Notes from the 56th Berlinale
By Leslie Weisman, DC Film Society Member
The 56th Berlin International Film Festival was without a doubt one of its finest, with what must surely have been a record number of films, visitors, celebrities, journalists, parties, events, and just about anything else you’d care to quantify. Indeed, the biz bible Variety reported “all venues SRO,” while the head of the ticket office estimated 450,000 attendees, and the massive festival catalog exulted in an “unprecedented interest, with more than 18,000 film industry visitors, almost 3,800 journalists, nearly 4,000 film entries [of which some 400 films were screened], over 3,500 applicants from 121 countries...”
The pride and joy of this year’s fest was the new European Film Market (EFM), housed in the magnificent Martin Gropius Building (see photo at right) just down the street from the Berlinale’s main venue at Potsdamer Platz. The EFM, which this year welcomed such U.S. companies as Focus Features, the Weinstein Co., and Lakeshore Entertainment, enjoyed an exhibition area of nearly 54,000 square feet, more than 250 participating companies from 51 countries, and over 650 films with almost 1,100 screenings and 5,162 accredited industry professionals, making it the EFM’s largest turnout ever.
While European, and to an extent, German films also dominated the Berlinale, at least in number--causing the Tagesspiegel (Daily Mirror) to post a full-page article debating the impact and implications (“German films at the 56th Berlinale were strong as never before. Was it also a strong festival?”)--they did not entirely overshadow those from other parts of the world, which shared in the prizes and accolades. To top it all off, adding to the rich, high-calorie filmic feast was the high-energy Talent Campus, whose focus was “Hunger, Food and Taste,” and whose heart and soul was film students, but which generously opened its doors to everyone.
The Films
Decisions, decisions! As with all film festivals, there were more movies than you could possibly see in three times the 11 days it spanned, even if you limited yourself to the new ones. But as any film buff knows, the temptation to catch such classics as To Catch a Thief, A Star Is Born, Never on Sunday, A Place in the Sun, Roman Holiday, Written on the Wind--more than 50 in all, under the rubric “Dream Women, Film Stars of the Fifties,” many restored or in new 35mm prints--can play havoc with the best-laid plans. In the interest of currency, I will leave it there, except to note that Berlinale audiences responded to these films’ timeless charms, cinematic craft and storytelling power as if they’d been made yesterday.
The opening-night film was Marc Evans’ Snow Cake (Great Britain/Canada, 2005). Sigourney Weaver plays the mother of a young woman who is killed in an auto crash, after the man in whose car she has taken a lift is sideswiped by a truck. Traveling to the girl’s home in Ontario to explain, and to express his sorrow to her mother, the man finds that while the daughter was outgoing and delightfully quirky, the mother is more of a mystery, and not due solely to the layers that age inevitably adds, given to occasional bursts of violent fury, and perceiving things in a way not immediately clear to him: she is autistic. There are some evocative visual touches: in one, the mother, who adores snow, has plastic snowflakes hanging from the window, the swirly, jangly things photographed in a such way as to seem metaphorical as well as representational. At her daughter’s funeral, she is entranced by the huge “sparklie”--a giant version of those her daughter faithfully collected for her wherever she traveled--in the form of a snowflake-like metallic ornament twirling in tribute atop the bier. But the ending is strangely inconclusive, leaving at least this viewer somewhat unsatisfied. If metaphor was the intent, it was could have used a bit more supporting representation.
Not so the “discovery of the Competition” (per the Tagesspiegel), Valeska Grisebach’s Longing (Germany, 2005), a deceptively simple tale of a blissfully happy young village couple whose lives are turned upside down when the husband goes on a business trip to the city and awakens the next morning in another woman’s bed. His memory of the previous night dimmed by booze, he’s not sure how he got there, or what, if anything, happened. Insisting that his love for his wife has not changed, he nevertheless begins to fall in love with the young waitress; torn by wrenching, uncomprehending ambivalence, he decides to end it all.
In an interview with the paper, Grisebach responded to the conflicting reactions her film also aroused in viewers, with some moved by it and others disturbed. “Realism isn’t something pure for me, something absolute. It is something very personal, a particular way of looking at something that finds a form. Filmmaking means making contact,” with the world, other people, one’s own dreams. The magic of films: “A window opens, you look out at the world.”
The window opened to the pre-teen protagonist of Grbavica(Austria/Bosnia-Herzegovina/Germany/Croatia, 2006), winner of the Golden Bear award, also closes the door on her childhood, or at least, on its illusions. Twelve-year-old Sara, who lives in Sarajevo with her mother, needs documentary proof that her father was a war hero to go for free on a much-desired school trip. Her mother, who tells her that her father was killed by enemy soldiers when he refused to leave his post, tries to earn the money for the trip so that she will not have to tell her daughter the ugly truth. In the end, of course, it comes out: she was brutally raped by a Serbian POW, and her daughter is the offspring of that violation. The first feature film for Jasmila Žbanic, known for her accomplishments as a documentary and art-video filmmaker, and as a puppeteer at Vermont’s “Bread and Puppet” theatre, Grbavica is a compelling film distinguished by excellent performances. It also took home the prize of the Ecumenical Jury for best Competition film.
Asked at the press conference how it felt to win the Golden Bear for her first feature film, Žbanic modestly said she wished it could have gone to her actors. As to whether her film, given its high-profile recognition, might have an impact on the war crimes trials, Žbanic was unequivocal in her feelings on the issue, making an earnest and deeply felt plea for the capture of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who remain at large more than 10 years after their indictment for crimes against humanity by the International Court at the Hague. In addition, Žbanic said she hoped the film would help the women who are “so psychologically and physically destroyed; they live on 10-15 euros a month. I hope it will make things better for them.” Grbavica screened the following month in a historical and emotional premiere in Belgrade, as reported in The Washington Post on March 28.
