75Berlinale. Decoding the Message: Analyzing the Implications of This Line-Up

And now, it is surely time for Berlinale attendees’ yearly appointment with Hong Sangsoo. Here familiarity breeds not contempt, but gradual acceptance; once seen as an eccentric, minor filmmaker with small concerns (drink, social awkwardness, creative angst), his prominent Berlin placements have led to a consensus that he’s one of the best of his generation.

33 features in, with the majority of them coming this century (and often with two premiered a year), I’ve been surprised my ardour remains to see what he’s making, and that I haven’t become bored. Still, What Does this Nature Say to You - his Berlin premiere this year - is not one of his strongest, although I’m warmed to see it still satisfying sections of his audience, as well as critics who dismissed Hong previously.

It’s a far more conventional domestic drama than anything the South Korean director has made before; squint a little (a germane aspect of the blurry, low-res mise-en-scène), and it could be an early 00’s Hollywood comedy like Meet the Parents, although with far less sitcom-y and crude hijinks.

It’s a tale of humbling and humiliation for Donghwa (Ha Seongguk), but whose denouement could lead to a positive change in fortunes. A sporadically published poet in his mid-30’s who’s “dropped out” after becoming estranged from his father (a prominent lawyer), he’s accompanying his serious girlfriend Junhee (Kang Soyi) to her old family home, so he can finally be introduced to her parents Oryeong (Kwon Haehyo) and Sundae (Cho Yunhee).

Oryeong subjects Donghwa to a bit of a “hazing”, first taking him out on a walk, with their interactions dripping with social discomfort, before plying the younger man (and himself) with alcohol at a dinner, where he directly attacks his life choices and suitability for Junhee. Whilst the actors excel, Hong’s writing in particular seems on its most predictable form, and he can’t allow the central conflict to resonate in the more affecting and outward-looking way he’s achieved in his recent work.

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The establishment of the new Perspectives section has been one of the festival’s larger talking points. Now all its features have been screened - and though I’ve only sampled one film - I can see the rationale for creating it and scrapping Encounters, the last director Carlo Chatrian’s baby. Works like the film I’m about to discuss, BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions, would’ve fit perfectly into Encounters, yet the new framing allows the collected features to look slightly more commercial, and not another swathe of the festival uncommitted to the attached European Film Market, which of course underpins so much of the line-up and encourages many international industry players to travel here.

Directed by the multimedia artist and music video auteur Kahlil Joseph (who broke out with his iconic work on Beyoncé’s era-defining Lemonade visual album), BLKNWS has been an anticipated title in American independent film circles, compounded by the controversy over its premiere, where it risked being pulled from the Sundance and Berlinale line-ups due to a conflict with its funder Participant Media (which has itself now shut down). It has to be one of the most ambitious in the festival’s whole line-up: beginning with a shot of the colossal tome Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, Joseph aims nothing less than to adapt it and expand upon it, with both speculative notations as well as details from his own personal hist

The film is most impressive in its eclectic interpretation of how to put these ideas onto film. Joseph congeals high and low audiovisual sources - different media like other films, news footage of triumphant and tragic events in Black history, music, photography - into a pulsing intellectual montage, and the results to witness are as unpredictable and anarchically funny as they are cerebral. Yet the limitation in his multifarious, magpie approach is the lack of a strong unifying thesis: given its 24-hour news channel framing device, it too often sits comfortably in that mode rather than transcending it, the images flickering past, sometimes a bit indifferent to our concentration and engagement.