From Marlene-Dietrich-Platz and the Zoo Palast, the focus of the day by Eleonora Ono

(from the #Berlinale Luigi Noera with the extraordinary participation of Carla Cucchiarelli and the kind collaboration of Marina Pavido, and Eleonora Ono of the editorial staff Ground floor – Photos are published courtesy of #BERLINALE)

At the halfway point, pills from the PERSPECTIVE sections, Forum e Generation

PERSPECTIVE

The River Train (The River Train) by Lorenzo Ferro, Lucas A. Vignale | with Milo Barria, Rita Pauls, Mariano Barria, Fabian Casas, Lucrecia Pazos – Argentina 2026 | WP| first work

The plot: Milo, nine years, he grows up under the pressure of becoming a great Malambo dancer and his son “Perfect”. She dreams of taking her life into her own hands and escaping the responsibilities of washing dishes, cooking and practicing Malambo at night. Milo longs for another life. She fantasizes about traveling by train and exploring the city of Buenos Aires, which he has seen so many times in the cinema and on television. however, to break away from his family and the countryside and realize his big dreams, must dare to embark on a new journey: a journey into solitude, between adventures and unknown pleasures of the big city.

Review: The film tells the story of Milo, nine years, who lives in a remote village in Argentina and trains with discipline as a malambo dancer, intense and percussive traditional dance. But while his feet beat the rhythm of the earth, his gaze is turned elsewhere: dream of the train, sogna Buenos Aires, dreams of a city glimpsed only through a film screen. It is the delicate portrait of a childhood suspended between roots and the desire to escape.

The work is part of contemporary South American cinema, which often favors slow rhythms, rural settings and childish protagonists to narrate social and identity fractures. In this tradition, childhood is never simple innocence, but a space of silent conflict between belonging and the desire for emancipation. Milo thus becomes an emblematic figure of an identity under construction, suspended between the earth that holds him and the elsewhere that calls him.

The narrative choice of entrusting such a young child with such an early path towards solitude which is not imposed is striking, but almost sought, as a necessary step to affirm one's identity. To get out of his tiny world, Milo must first go through it internally, accepting silence, the distance, the absence. Grow, who, it means crossing the void without being destroyed by it.

Even in the desire to escape, the protagonist never really severs the connection with his own land.

The malambo — a dance deeply rooted in the ground, made of percussion and beats that seem to arise from the dust — it is not just discipline or tradition, but embodied memory.

Indeed, dreams of moving away from the village, but it brings with it the malambo as a sign of identity, almost as if it were a talisman. It's a clear narrative choice: You can't know where you're going if you don't know who you are. Travel, before being geographical, it is reconciliation with one's origins.

The color palette is deliberately opaque, dominated by dull and earthy nuances. The colors never explode: they seem restrained, like the protagonist's desires. This visual choice reinforces the sense of isolation and immobility, transforming the landscape into a mental space even before a geographical one.

Sound symbolism is fundamental. In a work where silence weighs as much as images, the sound becomes an internal language. The sound of the train — evoked or expected — represents the promise of movement, the irruption of the external world into an immobile reality. The silence of the village, Unlike, amplifies the dimension of loneliness, which takes on the contours of a rite of passage necessary for evolution.

Times are slow, the rhythm low and meditative. The narrative allows for prolonged pauses, looks that replace words, suspensions that ask the spectator to experience the wait. however, It is precisely this slowness that prepares the ground for the final moment: a few minutes in which the pace rises and all the emotional tension is concentrated, forcefully bringing out the introspection and the void left by the missing family.

The roller moves at a snail's pace, but it leaves deep imprints. It is a cinema that does not seek immediacy or a twist, but it sediments over time, relying on contemplation and patience. An intimate and coherent work, which speaks of growth and detachment with rare delicacy, and which finds its most authentic truth in its obstinate slowness.

