A peek at what's playing at the 72nd annual Berlinale

please welcome new contributor John Lynn-Fernandez

M Night Shyamalan, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, and Connie Nielsen are on the jury

The Berlin Film Festival kicked off last night. It's the second of the "Big Five" film festivals each year (after Sundance, before Cannes). In this preview, some films that stand out as potential highlights of the festival. But, of course, you never know which discoveries or films will emerge as the triumphs until audiences are watching them...

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Doc Corner: Rithy Panh's 'Graves Without a Name'

By Glenn Dunks

It is not very often an autobiographical documentary about genocide is selected to open a prestigious strand of one of the biggest film festivals in the world. I suppose that’s what being the first filmmaker to, among other things, land an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film with a work of non-fiction does to one’s reputation. Director Rithy Panh has forged his career through telling the stories of his Cambodian homeland and it’s a testament that despite what may be considered tunnel vision for other filmmakers, this is his 18th feature, he continues to find new and interesting angles to investigate.

After detours through a colonial archival scrap-book in France is Our Mother Country and meditative stargazing experimental curiosity Exile, Panh has returned to the more earthbound terrain of his Oscar-nominated The Missing Picture (my no. 1 documentary of the decade). A film as rooted in the mud and the dirt that built that film its signature image of gaunt and decaying figurines, Graves finds Panh on an even more personal mission than that film...

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Doc Corner: The Top 100 Documentaries of the Decade

By Glenn Dunks

For those paying attention—and no offence if you haven’t—I have been counting down my top 100 documentaries of the decade. Okay, so it’s technically 110. Shut up, I couldn’t help myself. Check out the list with snap comments for each title on Twitter, or the list is also on Letterboxd. But if you don’t want to make a single click then after the jump you'll get the whole list with chosen highlights and links to full reviews. And just in case you were wondering... number 101? Exit Through the Gift Shop.

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Six More Foreign Film Oscar Contenders

by Nathaniel R

We're now up to 36 entries for Best Foreign Language Film, so  over one-third of the way to the full list. Of the six latest announcements The Heiresses has had the arguably highest profile at festivals but the Russian entry is the most "typically Oscar-like" in subject matter, though that thankfully matters less than it once did, even in the foreign category. 

• The Great Mystical Circus Brazil
  A century in the life of a family of circus owners. This is the 7th time Brazil has submitted a film by Carlos Diegues. He's their most frequently submitted director but none of his submitted films have been nominated. 
• Graves Without a Name Cambodia
  Rithy Panh created Cambodia's only Oscar nominee (the brilliant documentary The Missing Picture). This is another doc on the same topic: the Kmer Rouge and genocide
• Polyxeni Greece 
  The plot sounds intriguing. A young Greek orphan with a lust for life, is adopted and raised by a wealthy Greek-Turkish couple, unaware that people are plotting and after her large inheritance. Greece used to automatically submit the winner of the Thessaloniki Film Festival but those awards have since been abolished. The new big prizes for Greek films are the Hellenic Film Awards (often referred to as "the Iris" like we call the Academy Awards "Oscar"). They began in 2010 with Dogtooth as their first winner but winning the Iris (which Polyxeni did) doesn't automatically get you the Oscar submission since the submission is now decided by a committee. 
• Sunset Hungary
  It's László Nemes' follow up to his Oscar winning debut Son of Saul. He's gone further back in time from World War II in the previous picture to just before World War I for this story of a young woman who wants to be a milliner in a hat shop previously owned by her parents.
• The Heiresses Paraguay 
  Lesbian drama about a formerly wealthy woman restarting her life after her longtime partner is imprisoned. Among its several festival prizes is the promising Best Actress win at Berlinale.
• Sobibor  - Russia 
  A true story of a prisoner uprising at an extermination camp in Russia during World War II.

Related:
FOREIGN FILM PREDICTIONS
FOREIGN FILM SUBMISSION CHARTS

APSA Nominations: Lion, Cold of Kalandar, and More

The Asia Pacific Screen Awards has announced its nominations for the film year. The organization is in its 10th year -- and we should note that our own Glenn Dunks works for them behind the scenes. They basically cover the whole continent so that includes Asian countries, Australia, Russia, you name it. Their definition is loose enough that it even covers films with creative teams that qualify even if the film is a co-production made elsewhere. Their nomination procedure is elaborate -- 303 films from 43 countries were in the mix this year -- and whittled down throughout the year. The results are certainly a unique barometer of the region.

Cold of Kalandar, Turkey's Oscar submission, has 3 nominations

The nominations with commentary are after the jump...

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