And for a family that finds out someone is gay? It’s a shame so strong it can only be washed away by blood.” This is no overstatement, as we soon see in a horrifying video that was intercepted by activists. He says, “It’s a crime to be gay in Chechnya. Early on, we hear from David Isteev, a crisis coordinator at a facility that helps queer people find asylum in other countries - or, at least, smuggles them out before they can be killed. Welcome to Chechnyaĭavid France’s Welcome to Chechnya may be the most ironically titled film at the Berlinale - it’s about LGBTQ people who are not welcome in the country. My Little Sister is a classy weepie that pushes your buttons, alright, but it never becomes distinctive enough to justify its presence in the Competition slot. And that may be another reason she’s tearing herself apart, so that, at the time of greatest need, she can be the mother Sven never had. Lisa’s mother has never been a “good” parent. There’s a superb conceit at the film’s core. (Her husband runs a posh international school there.) But Sven brings her back home, and she struggles not just with a dying twin but also a possibly dying marriage. Lisa is settled in Switzerland, having given up her dreams of being a playwright in Berlin. But this is really a study of Lisa, and how one big event can make one’s entire life unravel. The title of Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond’s film - My Little Sister - suggests the POV of Sven. What if Sven collapses on stage? The director cares about Sven, but he’s just being practical. And the man she’s speaking to is a theatre director who made many hits with Sven, but is now reluctant to mount a production with him. The actor she’s speaking about is her twin brother, Sven (Lars Eidinger), who is wasting away from leukemia. The distraught woman speaking these words is Lisa (Nina Hoss). If you take that away, it will kill him more than any disease. My Little Sisterīeing wanted makes an actor feel alive. That is not the language of the soul.” Is this banality intentional? Is Siberia less a mindfuck than Ferrara impishly fucking around with our minds, daring us to call him out, instead of saying, “Well, he is an auteur, so there may be something to all this weirdness…”? Perhaps that’s why Siberia has got a Competition slot, because it both mimics and mocks a particularly pretentious strain of “art-house festival-type movie”. In Siberia, this is that line: “There is no beginning. The film revolves around Clint’s attempts to dive into his soul or subconscious or whatever, and there are times you get a line so inexplicably banal, so plucked out of the pages of a doleful teenager-poet’s diary, that the only option is to giggle. The question, therefore, becomes: Is it the good kind of mindfuck? Is it going to be Tarkovsky? Or is this going to be Terrence Malick, in his Knight of Cups phase? Alas, it’s the latter.
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By now you know the kind of mindfuck this movie is.