FORUM

Flying Tigers by Madhusree Dutta | with Madhusree Dutta, Mi You, Purav Goswami – D / India 2026 | WP | DOC

The plot: Driven by the strange evocation of tigers invading their homes by her mother suffering from Alzheimer's, Director Madhusree Dutta travels to Assam, in India. Here he learns of the existence of the Flying Tigers: US planes carrying military supplies during World War II across the treacherous Himalayan mountains, dall’Assam a Kunming, in China. Thus begins a docufiction essay that spans decades and travels around the world, on the human-scale experience of monumental logistical phenomena, with small stories that unfold in the silent shadows of History writ large. Collaborating with media theorist Mi You, nata a Kunming, and researcher Purav Goswami, resident of Assam, Dutta contrasts the current international flow of goods with increasing restrictions on the movement of people across borders. His film reveals how the realities experienced by border populations have always been fluid and malleable, rejecting the homogeneity required by the cartographic political imagination. Dutta appropriately adopts a heterogeneous and unconventional form, mixing interviews, archive material, performance, animations and musical numbers to create a personal and wide-ranging work, intimate and colossal at the same time.

Review: There are films that tell a story, and others who try to save her. This work belongs to the second category: a work that arises from a loss – that of memory, eroded by Alzheimer's - and turns into a journey between distant geographies, overlapping eras and female memories left suspended.

A daughter investigates her mother's lost memories, chasing an enigma pronounced in the last years of his illness: «The tigers are coming! Close the windows!». Words considered delusional, but which become the key to reopening a buried past. The film moves between documentary and fiction, intertwining fragile individual memory with great history: the tigers of Assam, disturbed by the monumental US military operation which during the Second World War connected India to China by flying over the Himalayas.

The title recalls the “Flying Tigers”, name belonging to military history, but here the term takes on a poetic and disturbing dimension. It's not just a war reference: it is the image of something breaking in, that breaks the domestic order, which forces you to close the windows – metaphorically and literally. Mother's childhood, apparently quiet, it turns out to be crossed by a radical transformation of the natural and social landscape.

The heart of the film is the memory of women: a memory that does not proceed in a straight line, which confuses chronology and perspective, that mixes fear and excitement. Through the comparison with the mother's brothers, two parallel flows emerge: on the one hand the wild emotion of witnessing something extraordinary, on the other, family apprehension about the sudden change in demographics and social structure. “The tigers are coming” becomes the echo of the adventure; “Close the windows” is the patriarchal warning, the attempt to protect and contain.

The project is both historical and deeply personal. The author, who in previous works had investigated urban cultures, feminist narratives and postcolonial identities, here he exposes himself in the first person. It had never been staged before: It wasn't his style. But in this film she feels pushed to become the protagonist. It's her mother's film for her. Research on maternal childhood thus becomes an existential synthesis, the highest and most intimate point of his artistic trajectory.

Even the experiences gained in multicultural contexts and in complex and post-industrial regions such as North Rhine-Westphalia seem to settle in the story: sensitivity for borderlands, for stratified identities, for memories that transform under economic and political pressures, resurfaces in filigree. Even the “touching of mortality” insinuates itself into the narrative, coloring it with a bittersweet awareness.

From a formal point of view, the work is touching, delicate and full of vibrant colors that release energy. The photography alternates intimacy and vastness, and some shots with an angle from bottom to top strongly mark the particularity of the film, giving the frames an almost epic tension, as if the gaze were trying to convey the disproportionate magnitude of the events experienced by a little girl.

Music is fundamental, which accompanies the story with sensitivity and measure, underlining the emotional passages without ever overpowering them. The soundtrack becomes an invisible thread between past and present, between individual memory and collective memory.

in which his interviewees talk in euphoric anticipation of the annual Horner School Ball, This film doesn't just solve the tiger riddle. Question how memories survive, they change shape, they remain latent and re-emerge. And above all it shows how, even when the memory crumbles, emotional truth continues to pulsate beneath the surface. It is an act of love, a gesture of restitution, and a powerful reflection on the fragility and strength of female memory. It is a film that does not "reconstruct" the past: crosses it. And in doing so, suggests that even in the disintegration of memory an irreducible emotional truth remains.