Pernille Fischer Christensen’s A Soap (Denmark/Sweden, 2006) really (if you’ll pardon the pun) cleaned up, earning both the Jury Grand Prize--Silver Bear ex-aequo and the Best First Feature Award, which recognized it as “a deeply human film for its powerful cinematic vision, purity, outstanding acting and subtle directing.” A transgender love story between two unlikely lonely hearts that uses the conventions of the genre to send up its semi-serious subject, A Soap involves a beautiful, liberated, tough-cookie beauty-salon owner and her neighbor, a transsexual who’s got plans for the operation (taking pre-surgery meds and dressing the part) but hasn’t yet taken that final step. Upon receiving her Silver Bear, Cristensen thanked the jury with tears in her eyes. When the 25,000 euro Best Feature Film Award was announced, she lost it completely, hugging a surprised but pleased fest Director Dieter Kosslick and telling the audience that the film, which was obviously dear to her heart, cost less than 1 million euros to make. At the press conference immediately following the ceremony, Christensen elaborated, telling the assembled journos that she was “a poor person” who had “invested a lot of personal stuff in this movie... The fact that I could do this with such few resources” (“a shoestring budget” put in the producer) “shows the power of film to move people.”
The Silver Bear for Best Director was shared by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross for The Road to Guantanamo (Great Britain, 2006), a dramatic recreation, using archival footage and interviews, of the journey of four Britons of Pakistani descent who set out to meet the bride of one, and get caught up in the wheels of post-9/11 paranoia. Captured by Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan, where, finding themselves with time on their hands, they’ve gone in response to an imam’s call to “give aid to the people,” they are turned over to U.S. troops, where they are beaten and tortured and accused of being terrorists. The three young men (the fourth has not been found) came up to the podium to be introduced to the crowd as Winterbottom and Whitecross accepted their Bears. At the press conference, the two directors said they had heard the story and wanted to see the situation through the eyes of the three men. “No one could imagine that the Americans would keep people imprisoned without charges for four years without any objections being raised anywhere.”
While these films made strong impressions that lasted well past the closing curtain, some of their lighter cousins were equally memorable. One of the runaway favorites was the venerable (and self-evidently still vital) Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion (USA, 2006), which won the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper Readers’ Prize. Appreciative laughter rippled through the audience throughout the screening, which surprised me at first, unaware until that moment of the show’s seemingly universal familiarity and popularity. When the film is released here, we will have a separate story relating comments by Robert Altman and Meryl Streep.
Another warmly welcomed gift from an acknowledged master, Claude Chabrol’s Comedy of Power (2006), takes a dim view of both government’s willingness and its ability to recognize, let alone address, corruption in its midst. (As Variety put it: “... one man’s dirty laundry is another man’s (or government’s) conception of standard operating procedure.” Touché!) A real Chabrol family affair, the film features son Thomas in a small role and music by son Mathieu, with not a shred of nepotism in sight: both are top-notch.
The story of an examining magistrate (the inestimable Isabelle Huppert) who has amassed evidence of corruption at the highest levels and finds herself thwarted at every turn as she tries to to see justice done, the film casts a sharp eye on the serpentine sliminess of the shadowy capos who pull the strings, and a rueful one on the “most powerful woman in France” who finds out just how fragile that power can be. (The look of utter hopelessness and desolation, betrayal, and even abandonment on Huppert’s face when she learns she’s been fired is palpable.) And anyone who has operated within the organizational confines of a titular hierarchy will identify, if somewhat nervously, with the cigar-smoking bosses who plot her destruction, by... promoting her. Perhaps appropriate to the subject, there’s a studied ambivalence to the end of this film that will leave the viewer filled with questions that can only be answered: “Yes. But...”
Director Claude Chabrol was asked why there were so many recent films about corporations that do bad things. It only reflects reality, he responded; there are a lot more companies doing bad things than there are films about them. Asked why he used so many of his family members in the film--because it was convenient, or because they were good? Chabrol responded simply: “The second.” As for the title, which in English is a bit perplexing--in English, the French title, “L’Ivresse du pouvoir,” would perhaps more accurately translate as “The Intoxication of Power”--the director shrugged, saying he didn’t really like it, but it would do. Another journalist asked Chabrol if he became “intoxicated” with his power as a director. A director has no power, Chabrol replied, outside of the cooperation of his actors and his team. The important thing is to keep them happy. And to keep them happy--feed them well!
Grand masters everywhere! Sidney Lumet’s Find Me Guilty, playing to another full house, tells the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale of Jackie DiNorscio, scion of the Lucchese organized crime family, arrested and tried on RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization) charges during a 21-month trial whose verdict is the stuff of courtroom legend. Deciding to represent himself, the guy-next-door racketeer--whose code of honor is “never rat on family,” even if they spray you with a fusillade of bullets while trying to rob you so as to feed their drug habit--is played by Vin Diesel al dente. The characters are a real rogue’s gallery, played to the hilt by scenery-chewing stars who have to be having the time of their lives with their to-die-for roles.
While questions at the packed press conference generally focused on the particular, reporters also took the opportunity to sound out director Sidney Lumet on such metatopics as the future of film. Acknowledging the increasing dominance of “big conglomerates,” Lumet was cautiously optimistic, saying it had been a great season for American movies, and “you can only take it one season at a time.”
Asked why he chose Vin Diesel for the dramatic role of mobster Jackie DiNorscio, Lumet said he had been bothered by the “snobbishness” with which action heroes were regarded, and found himself impressed by a movie Diesel had made about an actor making the rounds, in which he played five roles and was “brilliant.” Queried about his visible weight gain for the role, Diesel confessed to consuming “ a lot of ice cream--quart after quart” to put on the pounds, adding that the makeup he wore to flesh out his face took two hours to apply each day, even for rehearsals.
Addressing the ambivalence of viewers uncomfortable with the likability of his mobster characters, Lumet said simply that “you have to have a hero, someone to root for” in a film. “It’s a movie,” he added, echoing the mild exasperation of directors, from (film) time immemorial.
Why did the government, with all of its resources and mountains of evidence, lose this seemingly slam-dunk of a case? Lumet attributed it largely to DiNorscio’s personality, “so overwhelming, so likable” he won the jury over, much like Johnnie Cochran: “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” (“You could run for president with a slogan like that,” added Lumet.)
Where did your interest in, your fascination with injustice come from? he was asked, the questioner citing not only this film but earlier Lumet masterworks such as Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network. Saying he “learned about injustice early,” Lumet recalled growing up in a working-class neighborhood where as a boy, pitching coins against the wall in Depression-era New York, he and his buddies would be chased away by cops--who would return to pocket the coins. But Lumet staunchly defended the American justice system, noting that Germany does not have trial by jury, which “gives you a fighting chance.”
