As one of the few film festivals in the UK with a volunteer publication, this is a unique opportunity to get up close and personal with brand new films which have little or no writing on them. Needless to say, it’s the perfect chance to build-up your portfolio of published writing.

Availability in Cambridge during the Festival (17 – 27 September) is essential, however there may be a small amount of viewing/writing in the run-up to the event.

Please send a brief CV and a film review (300 words or more) to the Daily editor.

Deadline: Friday 10 July 2009

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Fans of Japanese animé of the Studio Ghibli type would do well to branch out and savour a sweet-as-ice-cream live action version, SORASOI.  This charmingly quirky summer tale is set in a seaside hostel, where a group of youths belonging to a dance club are practising for a competition.  Sadly they are not the most talented bunch, and despite their passionate teacher Tabe’s attempts to inspire them, they find it easier to concentrate on their various infatuations for each other (and Tabe) than on their dancing skills.  A mysterious and beautiful young woman, Yuri, shows up, stirring up more intrigue and (endearingly innocent) desire.  The film culminates in a slightly comic yet oddly moving dance performance on the beach: they haven’t magically turned into expert dancers but somehow have managed to express themselves and work together in way that is quite disarming and magical in its own way.

The dreamlike coastal location, with its verdant hills and jewel-blue sea views does much to lend the film an animé feel, with that nostalgic, milky summer light we’ve seen in films such as ONLY YESTERDAY by Isao Takahata (1991).  But there are other references too, like the cartoon-like sound effects when tummies rumble, towels are slapped in the shower room, and dance moves go awry.  Early in the film, one character claims that the manga convention of girls’ eyes turning to hearts when they’re in love actually happens in real life.  He’s just trying to bamboozle the inexperienced young men around him and we laugh at him, but nonetheless are still half-expecting Ryu’s eyes to transform when he first sees the enchanting Yuri.  It is no surprise to learn in the Q&A that the three directors (Katsuito Ishii, Shunichiro Miki and Yuuuka Ooosumi) also make animé and advertising films.

Berlin, finally…

I had a wonderful time at my first ever Berlinale.  It was quite blissful to stay away from the market with my academic accreditation, and concentrate on watching films from start to finish (almost unheard-of in market screenings of the type I’ve experienced in Cannes), even staying for the Q&A afterwards to learn more about how the films were made.

I saw a total of 24 films in 16 screenings, scattered across eight different venues all around central Berlin in the six days I was there.  I’ve already mentioned two of my favourites, LONDON RIVER and GHOSTED, which are probably the two that most relate to my own research.  However, BERLIN PLAYGROUND (HANS IM GLÜCK), which was the very last film I saw on Saturday night, was possibly the perfect way to end my strange non-visit to Berlin, a city I’d previously only glimpsed briefly between screenings and from a taxi window on the way back to the flat I stayed in.

The film, focusing on troubled musician Hans as he waits to find out if he’ll have to go to prison for driving drunk without a license, is an unusual tour of the city.  Hans is turning 40: twenty years in the GDR regime of old East Berlin and 20 years in new, reunified Berlin.  He takes us to the blank space where his primary school used to be, and the GDR prison he did time in, now being converted to condos (”this cell here will be a guest bathroom”), as well as the underground venues where his various bands and collectives rocked the Berlin scene.

Too much of a free spirit for the repressive GDR regime and too anti-materialist for the regeneration and decadence of capitalist Berlin (as well as feeling resentful that the money never flowed his way), Hans has never really fitted in.  There are many comic moments created by the gap between his world view and social norms, as in, “I have my best ideas when driving; I should just explain that to the court, that driving is a work tool for me, I need it”.  Yet this is also a touching portrait of a deeply creative man caught up in the divided history of the city.

Isabelle McNeill

Ramble On
Looking back over the last eight days, there have been few films that really stood out but I suppose for sheer enjoyment then IT MIGHT GET LOUD was just wonderful.  It’s a documentary recording of the meeting of three renowned exponents of the electric guitar (Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White) to discuss their music influences and technique.  Their superb individual skills, with humility, reverence and humour in equal measures, made this a 100% guilty pleasure, and I’ll definitely be back for more.  From the contrasting opening shots of Jack White, constructing his homemade guitar with electric pick up, to The Edge wheeling his huge flight case with rack of attentuators, delays, reverb units, complete with engineer, you just know you’re in for a treat.  When Jimmy Page joins the others, the enthusiasm they share grabs you – Guitar Hero Xbox sales should rocket!  Jimmy Page playing air guitar to Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ was a real highlight.  Yes indeed, it might get loud!

