While the full line-up has yet to be announced, this most political of festivals is shaping up with an focus on the challenges facing today's Europe, including the rise of populist parties over the continent, the messy aftermath of the European Debt Crisis and the ongoing Syrian refugee drama. These hot button topics will be especially well represented in the Panorama Dokumente section of the festival. Fernando León de Aranoa's "Politics, Instructions Manual" looks at the situation in Spain while Sylvain L’Espérance's "Fighting Through the Night" takes us to Athens. A number of films investigate how Europe arrived at this point of crisis, seven decades after the end of World War Two and nearly thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Films like João Moreira Salles's "In the Intense Now" deal with the echoes of Paris '68 and the Prague Spring, while Andrea Weiss' "Bones of Contention" revisit the murder of Federico Garcia Lorca under Franco. Others interrogate more recent alarming developments, such as "Investigating Paradise," a French documentary about young Arabic men in Europe who are lured by the nihilistic promise of Jihadism.
The focus on an imperiled Europe carries over to the main Panorama section, which is considered the festival's second most prestigious after the Competition main slate (similar to Un Certain Régard at Cannes), starting with the Panorama Special opener,"Tiger Girl," a German production directed by Jakob Lass about an intense friendship between two women that exposes the moral underbelly of Germany today.
As with the Dokumente selections, the films in Panorama that diagnose and explore Europe's present ills, take the long perspective, ranging over historical and current events as well as across continents. Teona Mitevska's "When the Day Had no Name" is a harrowing look at out-of-step Macedonian adolescents, while Erik Poppe's "The King's Choice" dramatizes the Norwegian king’s resistance to the German armed forces in World War II.
"Insyriated," by Belgian director Philippe Van Leeuw is a rare European film about the civil war and ongoing carnage in Syria. is an intimate look at a family trapped in their home day and night while war rages outside. A Turkish production, "Inflame," by Ceylan Özgün Özçelik, tackles the recent government crackdown on freedom of the press. Looking back, there is Georgian director Rezo Gigineishvili’s "Hostages," set during a Soviet airplane hijacking in 1983.
The Berlinale often plays itself. Three films at this year's Panorama explore the wave of young creative types who flock to Berlin from the world over: the psychological thriller "Berlin Syndrome" by Australian director Cate Shortland; the feminist fairy tale "The Misandrists" by Bruce LaBruce; and "Fluidø," by Taiwanese-American artist Shu Lea Chean, which is described as a"para-pornographic work of underground science fiction," whatever that means.
In Forum Expanded, the daring and non-narrative elaboration of the festival's independent sidebar, 44 works will be screened, performed or exhibited as part of a program named after Theodor W. Adorno's "The Stars Down to Earth,“ his seminal essay of the irrational in culture. Not confining itself to Europe's problems, the 28 films, and 14 installations that, along with a performance, comprise the program engage the irrational forces at work in our contemporary society and culture that seems to be going off the rails.
A rare screening of Fernando Birri's complete "ORG", just announced as a special Forum screening, promises to be a festival highlight for serious minded cineastes. Birri's experimental 1979 opus, nearly three hours in length, is ostensibly based on Thomas Mann's story "The Transposed Heads," although any resemblance to Mann's original is hard to discern in this behemoth montage of 26,000 edits and nearly 700 audio tracks, which stars the Italian cult actor Terence Hill, a loyal friend to Birri - now 91 - during the Argentine director's exile in Italy.
Experiences of dislocation and surreal visions also loom large in this year's Forum selections, which has a strong showing of Latin American cinema. Six films from Brazil, Peru, Chile, Mexico and Argentina will join 37 others from Europe, North America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa. The International Forum of New Cinema, as it is officially called, is an independent festival selection that was founded in 1970. It has a well-deserved reputation for being the Berlinale's most daring section, featuring "avant garde, experimental works, essays, long-term observations, political reportage and yet-to-be-discovered cinematic landscapes," according to the Forum's website. Writing about this year's selection, the curators promise: "The spectrum could hardly be broader here, encompassing institutional portraits, long-term observational projects, and works that employ participatory, narrative, essayistic, ethnographic, political and experimental approaches."
As usual, the films announced for the main section are the ones about which the least is known. There's no indication that the 24 titles chosen for Competition or the 13 films in Berlinale Special have anything to do with current events. For the time being, the DP-camp set "Bye-Bye Berlin," screening as a Berlin Special Gala, promises to be the festival's lone serious-minded film, a genre that doesn't exactly have a great track record at the Berlinale, with recent fiascos including "Alone in Berlin" "Jud Süss: Rise and Fall" "Woman in Gold."