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This Is Not Berlin(Esto no es Berlin)

✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Mexico · 2019
1h 55m
Director Hari Sama
Starring Xabiani Ponce de León, José Antonio Toledano, Mauro Sánchez Navarro, Ximena Romo
Genre Drama

It's 1986 in Mexico City, and seventeen-year-old Carlos doesn't fit in anywhere, not with his family nor with the friends he has chosen in school. But everything changes when he is invited to a mythical nightclub and discovers the underground nightlife scene: punk, sexual liberty, and drugs.

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What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

80

TheWrap by Dan Callahan

What’s lovely about the best scenes in This Is Not Berlin is the sense Sama captures of all the possibilities opening up for Carlos.

90

Variety by Dennis Harvey

Hari Sama’s fourth feature as writer-director is something special, and one of the best of its particular subgenre.

83

The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak

The events onscreen are semi-autobiographical for Sama and thus a document of the turmoil those his age at the time faced when external expectations and internal hopes clashed. At its center: love. The power it has to bring us together opposite its potential to tear us apart.

42

The Playlist by Jonathan Christian

Similar to the cringeworthy performance art that wraps itself around the core of the film, This Is Not Berlin is emotionally hollow, more than a bit confused, and regrettably forgettable.

80

The Hollywood Reporter by Jonathan Holland

Smart, good-looking and buzzing with edginess, Sama's fourth feature has been made with a love and care that's palpable in every frame, allowing us to forgive its occasional, inevitable brushes with cliche.

58

IndieWire by Jude Dry

The film has style in spades; it would have substance, too, if only it knew when to quit.

75

RogerEbert.com by Tomris Laffly

Sama owes much of the authenticity and visual panache of This Is Not Berlin to his cinematographer Alfredo Altamirano. The DP’s nervy, panoramic compositions heighten the precise production design of various multimedia art pieces and an assortment of impeccably choreographed street protests.

70

Screen Daily by Wendy Ide

Sama’s film captures the quicksilver sparks of an artistic moment – the point at which a loose bohemian community collectively finds its voice and forces the mainstream to take notice.

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