Berlin blues
Phillip Bergson felt hungry and thirsty at the end of the Berlin International Film Festival Not quite reduced to begging, film crit- ics, journalists and camp followers took to the streets straight after the prize-giving ceremony of the 47th Berlin International Film Festival. The closing party — a tradi- Are you looking at my bird?' tional event at any festival (Cannes throws two) — had been cancelled on financial grounds. Professional guests had already had to pay 50 deutschmarks for their accreditation passes, underlining the fact that Europe's new metropole — and biggest building-site — is, indeed, strapped for cash.
This did not, however, encourage the organisers to slim down the scale of this massive showcase of mainstream and art movies. Throughout the 12-day marathon, 16 or more cinemas across the city were filled with audiences of every persuasion. Organised with legendary Teutonic effi- ciency, if less famed for its flexibility, the Berlinale struggles by on a budget of some DM11 million, so cutting the pretzels and beer seemed strange.
Presiding over the 11-strong internation- al jury was France's ex-minister of culture, Jack Lang, who is assumed to have leaked the names of the prize winners to Le Monde, to the fury of the locals. David Hare fled home before the finale, anyway, but, as Britain's juror, he had brought a valuable world premiere to the festival: his own film adaptation of The Designated Mourner. This preserves the remarkable performance of Berlin-born Hollywood director Mike Nicholas in the recent National Theatre production of Wallace Shawn's wry parable on the death of cul- ture. A midnight showing, without subti- tles, was not, perhaps, the right time for a non-English-speaking crowd to savour its verbal felicities.
The main awards were judiciously dis- pensed, with Milos Forman jetting back to collect the Golden Bear for The People Vs Larry Flynt, while Baz Luhrmann's exuber- antly filmic updating of William Shake- speare's Romeo and Juliet deservedly took two trophies.
As the first big event of the year, with more than 11,000 professional guests, the Berlinale helps set the programmes for fes- tivals and cinemas around the world. And cineastes who did not make the pilgrimage to the undivided city could now venture up to the Bradford Film Festival which goes on until next Saturday (22 March). Like Berlin, Bradford's city centre was also destroyed by the British (architects and planners, rather than by bombing pilots).
Rising out of EU grants and Lottery funding is the magnificent National Muse- um of Film and Television. The central event is Hitchcock's celebrated folly Vertigo, brilliantly restored in 70 mm, and fresh from Berlin. Bradford wisely opened with an admitted comedy, and British at that: Stiff Upper Lips, directed by Gary Sinyor (of Leon the Pig Farmer fame), a delicious satire of Merchant-Ivory Italo- Indian epics. Berlin has sent its British entry to close Bradford, but it's not, I fear, a welcome gift: Kevin Allen's Twin Town, a Welsh Trainspotting. Let's hope that Bradford's Film Festival will soften the blow by cater- ing for its farewell more lavishly than Berlin did.
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