Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Devil’s Bath and Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s My Favourite Cake have jointly topped Screen’s 2024 Berlin jury grid with an average score of 3.1.
See the final 2024 grid below.
The last three titles to land, Meryam Joobeur’s Who Do I Belong To?; Gustav Möller’s Sons; and Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala, could not unseat the duo after scoring 2.8, 2.1 and 2.4 respectively.
Who Do I Belong To? follows a Tunisian mother struggling to cope when her jihadist son returns from Syria. It earned two fours (excellent) from Die Zeit’s Katja Nicodemus and Meduza’s Anton Dolin, two threes (good), but four twos (average) saw it slip down the leaderboard.
Sons, Moller’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut The Guilty, is a prison drama starring Sidse Babett Knudsen. It sharply divided our critics, earning two fours (from Rzeczpospolita’s Barbara Hollender and Cinematografo.it’s Paolo Bertolin), but also three ones, earning a middling final average of 2.1.
Nepalese drama Shambhala, the second feature from writer-director Min Bahadur Bham following 2015’s The Black Hen, was the final title to land on the grid. It scored a mix of twos and threes, with a one from Nicodemus. Bertolin was not able to score the film, so its final average is based on seven scores.
This year’s winning score of 3.1 is down on the 3.6 earned by Past Lives on last year’s Berlin jury grid (although that film premiered at Sundance before arriving in Berlin). It is the second time in three years that the Berlin grid has seen joint winners, after Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy and Maria Speth’s Mr Bachmann And His Class both closed on 3.3 in 2021.
Mati Diop’s Dahomey, awarded the Golden Bear over the weekend, received a strong 2.7 average from our last critics.
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