As a journalist I always like to expand my horizon. This year, I experienced the main section of the Berlinale's Forum section by focusing only on debut features and second films. It was a wild journey of styles and genres, sometimes with promising ideas and filmmakers, sometimes pretty strange and disturbing. One film challenged me a lot. In the experimental work "Horse Opera" (2022), a narrator talks about a group of club kids in New York preparing for a party, taking drugs and dancing while the images on screen show pictures of nature and animals. What sounds like a poetic experience was pretty weird. The voice of the narrator, the film's director Moyra Davey, sounded bored and monotonous. At the same time rumps of horses were seen, urinating. It was pretty disturbing. Fortunately, Davey decided to follow up those images with a Beatles song, and I swayed to the beat while more nature appeared in front of my eyes, for example, a fox. And I asked myself: Isn't this a film that would fit more in the Forum Expanded stand? For those who stayed, the images and text merged into each other, and Horse Opera was interpreted as a pandemic, somnambulant work, but I could not relate to that.
What a relief, then, to watch Tatsunari Otas very light-hearted "There is a Stone" (Ishii ga aru, 2022).