“Thriller” with a trans heroine closes the Berlinale

This 73rd Berlinale, of a more than remarkable level, was concluded with three films that, it seems, do not enter the list of winners. German By the end of the night It is written by film noir specialist Christoph Hochhäusler and develops the story of police officers who infiltrate a drug cartel. As an update it offers one of these insiders to be a transgender woman, played by Austrian Thea Ehre. Its first part looks pulsating like a genre film. But his clumsy screenplay veers towards melodrama and in the midst of emotional nonsense where a policeman takes a bad view of his homosexuality and a gangster ends up victimized, a colleague ends it all with a big disaster.

China Art College 1984, by Liu Juan, is the prehistory of animation. And it is as basic in its technical execution as it is burdensome in its repetitive childish discourse on theories of art and philosophy that are very true to the critical and intellectual nonsense tolerated by the Chinese regime. It begins with a smug quote from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But his level does not reach preschool.

Brighten up the end of the day with the famous French documentarian Nicolas Philibert, who in Sur l`Adamant shows us the work of a unique daily psychiatric center installed on the Seine. It is already known that the Philibert cinema is not there to brighten your day. And his proposal is as flawless as it is lethargic. It concludes the competition — the best in many years — in which there are up to five great films: Mexican TotemGerman firePortuguese Bad living and Americans past life and manodrome. And yet, it sounds like enough for the Spanish awards 20 billion bees, the debut of Estíbaliz Urresole. And you get the fear that the cinema is stuck but on the subject (here dysphoria trans girls born biologically male) are fish in the turbulent river of good intentions, which in the tradition of this festival are well-answered prayers.

Also from this edition will remain a valuable restoration of archival images carried out by Ulises de la Orden in trial. From more than 500 hours recorded during the trial of the leaders of the Argentine dictatorship, his film condenses the topography of terror into 180 minutes. And all dramatized in an honest and effective way for the general public Argentina, 1985 now shows its truthfulness without models. I don’t know if the faces of Commander Videla or Massera on the bench are banal looking. What is relevant is the celebration of how that country — not even two years after the end of its criminal regime to the level of Dante — was able to look in the mirror and with legal sobriety reject the images it recovered from that time of horror.