Berlinale Journal 2009

“I’m watching five films a day,” reports Professor María Elena de las Carreras from Berlin. “It’s heaven!”

Each year de las Carreras attends the Berlin International Film Festival, an event she covers for several international publications. Also in Berlin this year are Professor Jean-Louis Rodrigue, who is teaching his celebrated workshop “Embodying the Character” at the festival’s invitational Talent Campus, and alumnus Mischa Livingstone ’97, MFA ’99, who screened his short film A Little Night Fright at the Festival in 2008 and was invited back this year to participate in the Talent Campus.

De las Carreras will be filing exclusive reports for our web site throughout the festival.

María Elena de las Carreras’s Berlinale Journal

February 15, 2009

All too soon the festival comes to an end.

The statistics released by the Berlinale organizers are staggering: almost 400 films, 20,000 accredited guests and 270,000 admissions. The prizes awarded by the international jury fell along the traditional Berlinale parameters: small, edgy films and also pictures that engage the political Zeitgeist in a meaningful manner. The Gold Bear went to The Milk of Sorrow (its Spanish original title "La Teta Asustada" packs a punch), a moving Peruvian drama, backed by a Spanish producer and directed by Claudia Llosa. Tracing the interior journey of a young Indian woman from the Andes who moves to Lima, the film delicately traces the negotiations between a pre-Hispanic mindset and the modern world. The Uruguayan minimalist comedy Gigante, the debut of Argentine director Adrián Biniez, received both the prestigious Alfred Bauer Prize, in memory of the festival founder for a work of particular innovation, and the Best Feature award, endowed with €50,000. Both pictures come from countries which do not have a film industry properly speaking, and they are a tribute to the stamina of their creative teams as well as the faith placed in them by foreign producers.

The American independent production The Messenger, feature debut by screenwriter Oren Moverman, about an Afghanistan veteran who becomes a casualty notification officer, was awarded a Silver Bear for best screenplay. A straightforward (and fairly predictable) account of the physical and psychological toll of combat, the film was a favorite of the critics.

The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi received a Silver Bear for About Elly, an unflinching look at social dynamics among a group of middle class professional Iranians whose weekend at the Caspian Sea begins as a comedy of manners and ends in tragedy. The film has yet to open in its country of origin, and its depiction of the status of women – symbolized by the Elly of the title – will displease the cultural mullahs of Iran.

On a lighter note, the last day was enlivened by the screening of Der Rosarote Panther 2 – yes, Pink Panther 2 – directed by the Norwegian Harald Zwart, featuring Steve Martin, Andy García, Alfred Molina and Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai Bachchan – a cast that obviously had fun playing their outrageous roles. Even Pope Benedict serves as a foil to the bumbling Clouseau.

Steve Martin gamely came to the Berlinale and entertained the critics by playing the banjo. "How many more questions can you ask about the film?," he teased the press before pulling the musical instrument from behind his chair.

Attending the Berlinale can become a reality for our film students. Since 2003 the Festival has launched the Talent Campus, an initiative designed to bring budding filmmakers – including young critics – from all over the world, for a series of workshops, master classes and a hands-on approach to the craft of bringing images to the screen. The selection process is rigorous and 350 people are selected from a pool of roughly 4,000. The U.S. had one of the largest groups – 18 candidates. It's worth a shot, since the results of these first mentoring programs can already be seen in young directors who have succeeded in getting their films financed, based on contacts and connections formed here. A case in point are USC-graduate Lance Hammer and his Berlinale award-winner Ballast, and Lake Tahoe was a Berlinale winner last year. Why not give the Talent Campus a try?

I would especially encourage our MA and Ph.D. students in cinema and media studies to do so. The Talent Press branch of the program brought this year nine budding critics, and in conjunction with the Goethe Institute and the International Association of Film Critics (FIPRESCI), mentored them in the nuts and bolts of writing criticism for traditional (ever more scarce) and digital outlets.

The Talent Campus has a very useful website. And for those wishing to explore alternative training programs attached to international festivals, Rotterdam, Telluride, San Sebastian, Toronto and London are worth exploring.

February 11, 2009

Attending the Berlinale is perhaps the most satisfying professional experience of the year. It's a total immersion for ten days in overlapping worlds of fantasy, other geographies and histories, different politics and languages. Spellbound in the dark ...

The festival poses a never resolved Psycho dilemma: Will you follow Norman Bates' awakened longing for Marion Crane – and lose yourself in one of the great cities of Europe? Or will you be ensnared by a blind, unhealthy devotion to Mother – and consume celluloid, non-stop, sleepless in Berlin?

