by Elisa Giudici
Leyla Bouzid returns with A VOIX BASSE (IN A WHISPER)
Three more movies from Berlinale include a queer drama from Tunisia's Leyla Bouzid, a music bio about Bill Evans, and a docu-fiction hybrid film from Alain Gomis...
A VOIX BASSE (IN A WHISPER)
Leyla Bouzid’s previous feature As I Open My Eyes (2016) felt like a quiet revelation in the way it braided music and emotional awakening into the portrait of a Tunisia in flux. With A Voix Basse, she circles similar terrain. Lila, an engineer long settled in Paris, returns home after her uncle’s death. Only part of the family knew he was gay; his sexuality was carefully hidden from the elderly grandmother who presides over the household. Fewer still know that Lila herself is queer. She keeps her partner tucked away in the anonymous Western-style hotel where she’s staying, compartmentalizing her life in a way that mirrors the silences she’s navigating at home.
As the contradictions of her uncle’s hidden life surface, they begin to overlap with Lila’s own struggle to negotiate her mother’s exasperation and her reputation as the family’s “rebellious” daughter. Bouzid leans into melodramatic textures that recall 1990s Almodóvar and, for Italian audiences, Ferzan Özpetek; a lineage that is flattering but also revealing. The film is heartfelt and often moving, yet its emotional architecture feels somewhat dated in both theme and execution. The Berlinale has not had the strongest track record with lesbian narratives in recent years; this one lands more successfully than most, but it rarely pushes beyond its comfort zone.
EVERYBODY DIGS BILL © Shane O'Connor 2026 Cowtown Pictures_Hot Property
EVERYBODY DIGS BILL
With Wim Wenders presiding over the jury, Grant Gee’s exquisitely crafted black-and-white portrait of Bill Evans seems primed to attract attention, at least in the technical categories. Gee translates the pianist’s timeless, introspective jazz into a refined cinematic language, privileging atmosphere and formal elegance over conventional biographical beats.
Rather than building toward the famous Village Vanguard recordings, the film opens with that legendary performance and folds in the car accident that killed Scott LaFaro. From there, it shifts focus to the aftermath, the period of artistic paralysis and grief that followed. Evans is explicit: LaFaro was not a close friend, merely a stage partner with whom he shared perfect musical synchronicity. “Most of the time I couldn’t stand him,” he tells his brother Harry. The film frames this rupture as an artistic bereavement: the loss of a creative self-confidence essential to making music.
Yes, the dialogue often feels too articulate, too perfectly calibrated to be fully naturalistic but the polish is deliberate. Gee, a veteran of music documentaries, finds a demanding yet compelling structure for exploring artistic crisis. It’s a film that aspires to formal perfection — and largely earns it.
DAO © 2026 – Les Films du Worso – Srab Films – Yennenga Productions – Nafi Films – Telecine Bissau Produções – Canal+ Afrique
DAO
Alain Gomis, the French-Senegalese filmmaker, blends fiction and documentary grammar in Dao, immediately revealing the artifice by opening with actresses auditioning and discussing which role they would prefer to inhabit. From there, the film centers on a wedding in France and a funeral in Senegal, both held together by the bride’s mother. As she oversees her daughter’s marriage in the diaspora, she revisits the father’s burial back home; a ceremony shaped by traditions she has partially lost as a second-generation migrant.
Shot with handheld camera and staged with remarkable observational precision, Dao is so immersive that at times you wonder how the camera managed to capture even the peripheral gossip and generational tensions simmering at the edges of the ceremony, before remembering that this is, in fact, meticulously constructed fiction.
The film carries an enormous thematic load: diaspora, evolving African identity, gender roles across continents, racism, marriage, generational conflict, Black pride, the meaning of blood ties. Perhaps too much. At 185 minutes, there are extraordinary stretches of lived-in immediacy, but the final hour begins to stack new concerns onto an already dense framework without granting them adequate space. The editing and camera work occasionally falter under the weight. Still, its ambitious and its immersive qualities embody the Berlinale ethos — and in a competition slate short on obvious frontrunners, that may count for something in the end.
Previously at Berlinale