The gritty realism that the Berlin Film Festival has made its unique selling point may have been a little too close to the bone for some of the Hollywood stars who shivered and slid along the city's snow-covered streets last week. Hundreds of riot police were on every corner to control Kurdish demonstrations and, a few minutes away from the festival centre, three protesters were shot dead by Israeli embassy guards.
Nick Nolte showed the strain - and a little more besides - when he dropped his trousers at a crowded night club; Bruce Willis retreated into Planet Hollywood, where he reserved all the tables for himself; and Shirley MacLaine just smiled beatifically through it all.
There were more stars than ever in Berlin this year, a sign that the festival organisers are not prepared to play forever the role of the ugly duckling to glamorous, sun-drenched Cannes. But, although fans could gape at Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Willem Dafoe and Nicholas Cage, there was no sign of the man everyone was talking about - Terrence Mallick. Mallick, whose second World War epic The Thin Red Line won the Golden Bear for Best Film, has not given an interview for 20 years. But Berliners were disappointed that he failed to accompany the film or even to accept the award in person.
The Thin Red Line was an unpopular winner, yet there was something almost inevitable about the jury's choice of this 170-minute meditation on the horror of man and nature. The beauty of the film and its sheer breadth are enough to banish most doubts about its long-winded monologues and questionable vision.
Stephen Frears won the Silver Bear for Best Director with his charming, country and western story The Hi-Lo Country, about a male friendship that is threatened when both men become passionate about the same woman. The actors' awards all went to German performers - Michael Gwisdek for Nachtgestalten (Figures of the Night) and Maria Schrader and Juliane Koehler for Aimee und Jaguar.
Aimee und Jaguar, which opened the festival, tells the true story of the love between a young Jewish woman and a non-Jewish housewife in Hitler's Germany. Felice is a Jewish resistance fighter who is on the run from the Nazi authorities and Lilly is a patriotic German mother of four who wears a medal of the Virgin Mary.
The story of the women's love for one another is told with a pathos and stylishness that are unusual in German treatments of the Holocaust, and the film marks an important step towards illuminating the history of gay people under Hitler.
Aimee and Jaguar was one of many films at the festival to use Berlin as a backdrop. Thomas Arslan's Dealer is a stylised portrait of the city set among drug dealers and petty criminals. Arslan makes no attempt to romanticise the city and avoids the visual cliches associated with the criminal underworld to produce an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful film.
Olafur Sveinsson's video documentary Non-stop observes visitors to an all-night petrol station and stand-up cafe and, among the philosophising transvestites, bad-tempered taxi drivers and insomniac pensioners, discovers a remarkable tolerance of diversity.
The Panorama section of the festival has long been an important showcase for gay films and this year, it provided the winner of the Gay Teddy award - a romantic comedy called Trick. The story of two young men in New York who are frustrated at every turn in their efforts to get together, the film is refreshingly lacking in anger, edginess and misery. As the Gay Teddy jury pointed out, one of the happier side effects of new treatments for HIV is that, in today's gay films, nobody has to die.
There were no Irish films in competition this year but Joe O' Byrne's first film, Pete's Meteor, won a special commendation from a jury of Berlin children between the ages of 11 and 14. The children praised the realism of the film, about a boy in Dublin who tries to escape from the unhappiness of a world destroyed by drugs.
This year's festival was tinged with nostalgia as visitors bade farewell to the old haunts near Zoo Station where the festival has made its home for the past 49 years. Next year, it will celebrate its 50th birthday in a brand new cinema complex at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin's new city centre.
The festival director promises the longest red carpet in the world for a parade of stars he is expecting at next year's festival, and local newspapers have been playing up the move as a step towards a new, more glamorous life in Berlin. But there was no disguising the sadness many festival-goers felt last week as they wandered around the familiar, inelegant festival offices and had a final drink in "Florian", which has long been the watering hole of choice for visiting directors and producers and aspiring stars.