With a comment on a subject near and dear to our hearts, Lumet left his listeners laughing: “You could live every month of your life going to [film] festivals,” he said, “and I’ve been to them all - but Find Me Guilty is not a festival picture. It’s not boring.”
Nor was The Science of Sleep (France, 2005), despite its deceptive title. The latest film from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s Michel Gondry had such advance buzz, the CinemaxX theater was compelled to screen it twice to accommodate the number of interested pressies. While it can (and no doubt will) be called many things, what came to my mind upon exiting the theater was: This film is a MAJOR high. (As, one is tempted to say, the director must have been while making it. But that wouldn’t explain its masterful craftsmanship.) A mind-blowing, highly imaginative depiction of dreams, enhanced by technical wizardry, the film doesn’t let your eyes--or mind--rest for a second. At the same time, it’s a tender love story of two people continually at cross-purposes: a bored young textile worker who seems to suffer in 3-D technicolor from a serious case of arrested development, using a combination of dreams and a vivid imagination as an escape valve; and his attractive young neighbor, who tries to bring him down to earth.
The press conference was unique in that, as the film, it was in four languages (as opposed to the usual practice of a single language translated into headphones)--French, German, English, and Spanish--to accommodate the questioners, who were not always comfortable in either of the fest’s two principal languages, German and English.
Responding to a questioner’s observation that the animation, while exciting and imaginative, is engaging, and not pretentious--you almost feel like you could do it yourself--actor Gael Garcia Bernal said that as with Buñuel, the characters know it’s all a game, and not real. Dreams are like football, full of action and passion--but without logic.
Director Michel Gondry worked on the script for eight years, and said he enjoyed working in France again (he shared an Oscar with Charlie Kaufman in 2004 for Eternal Sunshine). In France, he said, it’s still difficult to get away from the Nouvelle Vague, and Godard still has a great influence; to establish his independence, a filmmaker has to feel he can go in a different direction. Regarding the psychological aspects of the dream state, Gondry, who wrote as well as directed, said his strongest influence was not Freud and psychology, but neurobiology, which he studied assiduously to equip himself for the task.
On the other hand, psychology studies might have helped equip viewers of Oskar Roehler’s The Elementary Particles (Germany, 2006). Based on a best-selling novel about half-brothers who take widely, and to an extent, wildly divergent paths, the film aroused strong feelings among viewers (and was quickly snapped up by distributors). One of the brothers, a gentle mathematical scientist, has trouble connecting with the opposite sex; the other is a sex-obsessed, racist college professor (Moritz Bleibtreu, Silver Bear winner for Best Actor) whose needs feed on the seamier side. Both seem irreparably damaged, in opposite ways, by the lives each led with their free-thinking, drug-addicted, self-absorbed, flower-child mother.
Oddly enough--yet in a way, not at all at odds with the head-scratching perplexities of life--the son who despised his mother’s lifestyle, and her for it (visiting her on her deathbed, he screams obscenities at her), takes it up himself in a nudist colony, a “vacation” from the psychiatric facility into which he’s checked himself. Finding true love there, he also soon finds it is not to be, with tragic results. The scientist son, meanwhile, finds true love of a more conventional sort with the “girl next door”--the childhood secret sweetheart to whom he never dared confess his love.
The first questioners did not mince words, challenging director Oskar Roehler and producer Bernd Eichinger to justify the length of the film (it could and should have been longer) and, going straight for the heart, their decision even to make a film out of Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires, a cult fave known as “the scandalous novel of the outgoing twentieth century” which, being complete in itself, did not need cinematic elaboration.
The two defended their decision to trim the originally three-hour film as necessary, both artistically and commercially, and used the attack on the film’s existence as a springboard for an eloquent lesson on the fundamental difference between books and films. The book is a social critique, something you can’t put on the screen, so naturally it will be different, we were told, and the script won’t be a word-for-word transcription of the text--in fact, even the ending was changed. What was most important was for the film to be true to the book cinematically, using cinematic language to convey its essence.
Martina Gedeck, who movingly portrayed Christiane, bad brother Bruno’s lover who... well we’ll leave that for when the film comes here, said she felt complete concord with her character, whose self-sacrificing love was noble, and beautiful.
And the film’s overwhelmingly American soundtrack? An accurate reflection of the times, the panel agreed: “That’s what we all danced to in those days [the sixties]. It was all American music.”
Dancing to American music in sixties Europe was way cool in the West--but risky, and soon dangerous, in the East, as seen in Dominik Graf’s The Red Cockatoo (Germany, 2006). The depiction of life under repressive regimes seldom holds much attraction for filmmakers, unless there is an element of heroism to add a splash of color to the otherwise dull palette of suffering and denial. And when it comes to the infamous Berlin Wall, its fall is inherently more dramatic than its inexorable and fateful construction. But for director Dominik Graf, it was the very ordinariness of the script’s depiction of life in East Germany in the days leading up to August 13, 1961, its honesty and refusal to “overdramatize,” that intrigued him. “I read the script,” he told the Berliner Zeitung, “and from the first had the feeling, this is a chance you don’t often get.”
The film is a portrait of paradoxes. Siggi, an art student who has come to work as a set painter in Dresden, meets and falls in love with Luise, a budding poet whose “subversive” works are banned in the communist GDR, even landing her in prison after Siggi naively has them published as a love gift. Luise loves and admires the work of West German novelist Heinrich Böll, calling him “the conscience of his country,” but never once seriously considers leaving for the West, despite the walls, both figurative and soon, literal, that increasingly close in on her, convinced that “the West is run by old Nazis.”
The Red Cockatoo of the title is a nightclub where the beatnik crowd and other free-thinking young people gather to listen to Western music--a self-deception they continue to practice even after they are assaulted with truncheons by police for listening to the same music in the local park. The film is filled with small details that indelibly situate it in a unique time and place, such as the Stasi guards reading and correcting Siggi’s love letters--and carefully filing them in a drawer.
Asked at the press conference what motivated him to write the story, scriptwriter Michael Klier said it was a page out of his own life. He disputed the general assumption that “Ossis” (East Germans) all wanted to live in the West, and was keen for the script to reflect that. On the contrary, he said, people who lived in the East generally were unaware that they were “missing something,” and most would have disputed it: “Life was life, as it is everywhere.” Graf chimed in that the West could be as repressive as the East, but in a different way, citing the atomic bomb scares of the time, and fire drills that sent school children scurrying under their desks.
