Just as there are now two Berlins in one - of which more shortly - there are, in effect, two film festivals within the Berlinale, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year. The contrast between the two strands of the Berlinale were emphasised for me last Saturday afternoon. Emerging from the screening of the tiny-budget Serbian film in competition at Berlin, I walked out on to Marlene Dietrich Platz where the festival's gleaming new headquarters stand in place of the old Berlin Wall.
Marlene Dietrich Platz was already thronged by hundreds of teenage girls, four hours before the festival screening of The Beach, and they were all waiting for a glimpse of its star. Every time a few girls chanted, "We want Leo", the crowd responded with piercing screams reminiscent of Beatlemania. They were to be disappointed when Leo eventually arrived - and slipped in the back entrance.
They were not the only ones who got a lot less of Leo than they would have liked. Journalists granted "interviews" with him were banded together in groups of 25 at a time for 25-minute sessions. Later, at the lavish, Thai-themed postscreening party, which would make most Cannes functions seem low-rent, Leo stayed away from the prying press by hiding out in a strictly guarded bamboo hut in the centre of the cavernous venue.
This uneasy mix of Hollywood razzmatazz and worthy arthouse fare runs right through the Berlinale. The US studios offer the festival their Oscar-aimed movies because it's an ideal time and place to give those movies their European media launches - which is why this year's Berlinale featured such high-profile American movies as The Beach, The Talented Mr Ripley, Three Kings, American Psycho, The Hurricane, Man On the Moon and Any Given Sunday, most of them jostling with the arthouse pictures in the competition for next Sunday night's prizes. The extremes of art and commerce are even more conspicuous than at Cannes.
Concentrating on seeing movies I might not easily have the opportunity to see again, I was particularly impressed by the festival's wide-ranging international documentary programme which yielded two fascinating portraits of countries which have undergone cataclysmic changes in recent years. The afore-mentioned film dealing with the two Berlins is Heimspiel (Home Game), which is ostensibly about an East Berlin ice hockey team, Eisbaren Berlin, formerly SC Dynamo Berlin.
Employing newsreel footage and interviews with the club's management, players and fans, the film charts their history, from their survival when the GDR reduced funding for the least medal-likely sports and the Dynamos were one of the two ice hockey teams left in what became the smallest league in the world - resulting in a monotonous series of duels between the same two teams who knew all each other's tricks and tactics. After reunification the Dynamos, renamed the Eisbaren, had their stadium renovated by the Berlin Senate - and the team and their fans found a new arch-rival in their new neighbours. Ten years on from the collapse of the wall, the antipathy between east and west Berlin remains just as pronounced, to judge from the views expressed in the film.
"Anyone with a clue about Berlin will know the wall's still there in people's minds," says one supporter, while one of their chants is, "Let's make life better, put the wall up again." Some fans, nostalgic for and proud of the old ways of the GDR, say they only travel to the west of the city when their team is playing there. The fans from the west respond with chants of "Spy dogs" and "Put the wall up again".
This illuminating and incisive documentary intercuts its social commentary with vigorous footage of the fast, exhausting sport at its centre for a tightly edited film which remains entirely absorbing. Its perceptive director is Pepe Danquart, a West Berliner who won an Oscar in 1994 for his anti-racist short film, Fare Dodger.
Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman, who produced the Oscar-winning Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt, turn their attention to discord in post-apartheid South Africa in Long Night's Journey Into Day, which arrived in Berlin with the best documentary award from last month's Sundance festival. The focus of this deeply moving film is on the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as it brings together those responsible for mindless, fatal violence with the families of their victims.
Telling four unconnected stories with admirable simplicity and directness, the film-makers compel the viewer to reflect on the irrational nature of racism and its expression, and on the remarkable capacity of some individuals for forgiveness. It makes for powerful, riveting and sobering viewing.
The tiny-budget Serbian film to which I referred earlier is Nebeska Udica (Sky Hook), which opens at the end of last April when Belgrade was being pounded by NATO bombs night after night. The first film directed by Ljuubisa Samardzic, one of the most popular and prolific actors in the former Yugoslavia, it was inspired both by the illness of his young son and by his sheer frustration with both sides in the conflict.
Its pivotal character, Kaja (Nebojsa Glogovac), is a divorced man whose young son has been so scared by the bombardment that he has stopped speaking. As an alternative to spending their summer days in an underground bunker, he suggests to his neighbours that they rebuild their bombed-out basketball court, not least to give them something that keeps the threat of being drafted off their minds. This small symbol of defiance and hope neatly draws together the neighbourhood's disparate residents in this slender but potent picture of ordinary people rendered helpless by the attitudes and activities of politicians.
From Spain, Daniel Calparasoro's Asfalto, which opened the Berlinale's official sidebar, the Panorama, is a lean, tight picture of two petty criminals whose close friendship is complicated when both of them become involved with the same woman - her solution is to encourage a threesome - and whose lives face further upheaval when a scam goes disastrously long. The three characters are convincingly played by Gustavo Salmeron, Juan Diego Botto and Najwa Nimri in this pacy, well-staged tale which makes good use of diverse Madrid locations.
The African landscapes of the new Claire Denis film, Beau Travail, are beautifully captured in this picture of suppressed homosexual yearnings in a French Foreign Legion unit. Denis, who was born in Paris and raised in several African contries, is a film-maker whose work deserves to be seen more widely here. Although not quite as involving as her best work (Chocolat, Nenette et Boni), Beau Travail, which opens at the IFC in the summer, establishes a languorous mood as the soldiers go about their daily rituals of strenuous exercise, breaking rocks in the hot sun, playing war games and meticulously ironing their uniforms.
Denis Lavant (from Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, and looking unexpectedly haggard) and Gregoire Colin are well cast as the protagonists in a movie which employs minimal dialogue as Denis and her cinematographer, Agnes Godard, becomes distracted from the landscape and train their lenses on the toned bodies of the legionnaires.
The Cesar awards will be presented in Paris tomorrow night. Readers with access to TV5 can see the recorded show at 9.15 p.m. immediately after it takes place.
