Film Review – This Is Not Berlin

World cinema focus turns to Mexico City for “This is Not Berlin,” which tracks the development of two teenagers trying to grow up too fast, too soon. To help soften the blow of technology, co-writer/director Hari Sama dials the clock back 35 years, returning to a time when innocence was attacked by specific forms of influence. It’s a coming-of-age drama with a keen sense of the city, delivering a specific place and time that’s periodically more interesting than the characters. Sama can’t push the material over troubling road blocks of melodrama, but “This is Not Berlin” is evocative and intermittently emotive, locating the heart of adolescent pain and the difficulties of finding one’s way in a predatory world. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com