The Brazilian Elite Squad took the Golden Bear.

festival/cinema

The Golden Bear of the 58th Berlin Film Festival was awarded to the Brazilian film Elite Squad directed by Jose Padilha, the Grand Jury Prize was awarded to Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, and the Silver Bear for directing was awarded to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. ANDREY PLAKHOV comments.

Almost every year, the decision of the Berlin jury is stunned by its unpredictability. And this year, few people guessed it right and not everyone will share it. Critical attention throughout the festival was focused on heavyweight films: “There Will Be Blood” by Paul Thomas Anderson and “Standard Operating Procedure” by Errol Morris led the ratings. The first represented the fresh blood of Hollywood, the second - the extremely relevant work of the famous documentarian, whom the bison of American film criticism Roger Ibert called the most intriguing of the directors he had encountered in his career. True, between these two films, another one, lighter in tone, “Carefree,” was placed at the top of the critical ratings, but it was also directed by the classic of modern cinema, Mike Leigh.

All these paintings were noted in the jury's decisions, so it is incorrect to say that they ignored the great art of the masters. "Oil" was even awarded two prizes: another "Silver Bear" went to Jonny Greenwood for his avant-garde and rather idiosyncratic music. Actress Sally Hawkins deservedly won the prize for her actress in Carefree, but Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays an oil tycoon, was forced to give up the prize for best actor to the Iranian Reza Naji from the film Sparrow's Song, where he played an ostrich farm worker . The main surprise, however, was not this.

The winner of the competition was unanimously recognized as the Brazilian film "Elite Squad", which was not among the favorites of public opinion at the festival. This is partly due to the fact that the press screening copy arrived without English subtitles, journalists rushed for headphones, half of which did not work. Meanwhile, the film, made in the genre of a brutal police thriller and shot with a modern mobile hand-held camera, is very ideologically complex. It takes place in 1997, on the eve of the Pope's visit to Brazil. A special elite squad is tasked with bringing order to the most criminal area of Rio de Janeiro, where the regular police are powerless and corrupted by connections with the drug business. The squad uses quasi-Nazi symbols and acts with a brutality that has evoked cinematic associations with "Rambo" and "Dirty Harry" and led to accusations of the film's right-wing tendencies and calls for a "strong hand."

At home, the police leadership first tried to ban the film, then its copy was stolen, and it began to circulate illegally throughout the country, where 11 million people watched it. The director of "Elite Squad" Jose Padilla, a documentarian who gained success with the film "Bus 144" about the hostage crisis, wanted to make this film as a documentary. But having immersed himself in the life of favelas - crime-ridden urban areas - he realized that he would not come out of there alive. So from a documentarian he turned into a debutant feature film director. His call to legalize drugs was a sensation at a press conference in Berlin, since the fight against them only leads to increased corruption and social inequality.

Jose Padilla's film gravitates towards the tradition established by none other than the chairman of the Berlin jury, Costa Gavras. This is a tradition of politically engaged, highly social and at the same time action-packed cinema. The impression that it is a thing of the past is wrong: these are the films that were most in demand in Berlin today, last year, and the year before. And the most high-profile event of the festival was the out-of-competition screening on the penultimate day of “Katyn” by Andrzej Wajda, another cinema classic whose films have more than once balanced between artistic and political statements.

According to the competition, critics recognized the best film "Lake Tahoe" by Fernando Eimbke - an example of Mexican neo-neorealism, a film that continues the line of Carlos Reygadas and proves, together with "Elite Squad", that an intense "new wave" of young talents has indeed appeared in Latin America. And in the grand jury, “Lake Tahoe” was awarded the Alfred Bauer Prize - for the search for film language.

There is blood, but not here