Repression of another kind was dramatically portrayed in Hans-Christian Schmid’s Requiem (Germany, 2006), inspired by the events leading to the 1976 exorcism of a young German university student (also depicted in last year’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose). In a deliberately paced recounting of a series of seemingly everyday events that inexorably become steps on a path from which there will be no return, the film derives considerable strength from its performances, particularly the stunning turn of Sandra Hueller as the young Michaela. Unlike William Friedkin’s notorious 1973 head-spinner, Requiem, as perhaps foregrounded by its title, focuses not on the exorcism--in fact, for the most part not even showing it--but on the young woman, her increasingly puzzled yet always supportive friends, and the family conflicts that contribute to the loneliness and separateness she feels, and perhaps to her condition.
The film leaves the cause of Michaela’s “visions” and erratic behavior unanswered, and the viewer (or at least this viewer) with feelings of sadness and anger, wishing she could rewind the film and find a point where something could have been done to make it end differently. But Schmid has instead placed the viewer both inside and outside the frame, allowing us to feel a part of the events, identifying at turns with each of the characters, yet at the same time apart from them, the film having at times a quasi-documentary feel. The film won the FIPRESCI prize for best Competition film, and Sandra Hüller’s remarkable portrayal of Michaela earned her this year’s Silver Bear for Best Actress.
Also inspired by a startling true story was Patrick Stettner’s The Night Listener (USA, 2006), introduced by fest director Dieter Kosslick as the Berlinale’s first “surprise” film. Based on Armistead Maupin’s eponymous bestseller, it stars Robin Williams as a graybeard radio talk-show host whose decency and to an extent, gullibility draw him into the lives of a woman with an AIDS-stricken son--who may or may not exist. In a post-screening Q&A, director Stettner and author Maupin, whose book came out in 2000, related a tale that still doesn’t have an ending, both eerily echoing film and book, and taking up where they left off. Maupin said he was taken in by the woman’s story for five years, and that when the book came out in 2000, he still didn’t know whether the boy existed, and if he did, whether he actually had AIDS. Oprah Winfrey and Magic Johnson were also reportedly taken in by the tale. To find out if any of what he was being told was true, Maupin turned over the tapes he had made of his exchanges with the boy and his mother to L.A. investigative journalist Tad Friend (also known, according to Maupin, for positively ID’ing Osama Bin Laden’s voice), who confirmed what he suspected: the voice of the boy and the voice of the mother were one and the same.
Meanwhile, the editor who published the “boy’s” book about his experience in battling AIDS, A Rock and a Hard Place is angry at Maupin for “betraying” the lad. Robin Williams and Toni Collette (who plays the mother) did the film for scale because they were so taken by the story. While the woman has yet to be found, we were told that both Williams and Collette have received letters with the same handwriting as those received by Maupin, and conjecture that she must be enjoying the attention immensely.
For those who see the film, if it comes to the DC area, be advised that while the basic tale is true, the framing narrative is fictional. Maupin also announced that he is working on a new book, Michael Tolliver Lives, while Stettner is working on a film based on a Gore Vidal novel.
The House of Sand (Brazil, 2005), is a haunting, mesmerizing film of tragedy and misfortune befalling a young woman brought to the Brazilian desert in 1910 by her mad husband who believes he can turn desert into arable land. Despite its bleak premise, the film’s riveting performances, stunning cinematography and internationally valid ironies made it one not to be missed.
One that I fitfully found myself wishing I had missed was the winner of the Berliner Morgenpost Readers’ Prize, the deceptively innocently named Strange Circus (Japan, 2005), a violent, psychologically and cinematically complex, cinematographically lush allegory of child abuse and sexual perversion informed by guilt, sadism and self-loathing.
The Other Press Conferences
The press conference for Syriana (USA, 2005) had a Red Carpet feel: Photographers lined up before the front row of seats, mere inches from the platform, forming a solid line tense with anticipation. As the minutes passed, some turned their lenses on the audience, shooting journos while awaiting bigger game. By the time the conference was scheduled to start, not only was every seat filled, but lines had formed up and down the aisles, the area behind the iron railing where TV cameras were stationed packed three-deep with late-comers.
On the dais were director Stephen Gaghan, actors George Clooney, Alexander Siddig, and Jeffrey Wright, writer Andrew Eaton, and author Robert Baer. The questions came rapidly, and were more or less evenly divided between the political and the cinematic (with the inevitable romantic invitations directed at the irresistible Mr. Clooney). When asked why they wrote the film and what sort of reaction they anticipated, Eaton and Baer said that in the wake of 9/11 they had wanted to explore the issues it opened. So far, they said, the reaction from the Arab Anti-Defamation League has been positive, and they hope for a similarly good one from the Arab countries.
Asked why he was interested in politics, Clooney responded that his parents were politically active, and growing up in the highly politicized Sixties, politics had always held an interest for him as well. Drawing parallels between that era and this one, Clooney said a similar situation seemed to be recurring: “I think we’re very cyclical. I think we lose our minds every 30 years, and I think we get it back. That’s why I’m proud to be an American,” though currently “not directly” involved : “In general, I stay out of politics.” As to how he’d lost weight after bulking up for the role, Clooney earnestly replied: “Cocaine. Kids, try this at home,” then immediately laughed and said, “No. Actually, diet.” Responding to flirtatious invitations from attractive correspondents offering a personal tour of their cities, Clooney served up a similarly disarming cocktail of friendliness and charming nonchalance. (He also offered a heads-up on his latest film, The Good German.)
As for the Oscars: “We’re gonna lose,” the panelists chorused, saying that being nominated was the important thing, and that Brokeback Mountain seemed to have a lock on Best Picture. Gaghan noted Syriana’s complex narrative and multiple story lines, calling it a “difficult, challenging film” that was hard to sell to studios (“We worked for two years, 15-hour days, 7 days a week, and tried to give equal time to every perspective”), while Clooney “saluted” Warner Bros. for stepping up to the plate after the script landed on their desk the same day President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier to declare “mission accomplished.”
