All the Films Berlin Can Bear

Every February, just as this northern European capital reaches its annual rock-bottom of slush, bare branches and frost; just when the short, gray days seem to drag most crushingly into long, dark nights--a sudden party-hearty mood sweeps the city.

For 12 zestful days, the downtown bars and cafes teem with the young, the hip, the happening, the see-and-be-seen people. Flashbulbs pop. Searchlights swing across the cloudy skies. Narrow side streets are blocked with double-parked Rolls-Royces and autograph hounds mill on the pavement in front of the best hotels.

The cavernous Zoo Palast, a mainstream movie house that plays little but big-ticket Hollywood fare the rest of the year, becomes the center for the Berlinale, a film festival that may rank behind the Cannes and Venice festivals in influence and prestige but which tops the list when it comes to out-there fun and public participation.

Starting Wednesday, the Berlinale will be the cultural event of the year here--and that’s in a city of gilded concert halls and stunning opera productions, bustling alternative theaters and an enormous late-night club scene. Some film-happy Germans even take a week off work so that they can do the Berlinale full time.

Berlin, after all, is a sprawling urban center, not a rarefied Cannes or a cramped, labyrinthine Venice. There are 5 million people in the city and its suburbs, three universities and at least 100,000 students, educated young people who like film and have the time to watch a lot of it.

A setting like this sets a special tone: Though industry professionals pack the invitation-only screenings in Cannes and to a great extent crowd out the ordinary viewers in Venice, the Berlinale plays mainly to full houses of appreciative “normal” people.

Or perhaps it would be better to say “normal Europeans.” The Berlinale audience expects, and for the most part gets, films that are something other than standard Hollywood--the big thrillers, action pictures and other well-tooled blockbusters that Berliners can watch any other time of the year.

There’s an unmistakable anti-Hollywood bias in the air at Berlinale time. All year, people here may be willing to lay down their marks to see, say, “Air Force One,” but not in February. This month, they are in the mood for things new and different and a little outside the mainstream, such as Robert Altman’s “The Gingerbread Man,” for instance, which will be screened as part of the Berlinale’s prestigious International Competition section.

Over 12 days, about 700 such films will be screened in Berlin. That’s not bad for a festival launched in 1950, in what was then West Berlin, with the most naked of ideological mandates: The original Berlinale was bent on showcasing the marvels of free-market capitalism to people in the Communist East.

The Berlin Wall hadn’t been built yet, so Easterners could cross the demarcation line, and Berlinale staffers put up signs directing them to the closest cinemas in the unfamiliar West. During the height of the Cold War, though, Soviet-bloc countries didn’t submit any films for the festival and East Germans couldn’t get there anymore.

This year, the 48th Berlinale will kick off with an Irish film--Jim Sheridan’s “The Boxer”--one of the 25 contenders for the festival’s top honor, the Golden Bear. Other feature films in the competition come from Denmark, Brazil, China, England, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, Russia, Hong Kong and Germany.

American films in the feature competition lineup are Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” Barry Levinson’s “Wag the Dog,” Gus Van Sant’s “Good Will Hunting” and the Coen brothers “The Big Lebowski.” Aside from the central competition, the Berlinale offers a range of sideshows, including Panorama, an exhibition of independent films from 25 countries, and International Forum, a varied collection of works by young filmmakers, many of them from developing nations.

American independents in the Panorama section this year include Theresa Connelly’s “Polish Wedding,” Alan Madison’s “Trouble on the Corner” and Evan Dunsky’s “Life During Wartime.” International Forum organizer Ulrich Gregor said at a recent news conference that, as usual, his section this year had been “flooded by a deluge of U.S. independents,” most of which didn’t make the final cut.

But, he added, “there were some pearls among them,” such as Amos Poe’s “Frogs for Snakes” and Michael Moore’s “The Big One.”

The Berlinale also has a children’s film competition, in which former Los Angeles schoolteacher Mark Lowenthal’s “Where the Elephant Sits” will be in contention with eight other features for a Glass Bear award.

There will be two retrospectives, one of them honoring actress Catherine Deneuve, who is to receive a special Golden Bear for “lifetime achievement” Feb. 18. Thirteen films featuring Deneuve will be shown, including Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion,” which won the Berlinale’s Silver Bear--the second prize--in 1965.

The other retrospective features the work of the late director Robert Siodmak (“The Spiral Staircase,” “The Killers,” “Criss Cross”) and his horror-film scriptwriter brother, Curt (“The Wolf Man,” “Son of Dracula”). The brothers began their careers in Berlin, in 1929, with the silent movie “Menschen am Sonntag,” (People on Sunday), then went into exile and made their way to America in the late 1930s. Curt, 95, who lives in California, is back in town for the festival.

Berlinale organizers say it was more difficult than usual to pull their lineup together this year. Producers have been waiting until the last minute to decide how and where best to launch their products, making it tough for Berlin to get commitments.

“I have never seen a film industry so nervous,” festival director Moritz de Hadeln said at a news conference. “There were last-minute changes in the competition lineup, and companies committed to attending . . . only at the 11th hour.”

In one case, the Berlinale organizers prematurely announced that they would be screening Clint Eastwood’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” only to learn that Warner Bros. had settled instead on a European launch of the film later this month in France.

The Berlinale’s European film market director, Beki Probst, admitted that the situation made her uncomfortable last November, when “the telephone hardly rang at all.”

“But then [in mid-January] the rush began,” she added. “We’ll have full theaters and a full Cine-Center,” referring to the affiliated trade fair, at which industry professionals make their international distribution and television deals. That’s where the big money of the festival changes hands.

Organizers said the growing influence of Utah’s Sundance Festival has also affected their ability to line up American independent films.

Distributors who find promising films at Sundance are now locking them up, said Panorama director Wieland Speck.

“Before, I dealt with the filmmakers, and then with distributors, and then with the international sales company,” he said. “Now, I deal with lawyers. The indie films that have a flag to wave are not here this year. But that doesn’t matter. All the films are cinema films.”