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Nov 20, 2008 4:34 PM CST |
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If one didn’t care about the films, one should definitely choose festivals according to the season. Havana, Cuba in December, Bangkok or Palm Springs in January, and there is often nothing wrong with the weather in May on the Riviera when the Cannes Film Festival takes place. On the other hand, Berlin in February is not too inspiring: snow showers, freezing rain, and wind are what the weather gurus promise this year. What Berlin can promise is a certain kind of rigor. The Berlin Festival is a huge festival. There are over 600 films over eleven days, with screenings not only at the complexes around Potsdamer Platz, but in cinemas all over Berlin. The competition program for the 55th Berlin International Film Festival includes the world premiere of Sometimes in April, an investigation of the genocide in Rwanda. Sometimes in April is directed by the talented Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, whose previous work includes the feature film Lumumba. Though set in the same location as Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda, Sometimes in April takes a different course. It tells the story of a Hutu soldier who is separated from his family, including his Tutsi wife, as he tries to take them to safety with the help of a fellow Hutu soldier. The film stars Oris Erhuero and Debra Winger, and had its first screening recently in Kigali’s Amohoro Stadiu, where thousands of Tutsis were killed during the slaughter. Interestingly, the film is produced by the American cable TV channel HBO, which has quickly become a more adventuresome and interesting producer of feature films than any of the Hollywood studios. Dysfunctional families seems to be the theme of the decade, and the Berlin festival has several films in this vein. In The Accused, a new Danish feature by Jacob Thuesen, a family man is accused by his daughter of a horrible crime. In Smalltown, Italy, the first feature of a young Italian filmmaker, Stefano Mordini, a young and unconventional family is undone by society’s rules. One of the highly anticipated films in the Berlin competition is Tickets, a compilation film by three filmmakers—Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Ken Loach. The three interwoven stories all take place on a train journey. Another hard-hitting feature film in the Berlin competition is Paradise Now, a Dutch-German-French co-production by Hany Abu-Assad. It is the account of the last forty-eight hours in the lives of two Palestinian suicide bombers. Russian director Aleksandr Sokhurov continues his series of films dealing with the psychology of power. His new film is called The Sun and revolves around the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Previous Sokhurov films in this trilogy of power include Hitler and Lenin. Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang, whose films include The River, What Time is it There?, and The Hole, will present the world premiere of The Wayward Cloud. The film is a Chinese-Taiwanese-French co-production which features colorful musical sequences, juxtaposed with explicit sex scenes. One of the highlights of the Festival will be a reconstructed new version of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. The new version restores the film’s Russian intertitles with their original graphics, as well as the opening words of Leo Trotsky. Changes and cuts which were made in the film due to censorship, including those in the famous Odessa steps sequence, have been corrected, and the music by Edmund Meisel has been revised. The screenings in Berlin will be accompanied by the live German Film Orchestra Babelsberg. Korean filmmaker Im Kwon-Taek will receive an Honorary Golden Bear in Berlin for his more than 100-film career, as will Spanish actor, director, and screenwriter Fernando Fernan Gomes. A special retrospective in Berlin is called Selling Democracy II—Winning the Peace, a retrospective of American propaganda films made in the postwar years to sell the Marshall plan to a defeated Germany. A number of historians and scholars will conduct workshops putting the films and the Marshall Plan in post-World War II Europe into context. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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