On the Marion Crane gentle side of things, I attended a fun exhibit organized by the Deutsche Kinemathek at the Museum für Film and Fernsehen on – speaking of coincidences – the Master of Suspense himself: “Casting a Shadow. Alfred Hitchcock und seine Werkstatt.” In a large exhibition hall, the curators have assembled a variety of materials – many on loan by the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library – to examine how Hitchcock worked in this highly collaborative "métier". Slick TV monitors loop interviews with the usual suspects every few feet. The highlight is the director himself speaking German – he spent several months in Berlin and Munich in the mid-twenties, and then again in the 60s – and discussing his craft with chain-smoking German critics with dark, thick, horn-rimmed glasses around a table. Completely uncinematic but fascinating. These Teutonic Truffauts ask all the right questions. Other excerpts belong to a new documentary to be shown this summer on German TV.

The Competition has displayed some interesting wares, honoring the Berlinale's tradition of showcasing the political. The US made an appearance with The Messenger, first feature by screenwriter Oren Moverman, about two Army officials (Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster) assigned to notify families about the deaths of their relatives in Iraq. Adequately handled, and grounded in well-researched military procedure, the film has nothing much to commend itself. Except that its critique of the devastating impact of war resonated with the Berlinale critics, and appears as a favorite in several polls. The co-writer, Alessandro Camon, attended our film program – no IMDb available in the hotel room where I write these notes, but I remember him distinctly.

Two of the most satisfying works I've seen so far are excellent candidates for the course I teach on international cinema, FTV 106C: Chen Kaige's Forever Enthralled and About Elly, by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. The first one is a biopic on a famous Peking Opera singer spanning three decades, and examining first the nature of the artistic vocation, and then, during the Japanese occupation of the late thirties until 1945, the relationships between an artist and the state. Like Kaige's early films this lavish production plunges into the tumultuous history of twentieth century China, speaking obliquely of things that cannot be said openly. About Elly – like so many of the Iranian films that never see the light of day in its theocracy of origin – is an oblique conversation about being a woman in Iran today. Our Film & Television Archive's annual Iranian series should consider showing it, and I wouldn't be surprised if the film won one of the awards.

Mother is calling ... For a few more days, she will win. The Berlinale is no food, no rest, all celluloid ...

February, 7, 2009

I first came to the Berlin Film Festival as a film critic from Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1985. And except for a handful of times when I couldn't come – literally, for matters of life and death, the birth of my child and a cancer treatment – I've been coming ever since. It has been the best gift a film professor could receive to deepen her love affair with the movies, and make her a more solid professional.

For a film professor – the angle of these short notes today – it was a key time to begin a regular visit. Little did I know that I was coming at the tail end of the Cold War era. There was no sense, at the Berlinale or elsewhere, in February of 1989 that the Wall dividing the Communist world and the Western democracies would crumble so spectacularly in November of that year. The festival had built its reputation since its beginnings in 1950, as a “political” showcase for cinemas developing under constrictions. It was practically the only place to see a wide assortment of Soviet and Eastern European films, as well as productions from emerging nations in Asia and Africa. Latin American political cinema always found a hospitable home at the Berlinale.

The added bonus for a budding film professor at the time, was –and still is – the city itself, and its place in the history of the cinema. It was, literally, stepping into 1920s Weimar cinema, the UFA studios, the intellectual and artistic life of Berlin between the wars. The locations were still there, sometimes massively transformed, still pulsing with the rhythm of a metropolis. Walter Ruttmann's city symphony unfolded everyday, the large stage sounds of Metropolis and Faust and The Nibelungen could still be visited in Babelsberg, near Potsdam, south west of the city. And, the physical presence of the Wall, which West German or American films had recreated elsewhere – Wim Wender's Wings of Desire, Robert Siodmak's Escape from East Berlin and Billy Wilder's frantic One, Two, Three, broke the city in two. The work of Leni Riefenstahl gained a geographical dimension, as did the Mabuse films of Lang. I was awestruck the first years, and that feeling has never left me.

The festival today has lost none of its political bite, but it has switched its focus: now it is the Middle East, the global world and budding national cinemas. The curators for its key sections – Competition, Forum, Panorama and retrospective – pick up trends, discover directors and films, mixing the old and the new.

In the first two days of this 59th edition, Claude Chabrol, Bertrand Tavernier, Francois Ozon (what's with the French this year?!) have shown their latest work, alongside with younger yet to be discovered directors. More to come about this in the next days.

The only “traumatic” thing at the Berlinale is the number of films I invariably miss. With luck, I see four or five a day. Which over ten days, doesn't even begin to approach the 400 and something the festival offers each edition. In the late nineties, I saw every film connected to perestroika and glasnost, but I failed to catch Marina Goldovskaya's key documentary Solovki Power. Little did I know at the time, that our UCLA Film Department would be enriched by having her as a filmmaking professor.

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