Day 2 – Sunday, February 10

Suchandrika Chakrabarti reports on Agnieszka Moody's introduction to the Media Program of the European Union
Ben Cho listened Fernando Eimbcke and Pablo Fendrik talking about Latin America and the problems of filmmaking
Dilek Aydin finds out that in Yves-Christian Fournier's Everything Is Fine (Canada) by far not everything is fine
Ezequiel Schmoller explains why Citizen Havel is a good example of "direct cinema"
Martyna Olszowska reviews Revanche by Austrian Götz Spielmann
Natalia Ames writes on three stars visiting the Campus: Maria Schrader, Kate Henshaw-Nuttall and Shah Rukh Khan
Shaibu Husseini visited the shooting of one of the films made by participants of the Talent Campus

Paper Bag Not Necessary
By Suchandrika Chakrabarti

Not even Agnieszka Moody's Meet the Expert session on film funding escaped the effects of Shah Rukh Khan's Berlinale reception. The rather well-known Bollywood actor's appearance on the "Love International" panel at HAU 1, the main location of the Berlinale Talent Campus, attracted a bit of a crowd. The result for Moody's audience was an impromptu gathering outside the theatre in HAU 2. Next time, Mr Khan, do give us some warning.

Moody, of UK-based funding team MEDIA Desk (www.mediadesk.co.uk) gave a detailed, witty talk on the opportunities offered to European filmmakers to fund development, training and promotion. They have helped out such diverse films as My Summer Of Love, Amelie and Mrs Henderson Presents.

Their Media Program has "a big pot of subsidy in Brussels," amounting to half a billion euros, or about 100 million Euros a year until 2013. There are 15 or 16 different categories of funding, aimed at helping most aspects of the filmmaking process, such as development, training and promotion. As Moody says, "how we can help is through the producer," rather than giving money to lone writers. MEDIA is interested in helping projects with budgets of 10,000 to 60,000 or 80,000 Euros.

As an EU initiative, Moody says that MEDIA needs to "know that we support a European entity," and the filmmakers need to show that their project will be of interest to European audiences. One Turkish directing Talent, Melisa Onel, was advised that teaming up with a European co-producer was a condition of applying, but only if the partnership "feels good."

In fact, February 11th will see MEDIA take a step forward in non-European relations, as it announces Media International, a million-Euro scheme designed to partner countries for training. "It's all about reciprocity," says Moody, with all nations having the chance to train and be trained.

Moody's top tip for this year's Talents is to apply to Rotterdam's Cinemart co-production market next January. It's a kinder place than Cannes, and "you'd have to put a paper bag on your head not to network, it's that good." Or perhaps standing next to a Bollywood star might do it... (Suchandrika Chakrabarti)

The Revolution May Not Be Televised
By Ben Cho

Calling the emerging movement of young Latin American cinema a "revolution" would probably be misleading. After listening to a pair of key directors from Argentina and Mexico at the Berlinale Talent Campus' lecture on Panamerican cinema it'd be best described as a disjointed guerrilla war. And the enemies? Predictably the Hollywood juggernaut and European distributors more concerned with East Asian exotica or European arthouse titles. But Dieter Kosslick and Dorothee Wenner should take immense comfort in the fact that their efforts with the Berlinale and the Campus are leading to new inroads for global distribution and greater exposure for young filmmakers.

This year was particularly illustrative that the Berlinale Talent Campus has yielded significant dividends for world cinema. In 2003 Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke attended the Campus, a year later he unveiled Duck Season which drew heavy praise and prestigious festival slots. His latest film Lake Tahoe has been selected for the Berlinale competition where it's currently benefiting from a warm critical reception. Joining Eimbcke was Argentinean helmer Pablo Fendrik who attended the Campus and Talent Project Market in 2006 and had his debut feature The Mugger screened during the Critics' Week at Cannes 2007.

Both men, flanked by their producers, discussed the difficulties of the Argentinean and Mexican film industries and despite wider exposure for the usual Panamerican suspects (Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuaron) indie Latin American films still have a long, arduous road ahead. International film festivals remain the lifeblood for arthouse titles but all participants were rather hesitant about the idea of a collective Panamerican cine-industrial bloc: the distribution channels within Latin America allowing Mexican films to find an audience in Brazil, Argentinean films to connect to Venezuelans and Peruvian cinema to travel to Uruguay are still blocked.

