For seven days this February, I found myself in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, the architectural glass and steel heart of the 64th annual Berlinale . It’s a surprisingly subdued centre for a city as bohemian as Berlin and for a festival so concerned with giving a platform to the most provocative, inventive, and marginalised voices in cinema. Nonetheless, it was the location for the festival’s gala venue, Berlinale Palast.
The Palast screened all the Competition films of the festival, including the Chinese Silver Bear winner, Black Coal, Thin Ice. Many felt the Competition was rather lukewarm, though one of my personal favourites was in the running, shown at the charmingly art deco Friedrichstadt Palast. Stratos (dir. Yannis Economides) is a Greek neo-noir about a hitman turned vigilante. With a wide-angle lens capturing the craggy Mediterranean backdrop and oblique references to the nation’s economic woes, Economides seems to indict a wide-ranging portion of Greek society. His lead actor, Vangelis Mourikis, gives a performance of solemnity and existential suffering in the vein of Jean-Pierre Melville’s contract killers.
