Berlinale, Part 2

My second and last update for the Berlinale 2012 edition is much smaller as I've taken a much more relaxed approach to the scheduling as mentioned in my previous post. I also recorded a podcast with Rob Beames, who has seen a lot more films than me.

Here's a summary:

Chris Keneally's documentary SIDE BY SIDE was one of the highlights of the festival. A comprehensive doc about the advent of digital technology in cinema, it addresses every single aspect of the debate from the sceptics (Chirstopher Nolan) to the evangelists (David Fincher). Keanu Reeves produced and did the interviews himself, and was on hand to talk about the film afterwards. You'll never think of Neo the same way again.

Zhang Yimou's epic THE FLOWERS OF WAR, starring Christian Bale, was an epic misfire. Tasteless, over the top and frankly offensive, this movie fails on every level. I can't see this working at all outside China.

Billy Bob Thornton's first film in a decade, JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR, suffers from both too long a running time and too short a running time; developed as an HBO show this could be masterful, and cut by half hour it could be a real gem. The writing is sharp and some of the vignettes are pure Raymond Carver but too many characters deliver long speeches about the war - bringing the movie to a halt. Robert Duvall on LSD is a sight to behold, however.

Swiss-French production SISTER was another good, but not spectacular, film which was mildly satisfying - with some amazing performances and scenes, but nothing I haven't seen before. Watching Gillian Anderson speaking French is always a pleasure.

German family drama HOME FOR THE WEEKEND was a modest, quiet affair that felt like Germany's answer to ARCHIPELAGO, the story of an upper middle class family facing some internal trauma. Like many of the films in the festival, a decent, 3 out of 5.

One of the worse films to play in a major festival as far as I can recall, CHERRY was like an episode of 90210 turned into a feature by virtue of the presence of James Franco and Heather Graham (in a clear nod to BOOGIE NIGHTS, which this does not even come close to). Poorly directed, acted and written, it was a hard watch.

A nice surprise came from the FORUM section, where German feature SPANIEN played at the beautiful DELPHI cinema in West Berlin. A collection of intertwining stories with a very Kaurismaki tone, the film delivers tension and laughs in equal measure with a keen eye for details. A real gem.

I'm now back in Brighton and will be recording a full round up next weekend on our podcast so you can get the full lowdown on every feature in competition, plus all the awards and buzz.

Berlinale 2012, Part 1

This year I have definitely taken a step back in terms of my film schedule and emphasized networking, socialising and even a touch of partying over serious film-watching. I think I've earned the break.

That said, I've seen a few films so far:

As part of the Retrospective this year, Berlin is looking back at the work of joint German-Soviet studio Mezhrabpom-Film, which released dozens of films in the 1920s and 1930s before the Nazis shut it down. GOLDEN LAKE was an expedition adventure film with a strong Communist message and some daring rock climbing. It's the original Mission Impossible stunts: actors, clearly working with few regards for health & safety, fight, jump and swim through the Mongolian landscape with verve. The film was a little clumsy, and its message none too subtle, but I enjoyed it.

The next of the Soviet retrospective was THE GIRL WITH THE HAT BOX, a charming comedy commissioned by the Government to sell premium bonds, it's one of the wittiest films I have ever seen, and it was silent. I had no idea silent comedies could be anything other than slapstick - this was like a Soviet Lubitsch at work; and some research reveals that director Boris Barnet was one of the leaders of his filmic generation without the fame of an Eisenstein or Vertov. This is the best film I've seen so far here.

The first (and only so far) competition film I saw was the Taviani Brothers' CAESAR MUST DIE, a docudrama hybrid about a group of inmates in a high security prison performing Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar. It was imaginative, inventine, honest and often funny - and made the play come alive. Everything CORIOLANUS, which I saw last year in the same cinema, should have been.

After getting shut out of CAPTIVES, we took a punt on Panorama documentary MARINA ABRAMOVIC: THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, which was an emotional and pleasant surprise; a fairly generic HBO doc which is elevated by its subject matter - an incredible artist and woman about which I knew very little and now want to know a lot more of.

Finally, another shut-out pushed me into Tony Gatlif's INDIGNADOS (THE OUTRAGED), a well-intentioned but fairly awful piece of agit-prop cinema that is loosely linked to the Occupy movement which started in Spain last year. Clunky, like a university project created by committee, I really wanted to like this but it just made it impossible to.

Tomorrow I switch gears and will begin to watch a lot more - first screening at 9am!

Berlinale 2012

This year, for the third time in a row, I'll be attending the Berlinale Film Festival. It's become somewhat of a tradition for me since 2009, when I went to reunite with my Venice friends.

This year I've decided to schedule fewer competition films and take some time to explore the retrospective, this year called THE RED DREAM FACTORY, looking back at German-Russian film studio: Mezhrabpom-Film and its German branch Prometheus, which operated from 1922 to 1936.