Fendrik drew laughs from the audience with his tales of no-budget guerrilla filmmaking in Argentina, at one point declaring, "We are like a bunch of thieves", referring to his constantly on-the-run crew, and both directors touched upon the wildly divergent styles of their films and the financing problems they experienced. Perhaps most telling was when Eimbcke's executive producer Christian Valdelièvre commented to the Argentinean filmmakers sitting opposite that he hadn't seen their films and they hadn't seen his. Great strides are being made within domestic industries but the challenge ahead will certainly be to create a regional powerhouse. If and when that occurs there might be a new juggernaut to rival the Latin American's cousins up north. (Ben Cho)

Did Somebody Say Light?
By Dilek Aydin

I was surprised when, just before the screening in the Panorama section, director Yves-Christian Fournier asked the audience to see the light and optimism in the film not the dark side. But I was more surprised when the film finished and there was only a small shaft of light next to its dark pessimism about teenage life. Besides if a director needs to tell his audience what they should look for in his film before they see it, there are usually problems in the message on the screen. 

Everything Is Fine (Tout est parfait, Canada) focuses on the suicidal tendency among young people and starts with a very provocative suicide scene. Before the audience has recovered from this shock, there is another suicide scene, then another and one more. We get overloaded with pessimism from the very first minutes. The four teenage friends who kill themselves all live in Canadian suburbia. While the families are trying to find the connection among these close friends and their suicide at the same time, we are introduced to Josh, the last member of the gang, who doesn't seem to know much about his best friends' common decision. Then we focus on Josh's own life. His traumatic situation and suicidal tendency become the biggest issue of the film. We sympathize with his family and lively girlfriend Mia who are always worried about him. We love him despite his inability to communicate with his family and to express himself. Even his trying to commit suicide becomes understandable. We think, "yes there is not much to love in this life."

The woman cinematographer Sara Mishara's work is the best thing in the film. She shoots it in bright sunlight emphasizing the gleams of light over Josh's head. But it doesn't give the feeling "everything is fine" because the subject matter is very depressing as we follow the unhappy young man suffering after death of his friends. Despite what the director says, we can't see much light in the film other than that over Josh's head. (Dilek Aydin)

Life and Life Only
By Ezequiel Schmoller

The Berlinale Forum film Citizen Havel, directed by Miroslav Janek and Pavel Koutecký, is a great example of Direct Cinema. The main aim of Direct Cinema is to explore the world and try to capture reality with the least possible intervention. This means avoiding incidental music, voice-over commentaries, interviews, re-enacted scenes and archive footage. As Robert Drew, one of the precursors of Direct Cinema, declared in a 2003 interview: "My goal was to capture real life without intruding. […] My idea was to have one or two people, unobtrusive, capturing the moment." This does not imply, however, that Direct Cinema is objective cinema. As has often been said, deciding what to shoot, how to frame, the duration and order of shots, scenes and sequences, etc, are all very subjective decisions and will unavoidably turn a real-life situation into a subjective interpretation. Life "as it is", of course, can't be captured. But Direct Cinema is one of the best means of portraying authentic situations — and people — in all their extraordinary perplexity.

Janek and Koutecký obsessively followed Vaclav Havel (president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003) with their camera for no less than ten years and reduced hundreds of hours of material to a two-hour film. The prodigious editing of Citizen Havel allows us to get to know the statesman quite intimately. We have access to his public and his private life and, even more interesting, to the complex interaction between them. Although the film does refer to the great events of his presidency and life (the death of his wife, his second marriage, his political achievements, the crises he goes through), these filmmakers appear to be more interested in the apparently banal, insignificant moments: cabinet discussions, informal meetings, everyday situations. Rather than convincing us that Havel is a good or a bad president, or even a good or bad person, Janek and Koutecký attempt to prove that he is a good character. And they do: "their" Havel is a really witty, fascinating, hesitant and contradictory personality.

Janek and Koutecký do for Havel the same thing that Don Pennebaker did for Bob Dylan (Don't Look Back, USA 1967), João Moreira Salles for Lula (Entreatos, Brazil 2004) and Alejandro Landes for Evo Morales (Cocalero, Bolivia/Argentina 2007): they succeed in capturing a human being in all of his ambiguity. Direct Cinema is alive and kicking. (Ezequiel Schmoller)

Almost Haneke
By Martyna Olszowska

Revanche, the Austrian film by Götz Spielmann in the Berlinale Panorama, tries to be at once a gripping love story involving robbery and revenge, as well as a psychological movie about people who go off the rails. In the final analysis, it's neither of these genres.

Alex (Johannes Kirsh), a driver for a brothel owner in Vienna, is having a secret affair with one of his boss's girls — Tamara (Irina Potapenko). They're planning to escape to a better life, and so they rob a bank. Unfortunately, things don't go well. After Alex leaves the bank building with a gun in his hand, he runs into a policeman named Robert (Andreas Lust). As the couple drive off, Robert fires at them and kills the girl. Alex has to hide in his grandfather's house in a village not far from the capital. As luck would have it, the policeman also lives there, along with his wife whose presence turns out to be significant.