Asked if he felt he had any “obligation,” director Stephen Gaghan replied in the affirmative. “We have an obligation. I’m glad and grateful to grow up in a country and a culture that encourages dissent.” Noting that Bob Baer, upon whose book See No Evil the film was based, had 32 years in the CIA and a Syrian “surrogate father,” Gaghan asked: “Did we get it right?” Baer did not hesitate. “Yes, they did get it right. Hits it on the head.”
The press conference for The New World, interestingly, was conducted in German, although the panelists were all native English speakers (except for actress Q’Orianka Kilcher, who was born in Germany to a German mother and Peruvian father). But questions from the international press were invariably asked in English, regardless of the speaker’s native language. (Linguistic challenges were a frequent topic in the local press. More on that below.)
Kilcher was charming, articulate, thoughtful, and intelligent as she explained how she began immersing herself in the character of Pocahontas, reading “tons of books,” when she got the role. When asked about the Disney film, she quickly dismissed it as “not a serious look” at the Pocahontas story. As serious as Kilcher was about the role, producer Sarah Green was equally so about Kilcher: From the get-go, she was the team’s first choice. Asked about director Terence Malick’s reputation for perfectionism, Kilcher unhesitatingly responded that he made the filming experience a pleasure, while Green said he was an extremely collaborative person who worked well with everyone. As to how much influence she herself had, Green was unequivocal, saying how much she had learned from Malick: “It’s pure Terry.” The 3-hour version of The New World will be coming out, we were told, in a high-definition DVD.
Talent Campus
The best way to introduce the Berlinale Talent Campus, a singular and remarkable institution, may be to quote directly from the literature:
The Berlinale Talent Campus is an arena for know how and inspiration, in which the world’s next film generation moves to learn, communicate and exchange experiences. 520 young filmmakers from 101 countries get together at the House of World Cultures and have the great opportunity to learn from experienced professionals from all genres, cultures and generations. The six-day programme touches on the essential issues of filmmaking: philosophy, pre-production, production, post-production and promotion.
The Talent Campus, now in its fourth year, is festival director Dieter Kosslick’s brainchild. As anyone who visited the House of World Cultures can tell you, it was a happening place, where at any given moment students could be seen (and observed) experimenting with different methods and techniques, loading and editing their own films, talking to and learning from each other and visiting pros. This year’s twin focus was on editing and films on hunger, food, and taste. The sessions were podcast; many were open to the public. And this reporter took full advantage of the opportunity, sometimes sacrificing film-watching for the privilege of engaging with and learning from their makers. Sometimes the campus offered the chance to do both, as when a surprise film labeled Wild Space was offered, with the added enticement of a post-screening discussion with the director.
Author and critic Peter Cowie, who led several of the sessions, said a day doesn’t go by that he doesn’t get an e-mail from someone who was inspired by the Talent Campus. To demonstrate their new knowledge, participants were required to write something each day, to be posted on the website. The daily blog was soon bursting with refreshing, often insightful commentary, which, no doubt because of the proliferation of participant languages, was required to be written in English: “The Berlinale Talent Campus uses English as a common language between speakers and participants,” reads the site. “Therefore it is important that you understand English in order to follow the events.” And the blogs duly followed.
The sessions were a film student’s and cinephile’s dream, with presentations and Q&A’s by international stars and world-renowned experts, including (to name just a few of their defining works) editors Angie Lam (House of Flying Daggers, Kung Fu Hustle), Sabine Krayenbühl (Mad Hot Ballroom) and Jim Clark (Vera Drake, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), The Day of the Locust); directors Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, The American Friend, Land of Plenty) and Peter Sellars (renowned for his contributions to theater, opera, and television); composer Stephen Warbeck (Shakespeare in Love, Billy Elliott), actress and jury president Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool, Farewell My Lovely, The Statement), and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York). This year Ballhaus, along with Lawrence Kardish of the Museum of Modern Art and director Jürgen Böttcher, received the “Berlinale Kamera,” which recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves through outstanding work in filmmaking.
Highlights of some of the sessions I attended:
Meet the Cutting Crew, with Jim Clark, Angie Lam, and Sabine Krayenbühl, began with a clip from Mad Hot Ballroom, which was met with laughter and enthusiasm from the good-sized crowd, who peppered the panel with questions. The first one I heard (having arrived late, reluctant to miss the end of Prairie Home Companion) was from the moderator, who wondered about the impact of computer editing. Regardless of the medium, we were told, what you see on the screen is 40% or less of an editor’s work; most of the work is done offscreen, and consists of handling people. In response to a later question, the editors elaborated a bit: As with any technological advancement, while editing with the Avid offers more options, its deceptive ease and enticing speed make it easier for an editor to make mistakes. The old-fashioned, film-based way allowed you more time to think.
What about when the director or others on the set want to make changes? An added hazard of digital editing is the temptation it offers others to think they can do your job. Suddenly, everybody’s an expert. If producers and directors were a meddlesome pain in the old days, the thrill and the ease of working on the Avid have made them even more of a potential threat to whatever command the editor might have. A fundamental rule: Always keep your version as a template. That way you can always go back to it after everyone else has finished with it and decided--as they probably will--that yours was the best after all.
And keep in mind that editing isn’t always cutting. It often means leaving it in, letting it flow, letting the images speak. The current philosophy, burned into the global viewing unconscious by the TV clicker, is the more cuts, the better. Short attention spans are epidemic. But even historically, a lot of American film editors, for example MGM’s Margaret Booth, who worked until she was 90, were “negative editors,” for whom cutting was the rule.
Then long shots are good? A long shot is good, as long as it fits the rhythm of the film.
What about film music? When it’s used to cover editing weaknesses, it can be a boon. On the other hand, when it doesn’t match the mood or the narrative, it can ruin a sequence.
Can directors edit their own films? Theoretically they can, but they shouldn’t, the most basic reason being because it’s against union rules. But even more important, the editor is a second eye, which is very important and very necessary.
How do you handle what seem to be inherent tensions in the director-editor relationship? The director is your partner, like a marriage, or maybe a shrink’s office. It’s very intense for about 9 months, and then, wham! It’s over. You may never work with each other again, but the experience stays with you.
Live with Jim Clark (sponsored by Avid). There were few empty seats for this session, whose combination of presenter and subject made it a sure-fire hit. To illustrate what an editor does, Clark screened a clip from one of his films, which was also Leonardo DiCaprio’s first: This Boy’s Life (1993). In it, the boy, who seems about 12 (DiCaprio was 18 at time of filming), is severely beaten by father Robert De Niro for taking his car. The clip demonstrated the precision of Clark’s cutting, employing a combination of rapidly alternating camera angles, allowing the viewer to see the beating from the boy’s, the father’s, and an objective POV.