Psycho Killer(s)
The Festival started off with an excellent Dutch film, CAN GO THROUGH SKIN, featuring a young professional woman who is raped and virtually self-destructs, leaving the city for a rundown rural farm house (that she and her former partner had identified as a future home).  Her deterioration escalates, as she seeks retribution and also friendship with the few men she meets.  Painful and psychologically brutal, this was certainly the most powerful film of the Festival.

By far the biggest challenge lay ahead with Philippe Grandieux’s ultra taxing, oblique and symbolically laden THE LAKE.  I had intended to catch up with this Paris-based intellectual’s work as he participated in a conference held in Cambridge last year on psychoanalysis in the cinema.  What was meant to be a dip in the water between previously scheduled screenings became a battle of wills with Grandieux and the audience.  I subsequently heard from a colleague and co-organiser of the Cambridge conference that Grandieux usually drives away the majority of his audience.  I’m proud to have survived his challenge.  From the very opening – uncompromising shots of a young boy chopping down a tree in a remote location in an unidentified country, then suffering a seizure in the snow – I could tell that this was to be no comfortable ride.  Even Grandieux’s camera was used in a staccato fashion.  A long held shot on an isolated farmhouse followed, with the only light on an otherwise completely black screen being picked up on the boy’s sister’s nose.  (At this point the audience at the screening had seriously depleted.)  The brother then meets a stranger whilst on another mission with his axe.  The two very slowly, and very beautifully, come into shot through the mist but Grandieux never quite lets us grasp any detail on the characters.  His film is about long takes and natural sound.  He was drawing us into his game and the audience (now only six or seven remaining) were staying with him.  The later inclusion of a younger sister and, very late into the film, the mother and father, had me wondering if he was playing some incestuous, generational game of time with us all (now merely three).  Back to the therapist for me…

Burden of Dreams
On Sunday (8 February) I attended a conference on ’surviving in the business of film’.  Words of wisdom frankly spoken by Vincent Grimond of the distributor Wild Bunch brought a lot of the attendees down to earth, as this self-proclaimed (albeit with a tinge of irony) ‘Agent of Change’ spoke some home truths.  Sure there have been too many films produced, too many now failing, but these were films (or product lines) that came out of an overly greedy/ambitious programme of investment going back some 10 years.  Clusters of films (and many truly bad), unambitious, box ticking projects of vanity and ineptitude, serviced by venture capital and investment funds.  Perhaps one should challenge their level of (in)experience in investing in a market for greed – sound familiar?  Good projects will get funding, the weak will not survive.  Did someone mention Charles Darwin?!  Oh, and yes, Grimond reminds us, working in this business is still a privilege and don’t forget it!

At the same conference, Pete Buckingham from the UK Film Council (as ever, a powerful voice with some radical points) shot out a challenge across the whole production, distribution and exhibition business.  ISDN numbers for films!  Tracking titles using GPS from locations!  Watch this space!  Then he also advises about the open-source application for downloading movies, BitTorrent.

Put Pete and Vincent’s points together and we start to realise that the 16 week exclusivity of the cinema release before DVD has to be revised.  Piracy and mass loss of revenue is the issue, with bona fide releases on DVD after the ‘window’ leaving an unchallenged opportunity for the pirates and illegal downloading.

As the years go passing by
My last night only served to remind me how I’m getting on in age – I gave up one of the best Berlin parties (the Forum) to go and see BARAKA by Ron Fricke for the first time in 16 years.  It is quite amazing… it’s not only filmed in 70mm with Todd AO lenses, but Ron Fricke actually designed the 70mm camera specifically for this production in order to move the camera seamlessly, achieving shots never before filmed in such stunning beauty.  Six continents and 24 countries feature in a wordless document on the state of the environment: indigenous communities, the rainforests and temples of the Americas and Asia, the scars of war, the beauty of the graveyard of B52 bombers all symmetrically lined up for destruction…  Every bit as relevant today as in 1992 and we should take up the issues of survival of the planet so persuasively presented in the film.

On a similar theme another highlight included THE AGE OF STUPID in which Pete Postlethwaite plays an archivist in 2055 and asks why we didn’t do something about our environmental problems when we had the evidence back in 2010!  Then there was EXPELLED – NO INTELLIGENCE NECESSARY, a documentary on the right to free speech for those supporting, or at least airing, the opinion of intelligent design and Creationism.  It debates the question of freedom of thought against the broad acceptance of evolutionary theory in the scientific world.  A little too jokey but nevertheless great material presented by Ben Stein.

