The 53rd Berlinale 2003 A Statement for Peace
»Towards Tolerance« was displayed prominently on the front cover of the catalogue for the 53rd Berlinale (6-16 February 2003), accompanied by a discerning essay by festival director Dieter Kosslick on how the Berlinale is contributing to »a greater understanding between cultures.« To be sure, the impending Iraqi war hung over the festival like a Damocles sword. So it wasn’t at all surprising when the international jury, headed by Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan, chose to award the Golden Bear to Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (UK), a fiction documentary about two young Afghans leaving a refugee camp in Peshawar to backpack on an arduous journey from Pakistan through Iran and Turkey to Istanbul and Trieste headed for London.
Shot with a digital camera (Marcel Zyskind) on actual locations, then transferred to epic 35 mm widescreen, the journey itself is the true centerpiece of the film, rather than the appealing Jamal and Enayat (both played by nonprofessionals). Only once does its humanitarian message move to the forefront: when the youths are confined with others in the dark container of a freighter en route to Trieste, the hyped soundtrack, portending tragedy, can send a chill up your spine. Besides the Golden Bear, the film was awarded the Peace Prize and the Ecumenical Prize.
Programmed on the second day of the festival, In This World set the tone for the entire Berlinale as »a statement for peace« a moral viewpoint that was to rise to a public crescendo on the closing day of the festival, when a half-million Berliners marched through the Brandenburg Gate in an anti-war demonstration. You knew then that the 53rd Berlinale was far more than just a festival.
Freedom Award
The most moving event of the festival took place on a Sunday evening, when the American Gary McVey bonded with the Russian Mikhail Shvydkoi in Berlin, where Russians and Americans once stood in a Cold War face-off. This time, before a standing-room-only audience in the Rotes Rathaus, Gary McVey, director of the American Cinema Foundation, handed the prestigious Andrzej Wajda Philip Morris Freedom Prize to Mikhail Shvydkoi, the Russian Cultural Minister, who in the presence of honorary guest Andrzej Wajda, Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit, and Berlin producer Jens Meurer accepted the award on behalf of Alexander Sokurov, the director of Russian Ark.
The ceremony coincided with the pending German release of the Russian Ark, deemed by film professionals the world over as the artistic cinematic achievement of the 2002 season. Never before has a »one-shot« historical feature of this scope and magnitude 400 years of Russian history intrepreted in the halls of the Hermitage and the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg with a cast of thousands (see reviews and comments in KINO 77 and KINO 78) been attempted in the long history of the cinema. And it’s hardly likely that it will ever be attempted again in the foreseeable future. In short, a masterpiece!
Unfortunately, due to a recent eye operation, Sokurov himself was not able to make the trip from St. Petersburg to receive the award personally. »I’m proud to say that Alexander has asked me to bring him the prize personally,« said Mikhail Shvydkoi, adding: »The first time that a Russian artist has allowed a bureaucrat to accept a purse award on his behalf!«
Oscar Nominations
Once again, the 53rd Berlinale effectively fulfilled its function as a winter showcase for the Oscar Nominations. Rob Marshall’s Chicago and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, both running out-of-competition, respectively opened and closed the festival, while Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (UK) outclassed them both as the creative artistic gem in the competition. Scripted by British dramatist David Hare (whose Wetherby had once shared a Golden Bear at the 1985 Berlinale) from a novel by Michael Cunningham, The Hours links three separate stories set on a single day in London in 1923, in Los Angeles in 1952, and in New York in 2002 around the seminal feminist novel »Mrs. Dalloway« by Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman in the first episode).
In all three episodes it’s the spectre of an impending suicide triggered by depression that sets the stage for a moment of truth in each of the women’s lives and in the case of Virginia Woolf she did take the fatal plunge into the river later in 1941, the closing shot of the film. The ensemble of Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep were collectively awarded the Silver Bear for Best Actress, and The Hours was voted the Readers’ Award by the Berliner Morgenpost.