Clark shared a number of observations and a couple of pet peeves, and offered valuable “rules to live by” for aspiring editors. In general, music is over-used and films are far too long, with “bombastic scores” flooding not only narrative dramas, but documentaries and news broadcasts. Composers, being over-committed, tend to “cannibalize” their own work out of desperation.
Showing a clip from The Innocents, an early example of his work, made in the rarely used black-and-white Cinemascope, Clark explained how he cut it with an Acmiola, an early and “very dangerous” editing machine: “It bit back at you.” The Avid, on the other hand, has changed the way he works because of its remarkable speed. While it does potentially reduce the editor’s autonomy because anyone can use it and make changes, Clark likes it very much, and uses it consistently.
As a general rule, you should never cut a film “unless you’re 100% in love with it.” Of course, rules are made to be broken, and Clark conceded that this was an especially hard one to live by. But here’s something to always keep in mind: the music you think you’re editing the film to, may ultimately be cut back--or even completely replaced. Something else to keep an editor up at night!
The Case for Taste. In this thought-provoking session with a surprisingly small audience, Michael Ballhaus, Carlo Petrini, Juan Pittalunga, and Stefan Elfenbein discussed the role of food in society and in film. The session itself began with a sharp little short by Campus students portraying their view of the role of food at the Berlinale itself.
Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement, whose aim is to shorten the distance between field or farm and table, screened a clip from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, shot by Ballhaus, to the latter’s obvious enjoyment. It brought back memories of the shooting, in which the scrumptious pasta sauce seen in the prison scene was actually made--and enjoyed--by the cast. Petrini said the Mafia is impossible to get rid of because it’s deeply rooted in the peasantry, illustrating his point with a joke about the old woman who, upon receiving the body of her murdered son, invites the gangsters in for a meal, saying it’s not entirely apocryphal, but pointedly adding that Monsanto is more dangerous. (As a side note, Petrini would like everyone to know that the story about him having a protest “spaghetti feast” outside McDonald’s--about which, he said, people still razz him--is utterly untrue.)
Pittalunga mourned the heedless destruction of the world’s grain reserve, contending that while only 10 years ago there were over 200,000 varieties of rice in India, only 2 or 3 remain, all produced by U.S. companies. Another problem with the Western world, he argued, is “the infantilization of taste,” manifested in the inability of people to make intelligent and informed judgments about such things as wine, and accepting those of so-called experts because the average person simply doesn’t know any better, and makes no effort to learn.
Passion Food. Another food-related session (before another surprisingly small audience) was this scrumptious tête-a-tête between Sandra Nettlebeck, director of Mostly Martha, and Alice Waters, Berkeley restaurateur who has run the legendary Chez Panisse, a favorite meeting place of filmmakers, for 35 years. Waters spoke about her project, “The Edible Schoolyard,” a product of her chagrin at discovering the lack of education about nutrition and food at her children’s school. Appalled that U.S. kids are “learning the culture of fast, cheap, and easy” and transferring this attitude to all aspects of their lives, Waters decided to make a difference. Thus was born The Edible Schoolyard, which teaches inner-city schoolchildren to grow, harvest, and prepare nutritional produce.
Nettlebeck, who grew up in a family of food lovers and expert cooks, had a ready-made script-editing team when she decided to make Mostly Martha, which depicts, in part, the conflict between a male and female chef with different culinary philosophies who are compelled to work together in the same restaurant. Nettlebeck was a natural for the film, considering that her “Number 1 rule for actors and crew [is]: Make sure you feed them well. You’re going to be expecting them to work for 16 hours a day, you’ve got to keep them happy.” The director added: “François Truffaut said, ‘Every film feels like the rehearsal for the next one.’ And it’s true.”
Art as Moral Action featured celebrated theatre, opera and television director Peter Sellars in an exuberant and impassioned discourse on the intellectual, psychological, philosophical and humanist facets of art--film, theatre, music, dance, the fine arts--and their fundamental importance to the world. Emphasizing the essential interconnectedness of the world’s peoples, and their universal ability to be moved by art, Sellars, in a flowing, brightly colored caftan, his reddish-brown hair flying out from a flattened top, told a rapt audience that “Art doesn’t tell you what to think. It only insists that you think.” You could have heard a pin drop throughout his hour-long speech.
Casting his thoughts against a broad moral, political, and historical, as well as artistic canvas, Sellars intoned that while the fall of the Soviet Union had given us a “peace dividend,” the world’s leaders had done little to exploit it for the betterment of their citizens, noting that a clementine orange bought three blocks away at a local market was grown in Ethiopia, where there is mass starvation. Excoriating the disconnectedness of the Western world, as epitomized by the newscaster’s “eye behind the camera” that observes without taking responsibility, Sellars wryly labeled it the “Steven Spielberg method”: showing everything, but not asking how it got that way. While the dramas of ancient Greece were filled with violence and horror, their Oedipuses were made to go offstage to put out their eyes; today, we gleefully show every knife thrust, pandering to audiences’ visceral craving for gore. We have lost concern for the why, in favor of the what--not cause, but effect--to our loss.
Color Me Kieslowski was an SRO round-table discussion of the director by three who worked with him: Agnieszka Holland, Wim Wenders, and Andreas Veiel. At turns highly informative, eye-rollingly humorous and deeply nostalgic, the session was also coincidentally “colored” by the Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement awarded later that evening to Kieslowski’s compatriot, the esteemed director Andrzej Wajda. (Wajda previously received an honorary Oscar in 2000 for outstanding lifetime achievements.)
Wenders, who “always met him in the toilet” because Wenders wanted to wash his hands and Kieslowski had a bladder infection and used the opportunity to take a smoke, recalled Kieslowski’s telling him that he could never work in Hollywood, in “a country where you can carry a gun but you can’t smoke a cigarette.” Wenders movingly evoked Kieslowski’s films’ “bleakness... that stark, existential hopelessness, transmuted into transcendence; a sense that even blind chance had a purpose--even if he didn’t become a religious man.” Commenting on a clip from The Double Life of Veronique, Wenders said Kieslowski “discovered beauty” in his actors, not just filmed or portrayed it. (Wenders “discovered” a bit of natural beauty himself during the session, when as moderator Peter Cowie was reflecting on Kieslowski’s use of close-ups, he noted “a miracle”: a ladybug had somehow found its way onto his note card. Insisting that someone with a micro-lens record it “as proof we had a visitor,” all action stopped, Wenders smiling with great satisfaction and enjoyment as the tiny transient was filmed.)
