Berlinale Classics 2018

(‘My 20th Century’), HUN/FRG, 1949, directed by Ildikó Enyedi

In 1879, as Thomas Alva Edison was lighting up Menlo Park with his first demonstration of the incandescent light bulb, far away in Europe, a dark and joyless childhood was beginning for identical twins Dora and Lili in Budapest. Orphaned and separated as young girls by a quirk of fate, their lives take very different directions. Dora becomes a successful con woman, while Lili joins a group of anarchist revolutionaries. Unknown to each other, their paths cross again briefly on New Year’s Eve in 1899 on the Orient Express. They will ultimately be linked by Z, a cosmopolitan gentlemen who has no idea that he is actually wooing two woman, not one …This first feature by director Ildikó Enyedi, who won the Golden Bear at the 2017 Berlinale for ‘Testről és lélekről’ (‘On Body and Soul’), is a bit like a puzzle. It presents the audience with a romantic love story, a poetic fairy tale, an erotic riddle – and at the same time, an inventory of new technology – electricity, the telegraph, film. Conceived as an homage to silent movies and shot in black-and-white, ‘Az én XX. századom’ references many silent film techniques and tricks. – World premiere of the digitally restored version in 4K DCP.

(‘Wings of Desire’), GER/F, 1987, directed by Wim Wenders

Damiel and Cassiel, the film’s two main characters, are guardian angels – benevolent, invisible beings wearing long coats. They are unable to intervene in human lives, but they can hear the thoughts of mortals and attempt to comfort them. Damiel falls in love with trapeze artist Marion and wants to become human, even though that means giving up immortality. Peter Falk, playing himself as a former angel, has already taken that fateful step and urges Damiel to leave eternity behind too. The story is told from the point of view of the angels, who see the world in black and white. It is not until Damiel becomes human that the world of colour reveals itself to him … The film was shot on both black-and-white and colour stock. At the time, that required several additional steps in the lab in order to produce a final colour negative, which was several generations removed from the camera negatives. For the digital restoration, the original negative was scanned in 4K, retouched, and colour corrected. So the film can now be shown the way cinematographer Henri Alekan might have envisioned it. – World premiere of the restored version in 4K DCP.

(‘Life According to Agfa’), ISR, 1992, directed by Assi Dayan

In a Tel Aviv bar, a world of bohemians, business people, junkies, tourists, pimps, and soldiers all meet. And they are all lonely and lost. The boss Daliah dreams that her lover will remain at her side forever; barmaid Liora looks the other way as her boyfriend sleeps around with any woman who’ll have him. Waitress Daniela yearns to move to America, and Riki, who comes from a kibbutz, has as much trouble coping with life as he does with the big city … The events of a single night, captured in the black-and-white photos that gave the film its title, are a microcosm of a society that considers itself liberal and tolerant, but in which seemingly trivial actions can become explosive. At the time, director Assi Dayan stressed that ‘HaChayim Al-Pi Agfa’ was not meant as a psychographic only of Israeli society, but could have been set anywhere. Not long afterwards, when prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv in 1995, it would become clear how close Dayan’s apocalyptic vision was to the concrete reality in Israel. – World premiere of the digitally restored version in 4K DCP.

(‘Tokyo Twilight’), JPN, 1957, directed by Yasujiro Ozu

Their mother abandoned sisters Takako and Akiko a long time ago, and their father has had to raise his two daughters alone. Now that they are grown, the respected businessman recognises how unhappy they are. After a fight with her alcoholic husband, Takako returns to live with her father. Her younger sister Akiko, who yearns for a different life, is also part of the household. Akiko has an affair with student Ken, a drifter who spends his time gambling. When she gets pregnant, he cuts her off. When she goes looking for him at a mah-jongg parlour, she meets a woman who knows things about Akiko’s childhood that only a mother could … The theme of the end of a family living together is one that Japanese directing maestro Yasujiro Ozu often reworks, and here he has given it a dramatic and sombre twist. In a barren, cold Tokyo, a young woman is broken by her father’s harsh nature and silence. This largely-unknown work is considered Ozu’s darkest post-war film. – World premiere of the digitally restored version in 4K DCP.