The fun film of the Berlinale, Spike Jonze’s Adaptation was awarded the runnerup Silver Berlin, Special Jury Prize. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman had previously teamed with actor-director Jonze on Being John Malkovich (1999), a free-wheeling screwball comedy about role-playing inside the persona of a willing John Malkovich. In Adaptation they carry the absurdity one step further by introducing Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother Donald (both played by Nicolas Cage) as screenwriters, the former numbed by a writer’s block on an assignment to adapt a novel while the latter is working feverishly on a script about a serial killer. This film-within-a-film about a film in the making hit the screen at the Berlinale just when the Oscar Nominations were announced. Since both Charlie and his fictional brother Donald were nominated for Best Screenplay Adaptation of a nonfictional novel, the fun has already spilled over into the Oscars.
The Tip of the Iceberg
Altogether, 59 German films were booked by the festival, including a representative entry in the Children’s Film Festival: Jörg Grünler’s Der zehnte Sommer (The Tenth Summer, photo below), the story of a 10-year-old boy in the 1960s in a provincial working-class town on the Rhine.
Extra screenings had to be scheduled to handle the overflow crowds cuing for entries in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino, programmed by the plucky Alfred Holighaus. The section opened with Stefan Krohmer’s Sie haben Knut (They’ve Got Knut), an ensemble film about love and politics gone astray during a weekend spent in a mountain lodge in the winter of 1983. A few days later, it hit another high note with Martina Döcker’s documentary Bernau liegt am Meer (Think German!), an insightful portrait of a young Neo-Nazi radical in a small town just north of Berlin, referred to in the film as »Bernau on the seacoast«.
The International Forum of Young Cinema under Christoph Terhechte continued its tradition of showing the longest film of the festival: Ulrike Ottinger’s six-hour video-travel documentary, Südostpassage (Southeast Passage) her three-part journey from Berlin to Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, with extra stopovers in Odessa and Istanbul. The Forum also presented the latest chapter in the longest running documentation in the history of the cinema: Barbara and Winfried Junge’s Eigentlich wollte ich Förster werden Bernd aus Golzow (Actually I Wanted to Be a Forester Bernd from Golzow), the 18th edition in the 40-year chronicle about Die Kinder von Golzow (The Children of Golzow).
Hits and Discoveries
One of the best German films at the Berlinale was programmed in the Panorama: Christian Petzold’s Wolfsburg, the third in his trilogy on moral ethics and individual conscience after Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) (2000), about a terrorist family still on the run, and Toter Mann (Dead Man) (2001), about a woman’s pained quest to avenge the murder of her sister. One of the discoveries of the season could be seen in the German Films section: Marc Ottiker’s 1/2 Miete (1/2 Rent), the bizarre tale of a Berlin computer hack who leaves town on the run for Cologne, where he lives a shadow-existence in apartments he’s broken into while their owners are away or at work. Gradually he becomes interested in their fates, enough to awaken him to the real world. Over in the European Film Market a crowd of cineastes and festival directors showed up in numbers to see Robert Fischer’s documentary on Fassbinder in Hollywood, made in collaboration with Ulli Lommel and featuring interviews with Lommel, Michael Ballhaus, Hanna Schygulla, Wim Wenders, and others who share their thoughts on the dream of Rainer Werner Fassbinder to work one day in Hollywood.
The German Trio
Crowds cued before, during, and after the Berlinale to see Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin!, awarded the Blue Angel Prize for Best European Film in the Berlinale Competion. Indeed, within a few weeks after the festival had closed, it had passed the three million audience mark and was still holding its own against American movie fare. A satire on a phenomenon known as »Ostalgie« (»East German nostalgia«), the film effectively takes the pulse of the German-German experience in the wake of national unification.
Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter (Distant Lights), impressive as a statement on social conditions today, well deserved its International Critics (FIPRESCI) Award. Set on the German-Polish border, Distant Lights sketches the fates of five »losers« in an interlocking narrative that never loses sight of the tragicomic no matter how bitter the truth may be to a forever dreamer or a would-be entrepreneur.