Holland, Kieslowski’s consultant on Blue, White and Red and a close associate, emphasized Kieslowski’s humanity, his insistence on seeing everyone--even the vilest of his characters--as a human being, adding that this was particularly significant in a country like Poland, not known for its tolerance. Kieslowski was “uncomfortable with the complexity of the human condition”; in later years he became old and bitter, and stopped making films “to save his life.” Wenders noted that while Kieslowski may have stopped making films, he nonetheless continued writing them, including another trilogy, to be called Heaven, Hell and Earth, two of which have been made by other filmmakers.
Veiel, whose Addicted to Acting won last year’s Berlinale audience award, and whose The Kick won critical plaudits this year, recalled how the great man relentlessly compelled him to redo an assignment, sending him back to the cutting room again and again until it was--to the young man’s no doubt injured pride--like a Kieslowski film. Breaking away from his teacher and sometime tormentor for several years, Veiel was surprised to find his work “reapproaching” Kieslowski more and more as the years went by, and realized how much he owed him.
Holland suggested that Kieslowski would not be happy in today’s film world; Veiel generally agreed, but added as an important qualifier Kieslowski’s dictum to “Trust your inner voice. Don’t make films for the market.”
Talent Spotting had legendary Hollywood producer and casting director Fred Roos and actress Martina Gedeck (who shone in this year’s The Elementary Particles) offering aspiring talents a bird’s-eye view of what it takes to make it in Hollywood’s lion’s den. Roos relaxed the eager crowd with homespun tales of his friends (including Jack Nicholson, part of a pack that used to go see the latest Godard or Antonioni, and described as funny, charming and irreverent, taking over a room as soon as he walked in the door). Roos also generously told the talents he wanted their names and contact details if they were actors, and described the typical casting process in the U.S., a bit of inside intelligence they could tuck away for the future.
To get a film made in Hollywood, said Roos, you have to walk in with “attachments”--famous names--before the dollars even think about flowing. Unlike in Hollywood, said Gedeck, when it come to the actor’s side of the equation, in Germany, you never have to worry about being typecast; you continually have to prove yourself, and they’re always looking for new faces. Asked how to deal with bit parts or walk-ons when you know (of course!) you have so much more to offer, Gedeck was eloquent and direct: “Even if it’s only a stupid, one-minute part, make it YOURS. Own it, do the best you can do with it; build a little jewel, make it bright and shiny and beautiful--and it will come through.”
For the third year, the Campus awarded the “Berlin Today” award to a film by a participant on “what Berlin means to me.” The winner was Anna Azevedo’s BerlinBall, about the hometown of soccer player Marcelinho. “The movie has all a good documentary needs,” said director Aelrun Goette, “a great story, strong and touching characters, and the glance at a piece of world you usually don’t see.”
Selling Democracy: Marshall Plan Films
The Berlinale concluded its three-year series on the Marshall Plan with the screening of 23 short films made under the plan from 1948 to 1953. The Marshall Plan, also known as the “European Recovery Program,” was initiated in June 1947 under the aegis of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, as a vehicle for providing financial aid and material goods to 16 European countries devastated by the ravages of the Second World War, and promoting democratic values. Its outreach efforts consisted of films (the most effective vehicle, because they reached the most people), radio shows, plays, and publications.
There were about 200 films, most of which can be seen today, though the quality and condition vary. These are “used prints”; indeed, there were no pristine prints to start with. There was no coherent strategy, said David Ellwood, University of Bologna, but rather a process of trial and error: they tried everything, and “ideas became realized results.” The communists, through Cominform, conducted organized resistance, sometimes militant, sometimes satiric, as with Jacques Tati’s classic Jours de fête, mocking the “myth of progress,” and Bienvenido Mr. Marshall, in which Spain, which had been excluded from the Plan, excoriated it as worthless and deceptive.
It is not known whether the Marshall Plan was responsible for getting Europeans to speak English, but that was one of its primary purposes. In a way, the European Union is a “grandchild” of the Plan, said Ellwood, but it “hasn’t found a myth” to legitimize its efforts at modernization. That cannot be said of the Marshall Plan, which even today is evoked as a model for what needs to be done in Europe. This year’s program, titled “Friendly Persuasion,” focused on efforts to show Europeans the positive changes wrought under the Marshall Plan. In addition to those mentioned above, films screened in this final installment included such varied offerings as The Mouse That Roared, The Battle of the Sexes (intriguingly titled “Mr. Miller ist kein Killer” in German), Shopping Is a Pleasure, and A Gun for Gaetano.
Intended primarily as a teaching tool, a two-disc DVD set, “Selling Democracy: The Films of the Marshall Plan,” comprising the 23 films and a bilingual 72-page booklet, is or soon will be available for purchase.
Teddy Twenty Tribute
The Berlinale’s Teddy Queer Film Award is now twenty years young, and the fest marked the occasion with a program of 36 films celebrating the history of gay and lesbian cinema. The Teddy Twenty Tribute comprised eight features, eight documentaries, and all 20 Teddy short-film award winners, among them Murder and Murder, Poison, Fucking Amal, Looking for Langston, The Celluloid Closet, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, Trembling Before G-d, and Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man.
Among the Teddy Awards, your correspondent saw the winner of the documentary prize: Beyond Hatred (France, 2006), the heartbreaking, quietly horrifying story of a young gay man who, asked by a pack of skinheads on the hunt for an Arab if he were gay, said he was; and was thereupon beaten unconscious, then drowned in a nearby pond.
The film is a marvel of reason and simplicity, effectively evoking the strongest emotion by suggestion, refusing to pander to the taste for gore by either visually reconstructing the event or displaying its result. The boys’ parents, who are clearly distraught by the horror visited upon their gentle son, nonetheless take pride in his refusal to give the hoodlums the satisfaction of submitting, the father calling the insults hurled at him worse than the fatal beating. The prosecutor suggested that it was his continuing to fight and resist that enraged his attackers to murderous fury, but added that he would have done the same, “with my dying breath.”