Spielmann started his career in television and his first feature film, Antares, was in competition at the Locarno Festival in 2004. In his latest production he stuffs too many plots into a two-hour narrative. Finally, he loses track of the story and the film becomes increasingly superficial and unconvincing. Too many scenes appear aimless and yield nothing. It's a shame, because as Spielmann shows (especially at the end of Revanche), he has a potential for continuing the great tradition of fellow Austrian director Michael Haneke with his allusive and understated style from which stemmed the emotional tension in films like Code: Unknown or Hidden.

Having developed the first part of the film in almost too much detail, Spielmann neglects the second half, which takes place in the village, and that promises so much. He contrasts urban life with the calm, harmonious rhythm of the village disturbed as it is by Alex, the outsider from the city. It all seems too naïve. Long shots, "symbolic" images, a lack of music and only natural sounds – using all of these elements, Spielmann tries to make the viewer believe that simple actions point to something deeper. Alas, he failed to convince me. Revanche comes quite close to the unique style of Michael Haneke, but unfortunately, not quite close enough. (Martyna Olszowska)

Stars with Hearts
By Natalia Ames

Flashes everywhere, people of diverse ages screaming and waiting for hours at the door of the Hebbel am Ufer theater, fans obsessed with getting a ticket... What was happening? Were they waiting for Daniel Day-Lewis? No, it was the moment before the opening panel of the Berlinale Talent Campus, which gathered a group of famous stars from different parts of the world to talk about a really important subject in cinema: love, the love we see portrayed in movies from Nollywood (the big film industry developed in Nigeria), Bollywood and Europe.

The director of the BTC, Dorothee Wenner, moderated an amusing conversation with three distinguished guests: German actress and director Maria Schrader, Nigerian megastar Kate Henshaw-Nuttall and Indian idol Shah Rukh Khan, who is at the Berlinale to present his movie Om Shanti Om in the Berlinale Special.

Following excerpts from their movies, the panel focused on different approaches to love on the big screen: the three guests discussed their cultural differences and national identities, emphasizing certain characteristics of each cinema; for example, the fact that Nigerian movies always have a moral, Bollywood films strive to express in a musical way the feelings and dreams of the Indian people, and European movies must negotiate the over-intellectualization of the western society. 

Even if the three guests are famous personalities in their countries, the presence of Shah Rukh Khan aroused the most diverse and surprising emotions. The Indian attendees were excited to see their idol closely, but the German fans were the most enthusiastic, applauding every sentence (such as "Indian movies do not have to be understood, only felt" or "All stories are love stories") and later running after his car to get an autograph. Khan is a magnetic yet friendly presence, who is conscious of his status and his charisma but does not brag about it and allows himself to be kind and pleasant with his audience.

This dialogue was funny and easy-going, a fitting way to begin the BTC, an event known by its intention to gather people from different cultures and realities who share one thing: their intense love for cinema. (Natalia Ames)

A Peep into Tomorrow in the Garage Studio
By Shaibu Husseini

The informal party they had thrown to get to know their mentors ran till the wee hours of Sunday. By 8 am, the first team on the line-up of the Garage Studio Talent team has gotten into full gear. There is a concentrated atmosphere of teamwork in the studio. Everyone, from the director to the prompter, is working to meet the challenge of turning out a ten-minute film — called One Time — in record time.

"They were done with setup and had started shooting by 8 am", says Debora Neumann, the Berlinale guide, outside the lobby of the third floor of Hau 3, one of the buildings in the Campus complex. A series of gangway lights lead into the belly of a small theatre, which has been smartly converted to a strike-and-set studio. A large screen with a projected still image of a busy airport separates the main shooting area from the recording station. Scriptwriter David Bradley Halls dashes off to pick up a script from a bag behind the audio and video consoles. "This is an exercise in instant filmmaking", he says. "We got together yesterday, rehearsed, got the set ready and now are recording onto hard drive. We shall edit and mix later in the evening and must be done by 5 pm, at the most." "Quiet on set", yells a voice, and Halls hurries off. "Need to run. We are working behind schedule", he says, dashing back on set — in this case, a makeshift departure lounge where two characters stand on cue for yet another take. "Take fourteen", the petite continuity person says.

"Sound … camera, action", a lanky fellow called Ted yells. The feedback on the monitors reveals the meat of the film: we see a travelling salesman, Lenny, who sells the future in his suitcase. He meets a willing patron and with a magnifying glass, he offers a 30 minute peep into the future. Over the next three days, three short films will be made in the Garage Studio. Each of the films has just a day to be shot, edited, mixed and released on the Internet. Halls is mindful of this fact. "We shall be up about time," he says as he runs off again. (Shaibu Husseini)

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