Berlin 74 is over, but the best films are heading to theaters worldwide. Prize-winners will have the easiest path to distribution, but Italian audiences will also get to see one of the festival's most acclaimed works—a film that surprised everyone by going home empty-handed from the jury. My Favourite Cake, the Iranian entry by directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, has already been acquired for Italian release. The directors couldn't collect their awards in person: Iran confiscated their passports. In their country, many films must be shot in secret because they show real life—not the censored, counterfeit version the regime demands. The protagonist is a seventy-year-old widow with no interest in politics. Her daughter lives abroad. She feels so isolated that the city no longer feels like hers. By chance, she meets a taxi driver her own age, equally alone. A small affection blooms between them, and she wants to know him better. But in Iran, an unmarried man and woman in their seventies spending an evening together at home is scandalous. This fragile hope for late-in-life love carries the bitterness of having to hide. The film is genuinely revolutionary: it possesses the everyday honesty that the regime wants suppressed. Yet it's not confined to four walls. The elderly woman is not indifferent to the injustices suffered by younger women. Though the film seems to exist outside time, it is soaked through with the fear and rebellion of Iran today.
The Berlin festival also includes the Forum—an independent, non-competitive section that has offered an alternative to the official selection since 1971, giving space to young filmmakers and experimental work from around the world. In the final days of the festival, the Forum screened a film by director Abdenour Zahzah with the longest title of the edition: Chroniques fidèles survenues au siècle dernier à l'hôpital psychiatrique Blida-Joinville, au temps où le Docteur Frantz Fanon était chef de la cinquième division entre 1953 et 1956. The title itself is a kind of summary. But first, we should know who Frantz Fanon was. Born in Martinica in 1925, he fought in the French Resistance during the war, then trained as a psychiatrist. In the mid-1950s, he became the first Black chief physician at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algiers—then still a French colony. Fanon introduced sociotherapy. The goal was to treat patients with dignity and involve them actively in group conversations and social activities, with medical staff participating as well, at a time when electroshock and dehumanization were standard practice in most of the world, Italy included. The hospital had a stark rule: French patients were separated from Arab patients. As head of an Arab ward, Fanon immersed himself in their culture and eventually collaborated with the National Liberation Front. In that crucible, he developed his anti-colonial ideology in full. The film documents these intense Algerian years in spare, simple black and white. It's clear and accessible to non-specialists—and essential for understanding psychiatric hospitals as centers of detention and suppression of dissent. Fanon's path was marked by deep historical and political convictions. But his insight into the asylum as a place where dignity is stripped away through abuse of power—and through the absence of any genuine will to heal—resonated far beyond France. It influenced Franco Basaglia himself. This film deserves to be seen in Italy soon.