Young talent in the spotlight
“As boss of the Berlinale, Dieter Kosslick has remained what he has always been – a fosterer of talent,” wrote the "Frankfurter Rundschau" – echoing many articles looking back at the festival in which Kosslick showed his magic touch with this year’s Competition selection. The festival managed to generate the greatest possible international attention and to make this advantageous for young and daring films. As never before, especially young talents held their ground in the Competition: Pernille Fischer Christensen, Jasmila Zbanic and Rodrigo Moreno took home awards and with them a chance to build on their success.
The way this “young talent in the spotlight” proves the value of the Berlinale as a network didn’t go unnoticed either: Rodrigo Morenos El Custodio belonged to the first projects supported by the World Cinema Fund. Films by former Berlinale Talent Campus participants ran in all sections as well as projects that secured their financing at the Berlinale Co-Production Market. With a booming European Film Market, the Berlinale provides the best possible infrastructure to convert a film’s festival triumph into a commercial success.
"The moment of total lucidity in the cinema.”
So much pragmatism does the festival well and is rewarded. “Seldom has a festival transformed so quickly from a glamour event into a working festival,” summed up Susan Vahabzadeh and Fritz Göttler in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. But they also saw the moment of “total lucidity in the cinema”, a moment which was experienced by a remarkable number of observers amidst the hustle and bustle of the festival as an intense encounter. Writing in “Die Zeit”, Katja Nicodemus devoted three paragraphs to “the moment”: the scene in Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing) in which Andreas Müller alias Markus dances to Robbie Williams’ Feel at a firemen’s party, totally immersed in himself (and utterly drunk). For many, Longing was the secret highpoint of the festival, perhaps because it permitted the joy of discovery, which Daniel Kothenschulte (Frankfurter Rundschau) feels is in danger of becoming lost in today’s engaged and positioned cinema: “The joy of the unknown and an art that doesn’t have to mean anything.”