquez Abella’s second feature Northern Skies Over Empty Space / El norte sobre el vacío and Brazilian director Flávia Neves’ debut feature Fogaréu, reflect the section’s commitment to championing “explicitly queer, explicitly feminist, explicitly political” world cinema that dares to look at social scenarios in new, daring, unconventional, and wild ways.
All of the films in the Panorama strand “tackle social turmoil with visual verve and an appetite for dramatic gestures, setting a clear example for combative genre cinema that turns social codes upside down,” the festival has said in a statement.
With a keen sense of how to deploy omens that herald change, Márquez Abella’s sophomore feature Northern Skies Over Empty Space portrays a period of epochal change in rural Mexico—as seen by those who are usually restricted to the role of passive supporting actor. Taken as a piece, the film is a dramatic depiction of the decline of Mexico’s power elite.
The debut feature film from Neves, Fogaréu follows Fernanda, who, after years of absence, returns to her uncle’s ranch in Goiás in mid-western Brazil. Her appearance and her uncomfortable questions expose ableist and colonial structures that shake the façade of her bourgeois family, the film combining family horror with the history of colonialism and slavery in a surreal and virtuoso manner.
The 52nd Berlinale Forum, the Berlin Film Festival’s section dedicated to reflections on the medium of film, socio-artistic discourse, and a particular sense for the aesthetic, is set to present the world premieres of six fiction and non-fiction titles by already-acclaimed and emerging Latin American directors representing Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile.
Independently curated by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art for the Berlinale, the Forum and Forum expanded programs aim to “expand the understanding of what film is, to test the boundaries of convention and open up fresh perspectives to help grasp cinema and how it relates to the world in new ways,” according the festival’s website.
Among the twenty-seven feature-length works in the main programme are the latest works by a slew of Latin American directors that have earned critical acclaim with their previous features: Argentine director Jonathan Perel’s non-fiction feature Camuflaje / Camouflage; Argentine directors Alejo Moguillansky and Luciana Acuña’s tragicomic lockdown film La edad media / The Middle Ages; Brazilian directors Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta’s documentary-tinged fiction Mato Seco em Chamas / Dry Ground Burning; and Brazilian director Gustavo Vinagre’s depiction of São Paulo’s queer community confronting the tandem crises of the pandemic and Brazil’s failing government, Três Tigres Tristes / Three Tidy Tiges Tied a Tie Tighter.
Also selected to play in the section is the Canadian non-fiction feature Mis dos voces / My Two Voices by Colombian and Mexican directors Ana Garay Kostic, Marinela Piedrahita, and Claudia Montoya, a tender exploration of the female Latinx experience in Canada; and El veterano by Chilean director Jerónimo Rodriguez which explores his country’s political fault lines that continue into the present day.
The 72nd Berlin Film Festival festival will be running over seven days from February 10 to 16, 2022. The complete lineup is now online at berlinale.de.