He doesn't just talk about the fragility of memories. He puts it on stage.

Lust by Ralitza Petrova | con Snejanka Mihaylova, Nikola Mutafov, Mihail Milchev, Alexis Atmadjov – Bulgaria / DK/ Sweden 2026 | WP

The plot: In her working life as a prison psychologist, Lilian deals with criminals who have been through a lot. She herself is equally full of secrets, apparently, a woman strongly guided by her perception and intellect, while keeping others and their emotions at a distance. A woman who doesn't talk much and yet acts decisively, usually in a trench coat, completely still. When the father, from which it was separated, dies, back home to Bulgaria; in the apartment he left her along with his debts, he encounters an incredible snake and his own extreme lust, long held in check by a celibacy pact. Knots and ties are untied during the act of shibari, and liberation begins. Incredibly precise in cinematic terms, psychological and narrative, this stubborn second feature, created by the Golden Leopard winner Ralitza Petrova (Godless), it is subtle and formally rigorous in playing with genres, bodies and psyche. Based on the unfathomable character of Lilian, played by the extraordinary Snejanka Mihaylova, Lust is an abstract search for joy and contains endless suspense.

Review: presented in the 76th edition of the Berlin Film Festival, Forum section, it is a work of incredible rarity: where psychodrama, together with the mystery and that rite of transformation, coexists without ever stabilizing in a recognizable genre.

It's a cinema that doesn't explain: exposes. It doesn't console: dig.

To the center, Lilian — probation officer, figure of control and containment - becomes the axis around which a constant tension between authority and surrender revolves, between institutional discipline and carnal vulnerability. His stiff posture, almost clinical, it is the first mask that the film slowly disintegrates.

The return to the city of origin to deal with the death of an absent father is not a simple narrative point, but a symbolic detonator. The mournful event does not produce catharsis: produces fracture. The protagonist passes through neutral spaces — impersonal offices, hotel rooms, suspended domestic interiors — which become extensions of his restrained psyche.

The director defines this movement as “an almost Jungian descent into an interior space where reality, memory and fiction are contaminated until they create a gap.” This is not a journey to the truth, but towards the crossing of suffering. The father, more than character, it is an echo that shapes the void.

The theoretical and emotional heart of the film lies in the relationship between Lilian and a Shibari rigger - a Japanese bondage practice which here takes on ritual value. The suspension of the body, the constriction of the ropes, muscular tension become symbolic language: control turns into surrender, rigidity into vulnerability.

The meat, exposed, it becomes a surface on which the trauma is inscribed, but also the threshold of transformation.

LUST questions the body as a political and spiritual space: what is linked is not only the protagonist's body, but his affective memory. And in the suspension a paradox emerges: only through constraint does the possibility of freedom open up.

The direction favors a dry aesthetic: natural light, extended times, shots that persist until they become a physical experience. The bourgeois interior - Persian carpet, velvet sofa — is suddenly crossed by a long python. The image, both disturbing and poetic, undermines the reassuring normality of the domestic space: the trauma does not erupt from the outside, crawls beneath the surface.

The camera remains confined, it offers no escape. Observe and supervise. In this visual enclosure the presence of the absent is amplified: the father. Ghost not represented but constantly evoked, invisible weight that conditions every gesture.

LUST also focuses on control dependence. Doctor Gabor Maté's quote — “Don't ask yourself why this addiction, ask yourself why this pain” — becomes an interpretative key: the obsession with order is a symptom, does not cause. The real narrative material is unprocessed pain, the wound that is transmitted silently.

The structure does not proceed by linear development, but for haiku images: short visions, isolate, which settle like fragments of a dream.

The cinematographic work does not ask to be understood but to be experienced. Like a wound that, opening up, it doesn't just bleed — it illuminates.