I'm also keen to do some straight tourism, as my visits to this incredible city have always been mostly contained inside dark auditoriums. I'll be posting updates here as I normally do during festivals, and will be recording a couple of podcasts with Robert Beames, who's at Berlin for the Telegraph.

Bis später!

San Sebastian/Donostia Roundup

Sorry for the delayed update but I hit the ground running straight after landing and haven't had a moment free since. Enough excuses. I attended this year's edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival (or Donostia Zinemaldia in Basque) for its 59th edition, as a guest of the CinemaLab programme, which seeks to create better links between European exhibitors and distributors and Latin American films.

It was my first time at this Festival but not my first in San Sebastian, a city not too far from Bilbao, where my father is from and where I attended University many moons ago - essentially I am half Basque.

I was only in town for 3 nights, and had two meetings to attend, so the filmgoing was sparse. But I did get in six films altogether. Four of those were titles from Cinema en Construccion, the movies-in-progress strand of the festival which focuses on Latino films. The quality was high, and I saw real gems. But it's not fair to review unfinished films. The two others were competition features, and both were excellent.

RAMPART, starring Woody Harrelson in an Oscar-worthy performance, is about a corrupt police officer in the infamous Rampart district headquarters of Los Angeles, home to a lot of the evidence-planting, police brutality and other naughty stuff the LAPD was up to. Harrelson, a terrific performer who has been underrated and underused in the past, takes what is a fairly generically-filmed movie and turns it into an epic character study that is complex, funny and terrifying all at once. This will get Awards buzz.

LE SKYLAB is the third feature from actress (and now director) Julie Delpy, best known for BEFORE SUNRISE/SUNSET. A hilarious French family comedy like only the French could produce, it's sprawling, with over 20 speaking parts, all of them performing at top notch level. I saw this in the Teatro Victoria Eugenia, a Belle Epoque palace turned into a cinema for the night, with a 4K projector beaming crisp-clean images onto a giant screen. A fantastic film and an amazing screening experience.

San Sebastian is one of my favorite film festivals (I've been to six this year) because it doesn't have a huge amount of corporate sponsorship, it's situated in an amazing city by the sea, all the venues are within walking distance of each other, and as a class A fest is has access to top notch competition features and juries. Just popping into bars in the Old Town I ran into Catherine Deneuve, Michael Fassbender and Rita Wilson (?!).

This is the end of my Festival tour for the year - it started with the Berlinale in February, and took me to Toulouse in March, Pula/Sarajevo in July, Venice in August and finishing in San Sebastian last week. Now on to focus to my own Festival, the Cinecity Brighton Film Festival, starting 17 Nov!

Berlinale Roundup

Yesterday I returned from Berlin where I spent a week at the Berlinale, my second visit. Last year I blogged that the festival was a real downer in both tone and content, with a dominance of slow cinema, and frankly, unremarkable films. I thought it might have been an off year, but 2011 was yet another collection of mostly dour movies (with some exceptions, which I will talk about further ahead.)

This year I was there with two colleagues from the cinema, Rob Beames (Dukes staff member and writer for Obsessed with Film, Picturehouse Blog and his own, Beames on Film) and with Duty Manager Carina Volkes. You can listen to a podcast we all recorded together in Berlin at iTunes or at the Picturehouse website. Another podcast shall be recorded next week with a roundup of the festival.

One of the biggest stories at this year's festival is the presence of so many 3D features, many by acclaimed arthouse filmmakers: Wim Wenders' PINA, Herzog's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS and Ocelot's TALES OF THE NIGHT being the three highest profile ones. This festival may mark a new beginning in the use of 3D outside of the blockbuster genre, as acclaimed filmmakers take on this new tool and apply it in unusual ways. Wenders has created a revolutionary performance piece with PINA, pushing the medium to maximum effect - I still haven't seen the Herzog, but we're installing 3D at The Dukes in order to screen it. Picturehouse Entertainment, a division of City Screen, our parent company, is distributing it in the UK and many of the cinemas in the group are installing 3D equipment ahead of this release. I believe this is a game-changing moment for the arthouse scene and 3D in this country, and eventually, in Europe.

Other highlights in the festival included THE GUARD, a hilarious comedy with Brendan Gleeson as a corrupt, perverse Irish cop; MAMA AFRICA, a documentary about Miriam Makeba, and THE DAY IS DONE, an experimental moving image project from Switzerland; and sitting next to Isabella Rossellini at the Bergman reception.

