Berlin Silver Bear for Best DirectorTrue StoryMusic/DanceArt/Artist
This is the first narrative feature by documentarian Grant Gee, who has chronicled portraits of legendary musicians such as Radiohead and Joy Division. While it shows the life of era-defining jazz pianist Bill Evans, the film leaps far beyond the conventions of a standard biopic. Beginning in 1961, when Evans reached his musical zenith, the narrative accumulates the ensuing two decades of solitude and wandering. The texture of 16mm film evokes the cinematic sentiment of the past century, while the montage of fragmented images, echoing jazz’s innate rhythm of improvisation and variation, fluidly harmonizes the layers of time the artist went through. Confronting Evans’s vulnerabilities and fractures head-on, the film intricately scores an unstable inner mind like a complex musical composition. Anders Danielsen Lie’s sensual yet restrained performance resuscitates the legend of Bill Evans into a living, contemporary figure.
Grant Gee was born in Plymouth, UK, in 1964. He has directed documentaries exploring music, literature, and the lives of artists, including Meeting People Is Easy (1998), which chronicled the tour of the rock group Radiohead. His major directorial works include Joy Division (2007), Patience (2012), Innocence of Memories (2015), and The Gold Machine (2022). Everybody Digs Bill Evans is his debut feature fiction film, for which he won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival.
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
