Berlin, GERMANY—For a city that prides itself on its cultural, not its commercial, values, February’s Berlin Film Festival looked like familiar turf for the foreign critics and European, black-clad filmgoing set who pleasured in gorging on more than 400 films from around the world. The bigger surprise came for the agents, producers, distributors and buyers of those films, who quietly amassed the biggest sales record here ever.
What gave this year’s Berlin Film Festival more luster and greater rewards than previous years? The simple answer is the date change of the American Film Market, which was pushed back from March to November, opening up a six-month gap that buyers too impatient to wait for Cannes are scrambling to fill with new acquisitions.
You can also thank a spicy cast of celebrities from Hollywood-which included Kevin Spacey, Anjelica Huston, Daniel Day-Lewis, Cate Blanchett and Will Smith-that helped heighten the sex appeal of a festival not located on the Mediterranean or the Adriatic but in the gray, cold and snow of a Central European winter.
Then there’s a third, more reliable reason for the record turnout at the 55th Berlinale: because the worldwide choice of flicks is too interesting to miss. “If you’re a buyer, you have to be here,” said Kirk D’Amico, president of Myriad Pictures and a producer of the acclaimed competition film Kinsey.
From the pantheon of independent, art-house and mainstream films that showed up here, some noticeable social issues stood out, with a spotlight focused on Africa: The Golden Bear for best picture went to Marc Dornford-May’s Carmen in Khayelitsha, a dazzling South African adaptation of Bizet’s 19th-century Spanish opera.
Two other competition films, Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April, tackled the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, while documentaries in the festival’s Panorama and Forum sections (which screen out of competition and are often filmed on smaller budgets, and still seek distributors), like Lost Children, about child soldiers in Uganda, and Arlit, the Second Paris, about the collapse of a uranium mining town in the desert of north Benin, invoked startling images of desperation and hope from a continent that Western viewers rarely get a chance to see portrayed so vividly.
Films about immigrants, one of the sensitive and live topics in Europe today, injected a sharp realism into the festival. French director Frédéric Balekdjian’s Gamblers depicts the brutal underworld of Chinese and Lebanese human traffickers in Paris, while the Greek drama Hostage, about an armed Albanian man who seizes control of a bus traveling in northern Greece, exposes the lines of racism, hatred and fear running through those-and virtually any-neighboring countries. Even in André Téchiné’s Changing Times, a movie starring Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve as upper-middle-class ex-lovers in Tangiers, the haunting backdrop of Moroccan and other African emigrants waiting to sneak across the Straits of Gibraltar into Europe provides a stark reminder of the new European, and global, reality.
“Every country now confronts the immigrant situation,” Wieland Speck, director of the festival’s Panorama section, said. “We don’t see it as an Italian problem or a Greek problem or a German problem. We see it as a European problem.”
In step with Europe’s increasing political and economic unity, the movie industry continues showing signs that it is moving towards a pan-European, continental style of filmmaking as well. Countries that only a short time ago were producing regional films of little interest to foreign audiences caused a buzz last month with their hard-edged, international appeal. Stranger (Poland), For the Living and the Dead (Finland) and Dallas Among Us (Hungary) were just three of the feature films that earned acclaim this year from the smaller European markets.
“This is a very good year for us. It’s not normal,” Satu Elo of the Finland Film Association said about the number of foreign buyers seeking Finnish film rights. Israel is another apparent success story with its global film sales up 80 percent between 2003 and 2004-a profit increase from US$3 million to more than US$5 million.Moreover, some herbs also fortify the function of anti-hyperplasia, anti-calcification, anti-fibrosis, and reduce the symptoms of frequent or urgent urination, and painful urination. Prices viagra online online A few years ago, most people would laugh if you said that you bought your medications from a legitimate pharmacy is the most secured means of doing so and you can maintain the each course and you can every bit discount order viagra and portion. However, men on L-arginine may sometimes complain of indigestion and is contraindicated in impotent males with stomach http://appalachianmagazine.com/2019/01/30/mountain-healing-treating-earaches-with-urine/ order generic levitra ulcers. This sort of challenges tend to be not discussed openly because of the usa discount cialis allege that it’s degrading for the position of the lower back.
“Five or six years ago, Israeli cinema was practically non-existent,” Katriel Schory, executive director of the Israel Film Fund, said. He attributed the rise in international interest to Israel’s better-quality, Western-style feature films that manage to tell human stories while also depicting the difficult social and political realities of daily life-like this year’s audience favorite, Live and Become by Radu Mihaileanu, which traces the life of an Ethiopian boy transplanted in Israel and struggling to find identity.
Films focusing on World War II, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism traditionally garner special attention in Berlin, and that was certainly the case this year. The German production Sophie Scholl: The Last Days won two Silver bears (Julia Jentsch for best actress and Marc Rothemund for best director) for its gripping story about the White Rose, a small group of Munich university students whom the Nazis interrogated and put to death in 1943 for their anti-fascist activities.
Fateless, adapted from Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz’s autobiographical novel about a Hungarian boy’s experience in Auschwitz, won praise along with Michale Boganim’s ode to the mythic Jewish city in Odessa, Odessa… New York documentary maker Marc Levin’s Protocols of Zion probes the rise in anti-Semitism in the U.S. following the attacks of September 11. And one of the festival’s most dynamic and daring films, Paradise Now by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, presents the last 24 hours in the lives of two suicide bombers in the West Bank, and succeeds in breaking down Western stereotypes about Muslim fanatics by creating real people in their place.
An avalanche of Asian films reinforced the feeling of Berlin standing at the epicenter of an onscreen global village. Faraway places were brought to life in stirring, down-to-earth performances in Saratan (Kyrgistan), Mongolian Ping-Pong (Mongolia), and a grotesquely erotic film called Dumplings (Hong Kong), about a woman who cooks up human placenta-and, on occasion, five-month-old aborted fetuses-which she serves in soups to an upper-class woman hoping to regain her youth.
Meanwhile, Asian films in competition, like Yoji Yamada’s Samurai drama The Hidden Blade (Japan) and Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Wayward Cloud (Taiwan), won critical praise, while Peacock, Gu Changwei’s directorial debut about a working-class family in a small Chinese town in the 1970s and ’80s, walked away with the Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear.
American films didn’t shock and awe their European audience for the most part. However, Mike Mills’ Thumbsucker, an American Beauty-style film delving into the underbelly of middle-class America, got rave reviews much like it did at Sundance the month before, and earned Lou Taylor Pucci the Silver Bear for best actor. On the Outs, by Lori Silverbush and Michael Skolnik, gave a hard look at the destructive lives of three teenage girls in Jersey City. And also following on its success at Sundance was Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary about the charismatic and tragic genius of a West Virginia cult songwriter, The Devil and Daniel Johnston.
Audiences have been streaming into Berlin for the February fest for years, knowing that if they don’t see certain films here, they won’t see them anywhere. But with the jump in sales and contracts and negotiation rights this year, the global film market may have witnessed a business breakthrough, with a chance to expand in years to come.
It may not be the warmth and sun of Los Angeles-where the American Film Market normally meets this time of year-but there’s something to be said for enduring a long, dark winter where the best flicks comes to your doorstep.