Generation Kplus

Entotsumachi no Poupelle – Yakusoku no Tokeidai (Chimney Town: Frozen in Time) in Hirota Yusuke | Nagase Yuzuna, Megumi, Kubota Masataka – Japan 2026 | WP | Animation

The plot: A little boy named Lubicchi is saddened by the loss of his best friend, Poupelle. Then, accidentally, finds himself in a mysterious realm that governs time. In this world, any clock that stops is immediately discarded. But a strange tower remains standing despite its clock being stuck at 11:59. Lubicchi discovers that the only way to return to his world is to restart this stopped clock. Together with his partner, Fluff, begins to unravel the mystery of the clock tower. During his journey, against Gus, a man who kept the faith and waited for a hundred years, it's Nagi, a tree spirit who once took human form. When Lubicchi finally finds the courage to believe, On Halloween night a miracle happens.

Review: Chimney Town: Frozen in Time tells the story of Lubicchi, a little boy marked by grief over the loss of his best friend, Poupelle. Lost and overwhelmed by sadness, Lubicchi finds himself in a mysterious kingdom governed by time, a place where any clock that stops ticking is immediately discarded, as if it no longer had any value. and yet, at the center of this suspended world, stands a strange tower whose clock is stopped at 11:59, frozen in an eternal moment before midnight.

Lubicchi discovers that the only way to return to his world is to restart that motionless clock. Together with his faithful companion Fluff, Thus begins a journey to discover the mystery of the tower. Along the way he meets Gus, a man who kept faith and expectation for a hundred years, it's Nagi, a tree spirit who had once taken human form. Through these meetings, the protagonist faces his fears and, mostly, find the courage to believe. Through this journey, The theme of faith also emerges forcefully as a guide to finding the way home. It's not just a physical return to your world, but of an internal journey: Lubicchi must learn to believe again, in itself, in others and in something greater than his pain. Only by rediscovering this trust is he able to restart what seemed irremediably stopped. Faith thus becomes a silent compass, capable of orienting him in the darkness and leading him towards the light.

And it is precisely on Halloween night that the miracle happens, sealing a profound and touching path of inner growth.

The animation focuses on a highly topical theme: the importance of time and friendship. In an era in which life is increasingly hectic and time seems to slip through our hands, the work invites us to reflect on its value and how easy it is to waste it or take it for granted. In the same way, underlines how much friendship is a strength capable of supporting in moments of pain and loss, becoming an indispensable point of reference for rediscovering oneself. It is significant that a Japanese animation chooses to focus on these issues, transforming them into powerful visual and emotional metaphors.

Time and friendship thus become two intertwined common threads: time that can stop, be wasted or recovered, and the friendship that it supports, saves and gives meaning to lived time.

Another fundamental element is the concept of union. Although initially an atmosphere of distrust hovers between the characters, this turns out to be only a transitory phase: with time, trust and collaboration become indispensable tools to overcome difficulties. The bond that is created between them shows how no one can face pain completely alone.

Furthermore, even if the loss of Poupelle is a horrendous event for Lubicchi, capable of leaving an apparently unfillable void in him, the boy is not completely alone in his pain. Next to him he finds a faithful and precious figure like Fluff: a noble and pleasant presence that supports him in his darkest moment. Certainly no one can replace Poupelle, because every bond is unique and unrepeatable, but Fluff's sincere affection proves that, even after a devastating loss, it is possible to open up to new forms of companionship and comfort.

The soundtrack deserves a special mention: accompanies the narrative with intensity, underlining the most dramatic moments - such as the explosion of residential areas - and emotionally supporting the viewer in the most complex passages. Music thus becomes a silent voice that amplifies feelings and tensions.

The representation of the female figure is also particularly successful, described in a dignified manner, strong and courageous, away from superficial stereotypes. In the same way, the presence of the cat alongside Lubicchi is fundamental: a faithful companion who makes the weight of sadness bearable and demonstrates how important it is to have someone close to you in the darkest moments.

Chimney Town: Frozen in Time is a dramatic yet luminous animation, capable of combining melancholy and hope. A story about loss, faith and rebirth, remember that even when time seems to have stopped, there is always the possibility of restarting it.

Eleonora Ono