Art meets politics with some thrilling results at this year's high-wattage Berlin Film Festival, writes Derek Scally
The Berlinale, now in its 56th year, is generally placed on a prestige par with Venice. But festival director Dieter Kosslick is raising the bar year-on-year to give Cannes a run for its money. The decision to move the Oscar ceremony forward to March has left the Berlinale lodged between the nominations and award night, and Hollywood stars campaigning for statuettes even less interested in boarding an aircraft for chilly Berlin.
But Kosslick still managed to present a mega-wattage festival this year with 17 premieres, A-list stars such as George Clooney and Meryl Streep and director heavyweights Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet and Claude Chabrol.
There was little doubt in Berlin that the glue binding this year's festival was politics. "As long as a movie with political content connects with the audience here, then the festival has done the right thing by screening it," said Kosslick of the trend.
After a chilly start with the Sigourney Weaver-Alan Rickman autistic flick Snow Cake, the festival screened political films such as Crime Novel, about mafia corruption and, out of competition, Bye Bye Berlusconi, about a fictional kidnapping of the Italian prime minister.
But if the jury, headed by Charlotte Rampling, chooses to make a political statement, it will probably award the Golden Bear, the festival top prize, tonight to Michael Winterbottom for The Road to Guantanamo.
Winterbottom mixes interviews with the dramatic documentary-style he employed in In This World to recreate the ordeal of three young British men held in Guantanmo Bay for two years before being released without charge. It is a gripping, horrific film but one that is unavoidably and unapologetically partial.
"The point of making this is to remind people about how bizarre it is that somewhere like Guantanamo exists," said Winterbottom at the press conference, flanked by two of the so-called "Tipton Three".
"We're not trying to say Americans are bad . . . what we're saying is that just the fact of Guantanamo's existence is shocking and terrible and it shouldn't be there." The film is guaranteed a wide audience: it will be screened by Channel 4 next month, with a simulataneous cinema, DVD and internet release.
In sub-zero Berlin, the warmest welcome was for A Prairie Home Companion, Robert Altman's fictional take on Garrison Keillor's old- style radio show that has run on US public radio for 30 years.
The film, the other Golden Bear favourite, has a stellar Altman ensemble including Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as a country singing sister act, and an outstanding Kevin Kline as a bumbling Clouseau-style detective.
The real surprise is script co-writer Keillor, who plays the dead-pan, pondering host who refuses to sentimentalise his final radio show before its theatre home is razed.
Altman could have delivered another scabrous satire like M*A*S*H or The Player. Instead, the 80-year-old director delivers a gentle, warm-hearted celebration of what Meryl Streep called "the authentic voice of America".
It's not a completely unpolitical decision considering the inordinately negative effect the Bush administration has had on how the world views the rest of the American people.
"The movie is very human, it relies on humour and music to communicate what's being lost, what's worthwhile," Streep told The Irish Times. "I have faith in basic human qualities and that ordinary people in America are just like those in Ireland or in Pakistan and I hope it translates around the world."
A frail Robert Altman denied he had made a political film, but added later: "We don't have to go to the battlefield every time to make a comment on the attitudes of this war."
A WELCOME RELIEF from political realities was The Science of Sleep, the wonderfully loopy new film from Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The off-beat love story of social misfits Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg features dream sequences offering Monty Python-style nonsense and absurd animation in a film that has the makings of, if not a cult classic, then at least a student favourite. "Films are so often about reality and nothing but reality. But reality can be an inhibition that can be really bothering," said Bernal in Berlin.
Beyond the competition, Ireland was represented by Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto and the animated short The Faery Wind, while the features Shrooms and Johnny Was enjoyed strong sales at the European Film Market.
The Golden and Silver Bears and other film festival awards will be presented this evening in Berlin. Channel 4 will screen Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo on Mar 9