Michael Winterbottom and Matt Whitecross’ THE SHOCK DOCTRINE is their clear representation of Naomi Klein’s novel and it is exceptionally well put together and hard-hitting.  The film takes no prisoners.  Winterbottom and Whitecross hit the mark and early footage is not for the fainthearted.  I hope it gets a theatrical release rather than just the TV slot.  My only issue was with some of the archive footage and its provenance, though admittedly the film is not quite finished and shown without end credits.

Communication breakdown
Who would have thought it?  With a reputation for efficiency in organisation, ticketing and technical standards, the Berlinale managed to mess up screenings attended by Mark Cosgrove from Watershed and myself.  I’m sure it’s never happened to two films in the Festival at the same time on the same day!  I had chosen THE FLYING CLIPPER, a rare 70mm production from West Germany of the ’60s.  Mark opted for the more conventional screening of Stephen Frears’ CHERI at the Berlin Friedrichstadt Palast.  Well, we waited and waited at Cinestar 8 for The Clipper to set sail.  Some excuse about a slight technical delay was OK – things overrun and I’m familiar with the change of formats at short notice.  After 30 minutes delay the slightly agitated bunch of enthusiasts were appeased by the offer of free beer at the bar – oh well, another 1/2 litre of the gassiest beer in town!  Then an SMS message from Mark: the digital projector had frozen at the CHERI screening!  We eventually started an hour behind schedule, with only one machine and changeovers every 20 minutes (the film is eight reels and 154 minutes long!).  The Frears screening was abandoned while I visited the Pyramids, Aswan Dam, Beirut… but called it a day after 80 mins as The Clipper sailed on.  Poor Mark and the Freidrichstadt crowd left mumbling about new technology… If only our trusty Cambridge projectionist, Roger Smith, had been there…

Forbidden City
The absence of distributors and exhibitors from the UK at the Festival can only ring alarm bells.  For here is a great city with the ’secondary’ festival events trying to escape from its all-consuming parent (the Berlinale).  The Forum, the Panorama and the retrospectives are the heart of Berlin.  I go to see what’s happening, to find out what might be available for a micro-budget event such as the Cambridge Film Festival, to keep abreast of new work.  Plus the guilty pleasure of spending an afternoon in a metaphorical Berlin brothel – the film market, of course!

So goodbye from me, goodbye to Mark and Maddy from Watershed, Verena from Berlin, Isabelle of the Film Trust on her first Berlinale and to Festival friend, filmmaker and programmer Monika Treut!

Tony Jones, Director, Cambridge Film Festival

I think the best short films have to be short for all the right reasons, rather than would-be features crammed into 15 minutes to keep the budget low. The former was certainly true of Uwe Flade’s PRISON FOOD (awarded ’special mention’ at Shoot), which depicts two British inmates who, every Sunday night, fantasise that they are dining in the finest restaurants. Choosing to dramatise a small moment that happens regularly allowed the brief glimpse to encapsulate a much longer stretch of time, while the art of cinema gave shape and colour to the characters’ inner – yet shared – imaginings. The relationship between the two criminals, one a bullish thug, the other somewhat snivelling and neurotic, was also quite touching, as they set aside the ugliness of their environment to escape together in a fantasy of refinement.

By contrast, the Shoot winner, THE DREAMING (by Anthony Green), felt like a showcase for the admittedly impressive skills of the filmmakers rather than a truly inspiring moment of cinema. It was stunning, certainly, with masterful editing taking us between breathtaking Canadian scenery and close-ups on eyes and hands, in a story about native American culture, dreams, memories and the land. Yet with its dramatic-sounding voiceover and series of enticing images it somehow ended up feeling like a trailer for a longer film, and despite its beauty it never quite convinced me.

Short film can be a great genre for experimenting with form; the unfamiliar and hard-to-watch is still striking yet more accessible when experienced fleetingly. Experimentation for its own sake can feel a little pointless however, and as the electric buzzing and flashes of shadow and light overwhelmed the auditorium in CONTRE JOUR (Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Berlinale Shorts III) I began to wonder where this violent assault on my visual field was going. As snippets of film images and dialogues gradually emerged however, the film developed into a powerful, cinematic exploration of blindness and vision, subtly mingling the mechanical and the human.

…If only I hadn’t been sitting at the far right of the very first row!

