“All the Long Nights”
A smaller title in this year’s lineup, “All the Long Nights” is writer/director Sho Miyake’s return to Berlinale. I didn’t catch his previous film “Slow, Small but Steady” when it premiered at the festival in 2022. Rather it was at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where I fell for the story of an unlikely woman boxer as the lead in a character study that seemed to break the sports movie rulebook through its meditative pacing and quiet capturing of pugilist exhibitions. “All the Long Nights” appears to be following the director’s penchant for nuanced interpersonal dynamics between seemingly broken individuals by way of a story involving a man suffering from panic attacks and a woman dealing with PMS. If “Slow, Small but Steady” is a sign of anything, Miyake will aim for the heart.
“Abiding Nowhere”
Considering it took seven years for Malaysian auteur Tsai Ming-liang to follow the intense realism of “Stray Dogs” with the sumptuous stillness of “Days,” it already feels like a win to receive another film from him so soon. “Abiding Nowhere” is the latest installment in the filmmaker’s walker series, concerning a monk moving across varying landscapes. The tenth installment is set in Washington D.C.
“Another End”
2024 has already been a busy festival season for Renate Reinsve, the French actress who burst onto the scene as the star of Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World.” She began this year’s festivities by premiering two new performances in “Handling the Undead” and “A Different Man” at Sundance. Now, she’s teaming with Gael García Bernal in writer/director Piero Messina’s “Another End.” In it, she plays Zoe, the dearly departed loved one to Bernal’s Sal. Heartbroken, Sal turns to a new device that can bring the consciousness of the dead back to inhabit new bodies. A film about how goodbye doesn’t have to be forever, on paper, “Another End” reads like a weepy primed to clean out tissue boxes.
“Dahomey”
It’s taken five years for Mati Diop to return with a feature following her critical smash “Atlantics.” Much like that film, her documentary “Dahomey” similarly concerns movement between Europe and Western Africa. Rather than focusing on a group of young men braving perilous waters to find work in France, leaving their partners to long for their ghosts, the migration, here, is reversed: In November 2021, 26 pieces of art hailing from the Kingdom of Dahomey were set to be returned from the Musée du Quai de Branly in Paris to Cotonou in Benin over a 125 years after French colonizers looted them. One would expect “Dahomey” to be guided by Diop’s way of connecting past imperialism to present economic inequality. And one should be happy she’s back.