Oskar Roehler’s Der alte Affe Angst (Angst), a personal study about a stage director’s laming psychosis in work and marriage, is remarkable for its spontaneous moments of razor-sharp give-and-take between Robert (André Hennicke) and his wife Marie (Marie Bäumer), a dedicated children’s doctor. Later, when the spectre of death enters the picture Robert’s father phones to say he is dying of cancer the story takes on extra depth to become a forthright statement on the human condition.
Murnau Aimée Ozu
»Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Ein Melankoliker des Films« (F.W. Murnau The Melancholic of Cinema), the Retrospective publication edited by Hans Helmut Prinzler, director of the Filmmuseum Berlin Deutsche Kinemathek, is the logical companion to the momumental Fritz Lang retrospective-exhibition at the 2001 Berlinale and is one of those collector’s item catalogues no honest film historian should be without. Published in collaboration with the Friedrich Wilhelm Stiftung and the Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, which opened with a Murnau Exhibition in the Film Museum, this 302-page catalogue see photo below is a treasure! Although only twelve of his Murnau’s 21 films have survived some in different versions, while nine may never be found a team of researchers did a yeoman’s job by working to fill the gaps in the career of one of cinema’s great visual directors, a true master of light and shadow on the screen.
Needless to say, one of the busiest stands in the European Film Market was that of Transit Film, the world sales representative for the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, based in München and headed by Loy W. Arnold. Although every Murnau fan has his or her favorite Nosferatu (1922) or Faust (1926) are the best known the high points of the Retrospective were the back-to-back screenings of Der letzte Mann (1924), both to musical accompaniment in the Volksbühne am Luxemburg Platz. The newly restored German version was premiered to the original musical score by Giuseppe Becce, enlarged upon in 2002 by Detlev Glanert, orchestrated by the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Saatbrücken under the baton of Frank Strobel. The Last Laugh, the American version with a happy ending, was also premiered in a newly restored version to the 1924 musical score by Hugo Riesenfeld, rearranged in 2002 by Javier Perez de Azpeitia, orchestrated by Europäische Filmphilharmonie Ensemble Kontraste under the baton of Javier Perez de Azpeitia. As retrospectives go, it couldn’t get much better than that! Bravo!
The 10-film tribute to Anouk Aimée was also a windfall, with the French actress in her most memorable roles as a fragile, melancholic beauty in Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 (1957), Jacques Demy’s Lola (1960), Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme (1966). She was awarded a Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement.
To commemorate »100 Jahre Ozu« a workshop on the Japanese master director was organized by Berlinale in conjunction with the Forum. During the festival a half-dozen of the classics directed by Yosujiro Ozu (1903-1963) from the 1930’s to the 1950’s could be seen. And a comprehensive retrospective of Ozu’s films were programmed throughout the month of February in the Arsenal-Kino.
Daniel Toscan Du Plantier
The sudden death by a heart attack of Daniel Toscan Du Plantier hit the festival like a thunderbolt. The renown 61-year-old French producer for Gaumont, the cofounder of the German-French Film Academy and head of Unifrance was on his way to view Patrice Chéreau’s Son Frère (His Brother) in the Berlinale Palast when he was struck down. »He was a great supporter of European cinema,« said Dieter Kosslick in a moving tribute to a close friend. »Daniel was in Berlin to deepen the friendship between the French and German film industries. He loved Berlin. This is a great loss for all of us.« A special screening of Benoît Jacquot’s Tosca (2001), produced by Daniel Toscan Du Plantier, was programmed the next day. On closing night Patrice Chéreau dedicated his Silver Bear Best Director to his friend Daniel Toscan Du Plantier. Shortly after the festival closed, ARTE, the French-German cultural channel the French producer had helped to launch, aired a documentary tribute to the film personality.
This year’s 10-day Berlinale may have seemed to some a shortened affair. But the public could use the 11th day to catch up on what they missed. Also, the Berlinale Talent Campus was a welcomed innovation. Our warmest congratulations to Dieter Kosslick and his team!
Ron and Dorothea Holloway