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On the surface, Rafael Kapelinski’s feature debut “Butterfly Kisses” looks to fit neatly into a certain subset of angsty teen dramas set against the backdrop of London’s drab housing estates, but something far darker — and, admittedly, much more complicated — looms just below the surface of the filmmaker’s dramatic offering.

“Butterfly Kisses” premiered last week at the Berlinale and stars a young and up-and-coming British cast, including Theo Stevenson (“Humans”), Rosie Day (“Outlander”) and Thomas Turgoose (“This is England”). The film was shot entirely in black and white, and it appears to earn all the moodiness that such a style implies.

Read More: The 2017 IndieWire Berlinale Bible: Every Review, Interview and News Item Posted During the Festival

Ostensibly concerned with a pack of teen friends goofing about around their council estate home, the film follows a trio of dudes — Kyle, Jarred and Jake — as they navigate such relatable themes as boredom,...

Comfortably wedged between Sundance and Cannes in every respect, the Berlin Film Festival is a massive orgy of world cinema that’s come to be known for the unrivaled variety of its programming. Best illustrated by its adventurous sidebars, the festival’s exotic tastes — unusual for such a glitzy and commercialized culture event — often spill over into the more prestigious Competition section, which has served as a launching pad for several of the current decade’s very best films (many of which, like Mia Hansen-Løve’s “Things to Come,” might have slipped through the cracks if not for such a prominent spotlight). And, in stark contrast to Cannes, the festival’s recent winners have been as worthy as they have been unexpected, ranging from a frigid Chinese neo-noir (“Black Coal, Thin Ice”) to a crushingly intimate documentary about Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis (“Fire at Sea”).

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Sally Potter spoke to a sold-out, mostly female audience on a springlike afternoon in Toronto. She was the latest world-renowned director to sit in the interview at the Tiff Bell Lightbox, and she discussed with journalist Johanna Schneller her experiences and views on filmmaking while clips of her films burst on the screen including her latest, Ginger & Rosa. The session started with a moment from her little-seen 1979 short, Thriller. It’s an experimental short consisting of grainy black-and-white photos married to the opera La Boheme and Bernard Hermann’s theme from Psycho. “The decisions I made were about trying to bring …...

More familiar with life on the fringes of British cinema, director Sally Potter finds herself the subject of a BFI retrospective. But she has no interest in looking back

In the late 1980s, Sally Potter was scratching around for funding to make Orlando, the Virginia Woolf adaptation widely considered her finest film, as well as a formative moment in the career of its star, Tilda Swinton. Potter's friend, the visionary director Michael Powell, had secured her a 10-minute meeting with Martin Scorsese, in which she hoped to convince him to extend a helping hand to a fellow maverick.

"Tilda and I went with our producer to meet Scorsese in New York," says the 60-year-old Potter, seated at a table in her east London office. "We walked into his place and nearly fainted with admiration. He then proceeded to spend the entire 10 minutes talking about how incredibly difficult life was for...