Selected Film-Festivals and Awards in Germany

The rush for tickets at this year’s 60th Berlinale remained unbroken – “The biggest birthday present of all however was the one we got from the audiences. The Berlinale was celebrated once again as the world’s biggest festival in terms of audience,” was the way festival director, Dieter Kosslick, described all the buzz.

The new series of films called “Berlinale Goes Kiez” was a perfect example of this. Every evening in selected cinemas in various districts of Berlin two films from the festival program were presented by film teams and so-called “film godfathers”. It was not a case of stars and glamour in this case, but an opportunity for people to go down to their local “cinema on the corner” and experience the festival there. Among the “godfathers/godmothers” were famous German movie scene people like Wim Wenders, Michael Verhoeven, Senta Berger, Andreas Dresen, Hans-Christian Schmid, Christian Petzold, Hans-Christoph Blumenberg and Tom Tykwer. Wim Wenders was enthralled, “A brilliant idea. With great devotion a concept of cinema has been upheld here that, if we were to lose it, would be a genuine loss.”

“Metropolis” – The Director’s Cut

Alongside world premieres at film festivals great store is also set by the idea of meeting up with old friends again. People hook up again with old friends, business partners and, strange as it may seem, with old films. The latter usually uses the program sections called “Berlinale Special” or “Retrospektive” for these “reunions”. This year it was the world premiere of a complete and elaborately restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis from the year 1927 that was so eagerly awaited. It is no doubt quite safe to say that film buffs all over the world have seen this masterpiece in either one or the other version – but this was something completely new! Immediately after the German premiere in 1927 the film was drastically cut for distribution reasons – over 30 minutes of material were removed. Then, two years ago in Buenos Aires a copy of the original version was discovered. An absolute sensation for the movie world. The film was later elaborately restored by a team of international experts who were coordinated by the Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau Foundation.

On 12th February, when Metropolis was shown at the Friedrichstadtpalast theatre, accompanied by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, there was thunderous applause – a final triumph indeed for Fritz Lang. At last his masterpiece had been shown the way he had originally intended it to be shown. For all those people who did not manage to get a ticket – no problem, as they were allowed to watch it for free. The film was shown on a huge screen suspended on the Brandenburg Gate in front of an audience of 2000 people who had braved the snowy weather. At the same time it was shown at the Alte Oper (opera house) in Frankfurt. Frankfurt is in the state of Hesse which had been one of the major contributors to the film’s restoration. This historical screening was also shown live on TV.

Fassbinder’s “Welt am Draht” (World on a Wire) and recalling the scandals of bygone days

A further example of outstanding reconstruction was the two-part TV film Welt am Draht by Rainer Werner Fassbinder – it had not been available for many years. In this science-fiction film from the year 1973 the protagonists become enmeshed in nightmarish parallel worlds. The similarity with so many more recent films like Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) or Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995) is quite remarkable and, even more admirable, Fassbinder’s clairvoyant choice of subject and the way he filmed it.

The aim of a festival however is not just to entertain, but to provoke social discourse and, as part and parcel, the odd scandal. “It was all about those films that, for either political or aesthetic reasons, caused a stir and turned the festival routine totally upside down,” said Rainer Rother, Artistic Director of the Deutsche Kinemathek and head of the Retrospektive.

Two of these “scandal” films were included in this year’s program: in 1976 the German Public Prosecutor’s Office confiscated Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses immediately after its first showing and preferred charges for the “dissemination of pornography”. And when, in 1979, Michael Cimino’s anti-war film, The Deer Hunter was included in the festival program, there were huge protests from the Soviet Union on account of its “distorted depiction of its socialist sister country, Vietnam”. The film was nevertheless still shown. Other socialist countries then reacted by withdrawing their films from the program and ordering their delegations to return home.

Favourite films – the audiences vote on it

All the 15,000 films that had been shown at the Berlinale since it first started in 1951 were to be seen on the posters for this year’s festival. “With a little bit of patience everybody can find their favourite film,” says festival director, Dieter Kosslick. Often however the audience’s favourite films are not those films that won the festival’s official prizes. That is why at this point it might be a good idea to take an in-depth look at People’s Choice Awards and Readers’ Prizes that are decided on by film fans, who award the prizes with total disregard of any strategic intentions.

It is not without good reason that at international festivals comedies are hardly ever nominated. And if they have been, they stand almost no chance of winning a prize – even if they have been well made, like the Norwegian film, En ganske snill mann (A Somewhat Gentle Man) by Hans Petter Moland. In it Stellan Skarsgard gives a brilliant performance as an ex-jailbird whose attempted new start in life is hampered by two-faced friends, sex-mad women and an encounter with the face of true love. Despite the fact that the film did not win any of the big prizes, as was expected, the readers of the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper voted it the best film of the competition. For the People’s Choice Prize in the Panorama section all festivalgoers were allowed to take part. This year the majority of them voted for a documentary – Waste Land (Lucy Walker). It focuses on the Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz, and his installation in the Jardim Gramacho, one of the world’s largest garbage dumps. Right on the doorstep of Rio de Janeiro there are people living there both in and from garbage. Muniz involved the local “catadores” (pickers of recyclable garbage) in his project, by getting them to make portraits of themselves out of the garbage.

The readers of the Tagesspiegel also voted for a film in which the heroes or, in this case, the heroine rises above herself. In the film Winter’s Bone Debra Granik tells the story of a young teenager’s desperate search for her father who has gone underground. He left the family with a pile of debt and pawned their home. Instead of finding help Ree is only confronted with silence and rejection. It is a cold depiction of a tough America that is still waiting to savour some of Obama’s optimism. The remarkable thing about it is that, although Winter’s Bone is a feature film, it comes across as a documentary – this fight for survival is well and truly brought home to us due to the film’s aesthetic camera and direction.

This year’s People’s Choice and Readers’ prizes show clearly that even if a film deals with a taboo topic or it is a documentary, it can still reach a wide audience. This should encourage cinema operators - above all TV stations – to rethink their programming strategies.

See and be seen

No festival, as we know, can live without insider tips. At the Berlinale 2010 it was the film Nenette (Nicholas Philibert) that reigned supreme. The star of the film was a female orang-utan. Yes, it was an animal film – but not in the classic sense. It was much more a film that taught us a lot about people – while we watch Nenette on screen – eating, scuffling about, scratching herself, we hear the people in the audience commenting on Nenette’s antics – very revealing indeed …

Nenette is indeed a film about watching and about cinema itself. “Through the eyes of the ape we movie-goers are able to become one with the zoo-goer – one individual observer who is reflected in what he is observing,” as Katja Nicodemus said in the Zeit newspaper. This is exactly what we want to see more of and that is why we are really looking forward to the 61st Berlinale in 2011!