11 BERLIN PREMIERES AT FEBIOFEST

FILMS THAT PREMIERED AT THE PRESTIGIOUS BERLINALE FESTIVAL HAVE A STRONG PRESENCE AT PRAGUE IFF– FEBIOFEST THIS YEAR. THEY ARE REMARKABLE AND OFTEN AWARD-WINNING.

A film in Austria-Germany co-production, The Trouble With Being Born, exploring the identity of a young android girl, won the Special Jury Award in the first annual competition section Encounters. Servants also competed in that section; its director Ivan Ostrochovský was a member of the Main Competition jury this year. An intoxicating drive audio-visual ride through the invisible parts of a pulsing city, Berlin Alexanderplatz, was in the race for Golden Bear and ultimately won the European Film Award for music, having been nominated in two more categories.

Atypical road-movie Father, which tells the story about the power of parental love and comments on the state of Serbia today, took home the Audience Award and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury last year. It shared the Panorama section at Berlinale with One of These Days, a film about a group of American endurance competition contestants who discover the strength of human will.

Any Day Now, an unpretentious and hopeful story of an Iranian family in Finland that the director based on his own childhood experiences, was screened last year in the Generation section, aimed at children and youth. It was joined there by My Name Is Baghdad, a loose sequence of episodes from a life of a seventeen-year-old skater girl from São Paulo.

The winner of this year’s Czech Lion award, Charlatan, premiered in Germany at the Berlinale Special Gala. Its producer Mike Downey was honoured with the Kristián Award this year. Also having debuted in the Berlinale Special category, Last and First Men by the tragically deceased Jóhan Jóhannsson will be screened at Febiofest accompanied by its cameraman Sturla Brandth Grøvlen.

You can also look forward to a new film by Hungarian director Bence Fliegauf Forest – I See You Everywhere, which was selected from this year’s Berlinale Competition and honoured with the Best Supporting Performance prize. Seven psychological analyses of everyday situations create an anthropological mosaic of today’s society. German adaptation of Erich Kästner’s cult novel Fabian, starring the popular Tom Schilling, was also running for the Golden Bear this year.