Berlin International Film Festival

In 1990, the then-East German government staged a brilliant publicity event during the Berlin Film Festival. They took bulldozers to the infamous wall, from the Brandenburg Gate to Potsdamer Platz, opening up the core of central Berlin for the first time in more than 25 years. Festival guests - including most of the world media - mixed with ordinary citizens to celebrate its destruction.

Just as this event ushered in a confusing, unsettled era in global politics, so too has it forced the festival to re-imagine its place in the world. During its captivity, the Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin represented, first, the Messianic phase of American Cold War culture, serving as a propaganda tool for Hollywood and non-Communist cinema. Later, as Berlin became the sybaritic city of the 1970s, post-détente, the Festival became the home of provocative cinema - gay, feminist, experimental, whatever - and a meeting point for the cinemas of East and West: new films from Russia and the Soviet client states were always premiered in Berlin.

Since the wall's demise, however, Berlin has become, in many ways, just another European megalopolis, the Russians are as happy in Cannes, and "marginal" cinemas are diffused to their own events. The Festival has not been helped by the utter collapse of German art film production, only now starting to show signs of revival. Even the organizing locus of the festival - the Cine Center in Schoneberg and the many cinemas used around it - is being dumped, to enable a move to Potsdamer Platz.

Judging by the selection at this year's festival, this crisis continues. There were, of course, wonderful films to be found here, but anyone seeking a curatorial stamp on the proceedings was hard pressed to find it.

The Festival breaks down into four main divisions. The Competition, which includes world premieres of major new art films, unfolds at the massive Zoo Palast cinema; the Forum, administratively separate, with a program ranging from commercial Asian films to hard-core experimental Euroscaries, takes place at the zoo-like Delphi and Arsenal alternative cinemas; the Panorama, another smorgasbord program, shows many gay and lesbian films and slightly more commercial work than the Forum at the Atelier, behind the Zoo Palast and at the Film Palast, a lovely, large cinema a few blocks away. The European Film Market, in which as many films again are shown, takes place in screening rooms throughout the Cine Center adjacent to the Zoo Palast.

For many years, the most impressive films to come out of the Competition have been Asian. This year was no exception. The River, a new film from Tsai Ming-liang (Rebels of the Neon God, Vive L'Amour) captured the Festival's imagination entirely. Using his trademark slow pace, Tsai gradually tells a story of alienation within a three-member family using the son's physical decay as its catalyst. Its climactic scene, a shockingly attenuated moment of gay incest, is ground-breaking. It was awarded the Silver Bear (second place) and the FIPRESCI (critics') prize for the Competition.

Tsai Ming-Liang's THE RIVER, the Silver Bear winner at The Berlin Film Festival

Most other prizes went to big studio films, always a staple in Berlin due to post-Oscar nomination release schedules. The People vs. Larry Flynt took the Golden Bear; Juliet Binoche was awarded best actress for The English Patient; and Leonardo DiCaprio received best actor for Romeo and Juliet. Surprise Best Director was Eric Heumann for his meditation on colonialism in Ethiopia, Port Djema. A confusing Special Prize was awarded to Raoul Ruiz - here with his esoteric, pseudo-intellectual new Genealogies of a Crime - for his "contribution to filmmaking."

Other disappointments included the Opening Night yawn, Bille August's Smilla's Sense of Snow; Le Jour Et La Nuit, an embarrassing old man's wet dream of collagen lips and pert tits from French intellectual titan Bernard Henri-Levy; Lucie Aubrac, Claude Berri's National Front-inspired version of World War II heroism, where the French are all great patriots and there's nary a Jew in sight, stars the forever appalling Daniel Auteuil; Twin Town, which, contrary to Festival rules, premiered at Sundance a month before, is a sad collage of fart jokes and unhip slapstick despite the participation of the makers of Trainspotting.

Slightly more interesting were Yim Ho's Kitchen, a scruffy, hyper-commercial adaptation of the gentle blockbuster Japanese novel by Banana Yoshimoto about a woman who comes to live with a strange young man and his transsexual mother after her grandmother's death. Huang Jianxin's shallow Surveillance, basically a shaggy dog story of a security guard forced to play big time stakeout guy, rides far on Huang's endearing comic sensibility.

Speaking of shallow, what was up with the Forum? Certainly its weakest year in memory, the section flitted between shockingly stupid Korean comedies like Three Friends - unbelievably selected for New Directors/New Films as well - and old guard monolithic documentaries like Johan van der Keuken's extremely local Amsterdam: Global Village.

A few films defied the trend. Im Kwon-Taek's Festival continued his exploration of the minutiae of Korean culture within beautifully conceived and executed films. Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's clever, if impenetrable, Icelandic comedy Devil's Island is a nasty portrait of a colonized people with a goofy, slapstick structure. Although deeply disturbed, politically and aesthetically, Fred Kelleman's Frost, at 270 minutes long, does convey some unusually brutal ideas about the "new Germany" while we follow a mother and child trudging through an inhospitable countryside.

By far the best thing on offer, though, was Michael Haneke's adaptation of Kafka's The Castle. Certainly one of Europe's most impressive working directors - The Seventh Continent and Benny's Video are two of the decade's most underrated films - Haneke's latest is a quiet film full of dark interiors and blowing snow; it perfectly captures the unseen menace of the writer's prose.

The Forum's loss was, however, the Panorama's gain. Good films - many of them far more confrontational and experimental than the Forum's tepid choices - emerged from this section this year. Sogo Ishii's Labyrinth of Dreams is a gorgeous period black-and-white tale of a bus driver and conductor heading towards a double suicide and may signal a return of the Japanese art-film scene. Graveyard of Dreams, a scripted dramatic film about a group of Georgian soldiers by Georgian Georgi Chaindrawa, was filmed amidst actual fighting; its gray tones and lovely key lighting are reminiscent of classic 1920s war movies. Aleksandr Sokhurov in his Mother And Son employs his usual camera tricks - the image seems to fold up at the edges of the screen with the protagonists fluttering at its center - to create a series of tableaux of a withering old woman expressing her remorse for her son's eventual death; it is uniquely affecting and beautiful. Something else very special was Maxim Yacoubson's Names, a completely non-linear collage - reprinted footage, home movies, animation, unusual texts - around the life of a brilliant poet and his effect on the filmmaker.

The French cinema continued to demonstrate that its young generation is stronger than ever. Manuel Poirier's Marion quietly explores the power play between a rich family trying to seduce a working class couple into "lending" them their young daughter; its inherent understanding of human weakness and undogmatic attention to issues of class mark it as an impressive addition to the new canon of French family dramas. Fred, by Pierre Jolivet, although its genre elements tire quickly, is as honest a portrait of working-class (read: unemployed) Parisians as one will find.

But I forget the biggest star, as always in Berlin: a full retrospective of the films of Kim Novak, presented in the glorious Astor cinema. Now there's a wall that's not going anywhere!

Sundance Film Festival by Noah Cowan
Berlin International Film Festival by Noah Cowan
International Film Festival Rotterdam by Stephen Gallagher