The parents are almost saintly in their ability to forgive his assailants, realizing how awful their own lives must have been, to fill them with such blind, unreasoning anger and hatred. Indeed, interviews with the boys’ parents show them to be only vaguely aware of what their sons did or believed, and uninterested in them to boot, freely admitting having abused them as kids. The young man’s brother and sister, on the other hand, are less willing to forgive, the brother obsessed with the boy’s agonizing last five minutes, the sister determined to see that the assailants pay for their crime.
At a post-screening discussion, director Olivier Meyrou came onstage to take questions. The film was 3½ years in production, very unusual for a documentary, he said. As for the prison sentences received by the young men, an audience member offered, while gratifying in the abstract, knowing what goes on in prisons does not leave much hope that they will emerge with increased tolerance.
Lost in translation. At any international film festival, the question of translation will come up, though usually behind the scenes. At this year’s Berlinale, it also captured the interest and imagination of reporters and editorial writers. In an interview with an interpreter whose job at the Berlinale for the last dozen years has been the simultaneous translation of films, press conferences and discussions, readers of the Berliner Morgenpost learned that what even on the surface appears to be a demanding job, is fiendishly more so. “The work is complicated, because I haven’t seen the films beforehand,” she writes. “...Sometimes we also have to interpret films whose language we haven’t fully mastered, and so we translate the subtitles, which we can’t see very well up here on the fifth floor [where the translator’s booth is located].”
And then there are other challenges: “Many films are somewhat dubious, and have dialogue that’s fifty percent swear words. As a child, I learned not to say swear words. And sometimes they’re pretty fierce swear words that I have to say into the microphone. I’m not an actress, but it’s important to be on the same wave length as the film.”
A “tough nut to crack” this year was A Prairie Home Companion: “There’s a lot of singing that all has to be translated. Everything that adds meaning has to be translated: poems, songs, jokes. The hardest thing is to bring jokes over spontaneously. Sometimes I have to laugh. And sometimes I cry too.
“During the Berlinale I also interpret press conferences. That has to be done really quickly, zip, zip, zip. And when there are discussions, I’m up there on the podium with filmmakers. Sometimes they’re nervous, and I try to alleviate their nervousness... At the Berlinale,” she concludes, “you plunge into another world: the world of pictures. But as an interpreter, I have to concentrate on language. As a film runs, so too should my translation.”
Subtitles were also a subject of reportage and commentary, sometimes getting a pretty thorough working-over. In the same edition of the Berliner Morgenpost, we learned that “The Berlinale is an international festival, which is very nice, but it has a decided disadvantage: the films are in different languages... Fortunately there are subtitles: German when the film is in English, English when the film is in German, and both when, for example, a Mexican tries to speak French. It really gets confusing when a filmgoer is competent in both the original and the subtitled language. That can lead on occasion to linguistic schizophrenia. Like in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, in which you hear a lot about donuts. You read “Berliner” [yes, the famous jelly donut; and no, President Kennedy did not say he was a jelly donut, as the urban legend would have us believe. While it has that meaning elsewhere in Germany, in Berlin, it’s known as a Pfannkuchen, and Ich bin ein Berliner is used as we would use ‘I am a Washingtonian’]--and think of the capital city’s ‘Pfannkuchen.’ Rumor has it that the next thing to be subtitled will be the grammatically and lexically challenged English speeches of Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick. In English, of course.” For most of us, Kosslick was an indefatigably warm and enthusiastic presence at scores of fest events who treated the public waiting in line with him as graciously as the publicists he courted. “During the festival I have 60 appointments a day where I have to be somewhere to say something or give a little speech,” he told Der Tagesspiegel. “I always have to have a good story ready. Imagine: I run someplace at around ten o’clock, where I find 200 sleepy people waiting for the festival to wake them up. That’s really my job: to wake them up...”
Meanwhile, the Berliner Zeitung bewailed the inability of English subtitles to faithfully represent the essential “Berlin-ness” of the language used in such films as Detlef Buck’s Tough Enough and Henner Winckler’s Lucy, and chided both for suggesting that their films could have taken place anywhere. “Well, yes, but [Winckler’s] would have been another film if you couldn’t see Alexanderplatz and the Matrix-Club, as would Buck’s if it took place in Munich’s Problemkiez Hasenberg [a neighborhood eleven U-Bahn stations from the heart of the city with a large proportion of foreigners]. In any event, the film wouldn’t move Berliners as much, if for no other reason than the language. Nowadays you can not only see Berlin onscreen, but hear it. And ask yourself what the foreign visitor must think, when he experiences it through boring English subtitles.” (I guess beauty is in the eye of the Berliner; I thought they were pretty good myself. But then, I’m sure I missed the nuances that might spell disaster for an attuned native.)
Language and translation issues are not unique to films and filmgoers. The Berlinale is one of the child-friendliest fests around, and while older children and teens are an established audience, with their own richly provisioned Kinderfilmfest and 14plus sections, there is also the younger set to consider. Until this year, there was no “home base” for this linguistically and culturally diverse subset of Berlinalers, both younger children who could not be expected to sit quietly for long periods, and older children whose parents would like to feel secure that they are being responsibly attended to between films.
Impressed by the kindergarten at last summer’s Locarno [Switzerland] film festival, this year Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick imported both the concept and the director herself to Berlin. “The children have no language difficulties among themselves,” said Cornelia Balzarini. “They use their bodies and gestures very creatively. For many children it’s a strange experience to be separated from their parents and handed over to complete strangers... We try to make it like a big family. That reassures them and helps them open up. With us, kids aren’t pushed aside, but actually take part in the Berlinale, even immerse themselves in it. I’ve even known families who came to the Locarno festival because their children wanted to spend summer vacation with us!”
While the Berlinale kindergarten, no doubt due to its newness, did not have as many children as hoped, perhaps the publicity it received (and director Dieter Kosslick’s wistful observation at the awards ceremony) will make a difference next year.
Indeed, next year’s fest is already on the calendar: “Save the date,” the website proclaims. “The 57th Berlin International Film Festival will take place from February 8 to 18, 2007.” For this Berlinale cub, that’s an invitation not to be refused. See you there!
