The decision by Berlin film festival to make its acting awards gender neutral is a “logical move” and a statement about gender equality in the film industry, according to the director of one of the most talked about movies at the Venice film festival.
Kornél Mundruczó, the director of Pieces of a Woman, was the third film-maker to approve of the move in Venice this week after Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett also backed the decision. Mundruczó said that he was supporting the unprecedented step because he feels it is a move toward equality.
He said: “I believe deeply in equality and I think that is every gender has their own rights. And this is something like a statement, and a protest for it.
“I think a performance isn’t as good if it’s made by a man or a woman. If you deeply believe in that, then it’s a logical move.”
On Thursday, Swinton, who received a lifetime achievement award at Venice, said that the decision by Berlin to do away with gendered acting awards was “eminently sensible” and came as a relief.
The Hungarian members of the Pieces of a Woman team also showed their support for a protest by students who have blockaded themselves inside their university in Budapest to stop what they say is a takeover by Viktor Orban’s nationalist government.
They wore black t-shirts with the hashtag #FreeSZFE which they said showed solidarity with students who were fighting for “integrity” and “autonomy” of their institution.
Mundruczó and writer Kata Wéber’s film has become one of the major talking points of the festival and stars Vanessa Kirby, Ellen Burstyn and Shia LaBeouf as a family that is struggling to come to terms with an infant death and generational grief.
Kirby, who has another film at the festival – Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come – said the role and the 30-minute birth scene, which the film opens with, were the most challenging of her career, and involved research that included witnessing a real birth.
She said: “I’m not a mother and I’ve not given birth before so the intention that we had to do about as authentic as possible. I felt a duty to every mother to try and represent it on screen as true to life and raw.”
Earlier in the day the director Abel Ferrara, who is at the festival with his film Sportin’ Life which documents his life in Rome, denounced so-called “cancel culture”, saying it couldn’t be allowed to curb provocative film-making and artists.
Ferrara, whose film 1979 The Driller Killer was banned in the UK between 1984 and 1999, said filmmakers who were worried about criticism online “shouldn’t be expressing themselves” but encouraged those who do to not be “dictated’” to.
He said: “It’s on the artist, it’s on the film-maker and the writer or whoever is coming up with the work to uncancel themselves, you know, to come clean to themselves.”
“I grew up during the women’s movement in the early 70s, which was a cultural revolution for me as a male born in the 50s. There was basically a revolution going on in the country. Times change, but the work and expression of the individual can’t be dictated by the attitude and that kind of political attitude.”
The director also referenced an exchange between the characters in Sigrid Nunez’s new novel What Are You Going Through, which “warily circles the #metoo movement” according to the New York Times.
“I read something very funny today,” he said. “Someone said, ‘Albert Einstein made some very racist comments’; the other person said, ‘Well, there goes the theory of relativity’.”
