Berlinale 2009

Film Festival Shrugs Off Economic Gloom

By Naomi Buck

The Berlin Film Festival resisted efforts to fit its movies into a fashionable theme this year and showcased an eclectic range of topics -- from a winged baby to the war in Iraq. The financial crisis also failed to keep moviegoers at home. The Berlinale, if anything, is growing.

Any concern that the financial crisis might overshadow this year's Berlinale dissipated soon after the festival started. After Tom Tykwer's opening film, "The International," showed that bad banks make great villains, and a couple of documentaries presented the case against neo-liberalism, viewers could turn their attention to time-honored cinema themes: family dysfunction, the trauma of war, elusiveness of justice and pain of mortality. Lighter fare was doled out sparingly.

The entries were less international than in years past, but many of the plots made up for that -- like Tykwer's aptly-named thriller, which started in Berlin and moved through Milan and Lyon to New York. There was a healthy mix of the old European guard (Andrzej Wajda, Theo Angelopoulus, Betrand Tavernier, Costa Gavras) and the new. Two directorial debuts were in competition, and while Peter Strickland outraged more than he impressed with his stark tale of rape and revenge in Transylvania ("Katalin Varga"), Oren Moverman's "The Messenger" may be one of the best films so far on the fallout of the Iraq war. In "Storm," a younger German filmmaker named Hans-Christian Schmid offered a critical look at the work of the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, with the compelling story of a prosecutor's relationship with a Bosnian rape victim.

REPRINTS

Find out how you can reprint this SPIEGEL ONLINE article.

Critics were divided over whether Francois Ozon's "Ricky" -- about a baby that sprouts wings -- was the stuff of myth or kitsch. But there was general consensus that Sally Potter's portrait of the New York fashion industry ("Rage") was almost as vacuous as the subject matter itself, and that Stephen Frears' "Cheri" had the most luxuriant costumes and cleavage (Kathy Bates') -- but not much else. Nor did Mitchell Lichtenstein's light-hearted tale of two sisters reuniting to care for their senile father ("Happy Tears") garner much praise, but it didn't hurt to have Demi Moore on the red carpet.

There was only one competition film from Iran (Asghar Farhadi's "Darbareye Elly"), but Petr Lom's documentary "Letters to the President" -- which was not in competition -- offered a close look at the current regime's propaganda apparatus and may have contributed more to an understanding of the country than the beautiful landscapes and opaque dialogue that characterize most recent Iranian feature films.

The financial crisis didn't hurt ticket sales: Halfway through the two-week event Berlinale officials said they had already sold more seats in 2009 than in 2008's entire festival. Gala screenings at the 1800-seat Friedrichstadt Palast, the latest venue to be colonized by the organizers, were selling out, and the International Forum of New Cinema has extended its reach to a growing number of gallery spaces in Berlin. The Berlinale isn't suffering.

In fact, to judge by the compilation of shorts called "Germany 09: 13 Films about the state of the nation," the greatest challenges facing this country in 2009 are its unmotivated strippers (spoiled by over-generous welfare packages), the disappearance of the old fraktur typeface from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and business travellers bored by Lufthansa's tomato juice. The crisis -- if it's still out there -- will have to wait for its 15 minutes of fame.