Berlin Day 4

With almost no sleep somehow I managed to carry on throughout the day - but indulged this morning in a little bit of extra sleep so my Tuesday might be light on films. Here are some reviews:

IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE
This has been getting rave reviews here and I wouldn't be surprised if it won the top prize, but this Romanian film left me cold. A cliched story about a young prisoner who is pushed into desperate measures to save his little brother, I found it beautifully shot and acted but ultimately unsatisfying.
EL MAL AJENO
A slick Spanish supernatural medical drama (a new genre?), this was produced by Alejanddro Amenabar (THE OTHERS) and stars his favorite actor Eduardo Noriega as a doctor who discovered he has the power to cure people by touching them. The how and the why is both complicated and irrelevant. Don't watch this if you're a hypochondriac, as almost every scene features a medical procedure. For ER fans.
EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP
The amount of buzz this is getting was evident in the screening - huge excitement and clearly lots of laughter and applause for the street artist Banksy's film debut. The very hype that the feature is getting is exactly what Banksy is spoofing in EXIT, and I do understand the point he is trying to make, I just didn't find it very interesting. That said, I do think that audiences will love this, particularly in Brighton.

Berlin Day 2, 3

Again the lack of wi-fi has hobbled my best blogging efforts. The pace has picked up, and I've seen a good amount of films now. The temperature has risen a bit too, so it's less of a struggle to get around.

The first film I saw at the fest was APART TOGETHER (TUAN YUAN), a sweet family drama from China, this small but endearing film opened the Berlinale after its director won the Silver Bear in 2007. A friend who'd seen it before me warned me, "don't watch it if you're hungry" and boy was she right: scene after scene of cooking, eating, and drinking frame each family encounter and fight. A perfectly observed, often funny, and moving little film.

The morning after, once we'd secured our tickets, we popped two stops on the S-Bahn to the Friederichpalast, a huge theatre turned cinema for the Berlinale. There we saw HOWL. Given its pedigree of producer (Gus Van Sant) stars (James Franco, Jeff Daniels, Jon Hamm) cinematography (Ed Lachman) and subject matter (Allen Gingsberg) this had the chance of being special. Instead it's a car crash of a movie, with embarrassing animated interpretations of Gingsberg's poems, clunky courtroom scenes, and the sight of Franco with a false beard and extended ears. Its a testament to the power of Gingsberg's work that even through the silly conceit of this film you are touched by his poetry.

After a cocktail reception with CICAE, the International Federation of arthouse cinemas, where I ran into many of my colleagues from Venice, we popped over to the Urania cinema, which is a little out of the way of the main festival area. To my amazement, there was a woman outside the cinema asking for signatures for a petition to free Polanski. THE GHOST WRITER - it comes front loaded with the Polish director's personal problems, but I won't address any of the off screen controversy, but suffice to say that this film was partially edited from a prison in Zurich last year. You couldn't tell from the slick, efficient thriller Polanski has constructed from Robert Harris' novel. Pierce Brosnan is almost as sleazy as the prime minister this whole film is clearly based on, and Ewan Macgregor turns in a surprisingly decent performance. All Hitchcock twists and turns, this slightly unbelievable but very watchable story could be a hit.

With just twenty minutes between films for a noddle box and a bottle of water, we sat down for MY NAME IS KHAN. Billed as Bollywood's first Hollywood, this is a really hard film to review: its all about context. Without being familiar with India's commercial style of moviemaking, with long running times, outrageous plot developments and sentimental scenes this might seem like a film from another planet. That said, it does skip the song and dance routines and embrace a controversial subject matter, that of racial profiling in America post 9/11. As if that wasn't enough, it also decides to tackle Asperger's syndrome, American presidential politics, race relations, Katrina and Hindu-Muslim tensions. A tough watch.

Lined up for today is Romanian feature IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE, Spanish thriller EL MAL AJENO, and then Ben Stiller in GREENBERG and Banksy's EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP at the Palast in the evening. Reviews up tomorrow.

Berlin, Day 1

Sorry it's taken me so long to finally post, but finding a Wifi spot in Berlin is like trying to find a sausage in a well.
The truth is I haven't seen any films yet, so it's probably going to be a short one. After collecting my accreditation, my flatmate Esther & I snuck into the European Film Market, the trade show side of the festival, and browsed through the international stands - it was fascinating to see espresso-fulled sales agents and distributors openly negotiate terms of sale.
This being the most highly attended of all major festivals (hundreds of thousands of tickets are sold each year) getting into films without the red (press) pass isn't easy. This morning we queued up at 8:00am, in freezing wind and snow, to get out tickets for tomorrow. It's a strangely inefficient system for a German event, and both cruel and unusual given the weather. Non-badge holders are camping out in the arcades waiting for tickets overnight.
The rest of my time has been divided between the mundane (buying a new blackberry charger) to the interesting (a meeting about cinema networks at the AG KINO, Germany's arthouse network) to the fun (dinner in probably the only ska-pizza restaurant in the world).
So by the end of tomorrow I will have actual reviews of films and more news. Until then, Auf Wiedersen!