"You can make a documentary about your favorite band and fight fascism at the same time."

Special correspondent in BerlinIt makes sense that if Germany hosts the world's largest heavy metal festival – the Wacken Festival, with more than 200 bands – the country's major film festival is the chosen venue to premiere the season's heavy metal documentary. The Ballad of Judas PriestMoreover, it has in its favor an element highly valued at the Berlinale: the vindication queer through the figure of its iconic singer, Rob Halford, who came out in the late 90s after nearly three decades of imposed silence regarding his sexual orientation.

But the driving forces and co-directors of the documentary are the anthropologist and documentarian Sam Dunn, author of the magnificent Metal: in headbanger's journeyand Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who imbued the film with their lifelong passion for Judas Priest, but also with a reflection on the social context in which the band was born (the working classes of the industrial cities of the English Midlands) and its fundamental role in the emergence of heavy metal.

Morello's presence at the Berlinale, a political activist who has always championed progressive causes, held added interest due to the controversy that erupted following a question about the festival's refusal to condemn the Gaza genocide. Jury president Wim Wenders questioned the appropriateness of mixing cinema and politics.The debate has permeated all conversations about the films. This Sunday, the festival director, Tricia Tuttle, issued a statement expressing concern about press questions to artists about politics. "They're criticized if they don't answer, but also if they do answer and we don't like what they say, or if they can't summarize complex issues briefly when a microphone is thrust in front of them," Tuttle said. "We shouldn't expect artists to talk about every political issue unless they want to," she added.

For Morello, however, mixing art and politics is the most natural thing in the world. "What a great time to be living in, where you can make a documentary about your favorite band and fight fascism at the same time," he said before highlighting the diversity of the audience at current Judas Priest concerts: "50% of the attendees are Latino, there are a lot of gay couples, and, yes, also some kind of leather jacket. Judas Priest is the model we should follow." Halford also weighed in: "For me, it would be impossible to ignore the things in the world that make me angry and not include them in a song. It's what I've done my whole life. And I get angrier all the time, especially because of what's happening to my people in countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia."

The Ballad of Judas Priest It includes interviews with all the band members, but also with fans like Dave Grohl, Jack Black, Kirk Hammett, and Ozzy Osbourne himself, the voice of the other fathers of heavy metal, Black Sabbath, who died just a few months ago. And to avoid an overabundance of talking heads, Morello brings together a diverse group of musicians (himself, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, Scott Ian of Anthrax, Darryl McDaniels of the rap group Run DMC, and Lzzy Hale of Halestorn) to chat about their shared passion for Judas Priest. The idea was, of course, Morello's: "I'm a musician, but I'm also a fan, and fans get together to drink and talk about music," Morello explained. Uplifting and reflective, the documentary reviews the band's musical journey, but also their defense of heavy metal against attacks from the Christian right in the United States during the 1980s, and the importance of Judas Priest in establishing the genre's aesthetic, heavily influenced by subculture. leather of the gay community.

The return of Sandra Hüller

In official competition, the premiere of the historical drama Rose has confirmed the status of auteur cinema star achieved by Sandra Huller, the actress who in 2023 starred in the film that won the Palme d'Or (Anatomy of a fall) and the film that won the Oscar for best international film (The area of ​​interestHuller now plays a woman who has been passing as a man for years and who, after serving in the Thirty Years' War, usurps the identity of a deceased comrade and arrives in a remote rural area of ​​Germany with the documents that allow her to claim an abandoned farmhouse. "I didn't want to be a man, I just wanted the freedom that comes with wearing trousers," her character will later explain, based on a real case that, like that of the Austrian woman The Devil's Toilet, shows the coercive rigidity of gender roles in 17th-century Central Europe.

Right from its title, Rose She forgoes deception and chooses to tell the story with a sobriety broken only by the unnecessary omniscient voice-over. With her face disfigured by a war wound, Hüller captures in her performance all the nuances of complexity of a woman who, thanks to a disguise, is able to access an authentic life, not subordinated in every aspect to the strict codes of patriarchal society. "Whether this woman's life is a lie, I neither know nor care," Hüller said at the Berlinale to summarize how she sees the character.