Isabelle McNeill

There seems to be a growing trend for fiction films that situate themselves in the terrain of documentary. In the midst of real environments, often inhabited by the filmmakers for considerable periods of time, non-professional actors mingle with real characters and documentary footage to weave a fictional tale that is closely related to the real world portrayed in the film. In a way this marks a return to the concerns of Italian neo-realism, which also often used non-professional actors and focused on society’s underdogs in real post-war settings. But this new trend is often more extreme in its merging of documentary and fiction, and the reportage-style examination of ‘un-representable’ milieux.

A recent example is IMPORT/EXPORT, shown at the 28th Cambridge Film Festival last September. The director, Ulrich Seidl, spent months recording hours of footage in a real internet sex agency in the Ukraine and old people’s hospital in Austria, in order to construct his tale of border crossing and social marginalisation.

At the Berlinale yesterday I watched CALIMUCHO, a film by Dutch director Eugenie Jansen, who travelled with a small circus through rural Holland for an entire season, before creating a narrative played by real circus performers who even share names with their characters. At the Q&A afterwards the female lead Dicky Killian (part of a knife-throwing and magic show) explained that she found it quite easy to get used to playing a fictional character whose life wasn’t so far removed from her own, especially since she didn’t need to learn lines and so could speak in her own voice. Willy Soert, who plays the clown, knife-thrower and male protagonist in the film, said that it was a different kind of performance for him, but one that he wanted to try: he is, after all, used to performing.

Q&A following CALIMUCHO screening

For the director, the circus represented a microcosm of society, in which the familiar family dramas of money worries, bereavement (in the fictional narrative Dicky’s sister died in a car accident, leaving behind her son, whom Dicky looks after), and desire are played out in a setting that is completely unfamiliar to most of us. Jansen keeps the viewer guessing with very tightly-framed close-ups that keep us in intimate proximity with characters (including, greasy hair, skin, stage make-up and tattoos) rather than giving us the whole spectacle. Just a few times we are allowed to sit back and watch the performance, but only, as Jansen explained, when this is explicitly motivated by the narrative.

The documentary aspect is further played with in an unusual framing device. A group of musicians are shown creating a soundtrack to the film, discussing how best to fit the music to the story and characters, providing interpretations along the way. A humorous, yet poignant version of a Greek chorus, we’re never allowed to forget that we’re watching fiction. At the same time, of course, this highlights the reality of the people and performances captured on film.

Isabelle McNeill

I landed at Berlin Tegel airport at 4.10pm on Monday 9 February and threw myself straight into the Festival experience. By 5.45 I was in a huge, darkened screening room in the Cinestar Imax at Potsdamer Platz, as the opening credits rolled out for GHOSTED. I was captivated by this Taiwanese-German co-production, directed by long-time Cambridge Film Festival contributor Monika Treut, with a wonderfully talented bi-cultural cast and crew.

GHOSTED director Monika Treut, star Ke Ru-Han and friend

A touching portrayal of love and bereavement, the film mingles Taiwanese and German cultures in its narrative of a video artist from Hamburg, Sophie, haunted by the memory of a young Taiwanese woman, Ai-Ling, who had been her lover. On a trip to Taiwan Sophie meets a mysterious Taiwanese reporter to whom she feels uncannily close, and strange things begin to happen. It was a moving film, where moving images seemed both able to capture and preserve life and to make lost love even more acutely felt.

Another transnational encounter took place in a film from the main competition, LONDON RIVER by Rachid Bouchareb, which was set during the London ‘July bombings’ of 2005. A white woman leading a sheltered life on a farm in Guernsey and a muslim African man living in France both come to London seeking their children, who seem to have gone missing since the bombings. It emerges that the pair were living together and their parents’ worlds collide as they frantically search for clues and scour the hospitals. It is a beautifully sparse and assured film, and although the narrative feels predictable as the mother’s hostilities give way to gratitude, this hardly detracts from the film’s quiet realism and poignantly intimate performances from Brenda Blethyn and Mali-born actor Sotigui Kouyate.

Berlinale Palast, where the opening and award ceremonies take place

At the dinner for the Perspectives Deutsche Films section last night I met the director and producer of an intriguing 60min documentary called BERLIN PLAYGROUND. They convinced me to come to the screening, so watch this space for an update in a few days’ time! As they left the dinner they were heading to the sound edit suite to work on the mix, which apparently had a few ‘holes’ in it, so let’s hope they get it done in time for Friday’s Premiere!