_{Oink by Mascha Halberstad}

Stop motion animated feature Oink** will celebrate its world premiere in the Generation Kplus competition of the Berlinale. Oink is director Mascha Halberstad’s (Munya in Mij, 2013) first feature film and is based on the book  ‘Oinks Revenge’ by Tosca Menten. Fiona van Heemstra wrote the screenplay and Oink is produced by Viking Film. In Oink 9-year-old Babs receives a pig named Oink as a present from her grandfather and she convinces her parents to keep it under the condition that Oink follows a puppy training. But her parents are not the biggest threat to Oink because actually her grandfather is secretly taking part in the sausage competition organized by The Society for Meat Products from Fresh Pigs. 

The international premiere of Emma Branderhorst’s short Spotless*, produced by IJswater Films, is also part of the Generation Kplus competition program. Spotless is a short drama about Ruby (15) who does everything she can during her menstruation not to bother her hard-working mother with asking to buy tampons, because she knows there is no money for them. The film had its world premiere at the Netherlands Film Festival and was awarded the Cinekid Lion for Best Dutch Short Live Action last October at Cinekid Festival. Sales and festival distribution are handled by Kapitein Kort. In 2019 Branderhorst’s short graduation film for the Utrecht University of the Arts, Under the Skin, also had its international premier at Berlinale Generation.

Myanmar Diaries by The Myanmar Film Collective and produced by ZINDOC, will world premiere in the Panorama Dokumente section. It is a hybrid documentary film about life under Myanmar’s junta regime of terror in the aftermath of the military coup of February 1st 2021, told through intimate personal stories. Myanmar Diaries is built up of short films by ten young anonymous Burmese filmmakers, combined with emotionally harrowing citizen journalism documenting the junta’s brutality, as well as courageous resistance to it.

ZINDOC has produced two other films from Myanmar this year: Sad Film, a short by an anonymous filmmaker about living in fear and the impossibility of filmmaking in Myanmar, which world premiered in Venice and Letter to San Zaw Htway, a collective short film directed by Petr Lom about an inspiring Burmese artist and activist and his resistance to dictatorship, which premiered at IDFA.

Also selected for Panorama Dokumente is Dreaming Walls* by filmmakers Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier and minority co-produced by Basalt Film. The documentary is about the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York City, icon of the 1960s counterculture and artists’ refuge for over a century, which will be transformed into a luxury hotel. Dogwoof are handling sales.

The Berlinale starts February 10th and continues until the 20th. For more information, click here.
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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Film Production Incentive