Berlinale Classics 2023

USA, 1967, directed by Stanley Kramer

When Joanne Drayton brings her fiancé home to introduce him to her parents, they are not as happy as they might be. Dr. John Prentice is a respected doctor, but he is also African-American. Prentice tells Joanne’s father that he will only marry her if both her parents agree – and do so before he leaves the next day. Father Matt Drayton, a liberal journalist, feels pressured. While his wife Christina is taken with the depth of John’s love for their child, Matt foresees the couple facing a host of problems that he would like to spare his daughter. Over the course of a day, as they prepare for the arrival of John’s parents for dinner, the Draytons discuss the pros and cons of the potential marriage … ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ made film history with the first interracial kiss on the big screen, at a time when miscegenation laws in the United States were front and center in public discourse. The film cemented Sidney Poitier’s status in Hollywood. But the emphatic and moving final monologue delivered by Spencer Tracy provided a fitting legacy for the great Hollywood actor, who would die bare weeks after the production wrapped. World premiere of the digitally restored version.

UK/CA, 1991, directed by David Cronenberg

In 1953 New York, writer Bill Lee works as an exterminator, whereby inhaling an excess of insecticide has distorted his sense of reality. After accidently shooting his wife to death in a drugged haze, he flees to Interzone on the Moroccan coast, the stomping grounds for a variety of enigmatic characters. Functioning as a secret agent for a certain Dr Benway, he writes reports about a drug ring involving an American writer couple that mushroom into the novel ‘Naked Lunch’ while the protagonists change their identities at will, and typewriters morph into aggressive insects … “Exterminate all rational thought!” In his adaptation of a novel widely considered unfilmable, David Cronenberg has taken to heart that advice from Bill Lee, William Burrough’s alter ego. In a surrealist brainteaser full of monsters and mutations, body horror and literary allusions to the Beat Generation, what happens onscreen turns out to be pure cinematic hodgepodge, in which reality, drugged delirium, and literary fantasy imperceptibly segue into each other. “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” World premiere of the digitally restored version.

(‘Sweet Dreams’), IT, 1981, directed by Nanni Moretti

When director Michele Apicella screens his newest movie in film clubs, auditoriums, cinemas, and even a convent, he faces a torrent of criticism, mainly that he hasn’t adequately represented the interests of farmers, housewives, and labourers. Meanwhile, work on his next film also takes a catastrophic turn. Titled “La mamma di Freud”, its lead character is a revenant of the famed psychoanalyst who, like the director himself, lives with his mother in a symbiotic love-hate relationship. On top of that, Michele has to ward off a rival who is making a musical about the 1968 student uprisings. When the two are pitted against each other on a TV game show, it takes on nightmarish dimensions. As does Michele’s reunion with a girlfriend who might, however, be purely imaginary … Woody Allen in Annie Hall is a poster child of normality by comparison with the cinema narcissist to whom Nanni Moretti gave form in five autobiographically tinged comedies. ‘Sweet dreams’ – lauded as a self-reflective satire about the film industry, with the tics and neuroses of filmmakers becoming the real show – won the 1981 Silver Lion in Venice. World premiere of the digitally restored version.

USA, 1923, directed by Charles Chaplin

Lovers Jean and Marie want to leave their parents and elope to Paris. But fate prevents Jean from getting on the train. A year later, Marie has become the glamorous toast of Paris – and mistress of the city’s richest bachelor. When he becomes engaged to a woman befitting his stature, she is meant to remain in that position. But Marie yearns for a family of her own. When she accidently encounters Jean, now an artist living in the Latin Quarter, she accepts his proposal. But Jean disavows their love to his mother, so Marie leaves him. Jean is in despair … Charlie Chaplin spent a year preparing what would be his directorial debut for United Artists, the company he helped found. He himself appears only in a cameo as a porter. Directed with a keen eye for the world’s overburdened and servants, his elegant societal drama is impressive for the matter-of-fact approach of all its actors. It wowed the press and fascinated Ernst Lubitsch, but was a flop at the box office. After censors in the American hinterlands took their scissors to it, Chaplin pulled the film from release until the 1970s. World premiere of the digitally restored version with new music based on Chaplin’s compositions.