During the ten days of the Berlinale most Berlin dailies adorn their front pages with large color photos of celebrity posturings the night before. On Thursday, day number 7 of the fest, however, what was to be seen on all Berlin front pages were shots of men in hooded white spacesuits holding up dead swans fished out of the city lakes, or otherwise attempting to deal with the sudden arrival of the dreaded aviarian flu virus in the midst of the city. Of course, this does not mean that we can expect to see people keeling over on Kurfurstendam in the next few days, but it is a sobering note coming at a time when the city is flooded with foreign visitors here for the film festival.

On the night before actor Heath Ledger and the new princess of Aussie film, Abbie Cornish, pranced about on the red carpet leading into the Gala evening presentation of "Candy" for a good half hour, in spite of the chilly sleet-laden air, basking in the sunshine of adoring fans swarming and writhing in collective ecstasy on both sides of the restraining ropes -- the whole event receiving instant replay on a giant television screen mounted just to the right of the theater entrance. These red carpet star grand entrees are one of the standard features of truly big festivals such as Berlin and Cannes, which depend on star visitations to pump up the aura, glamour and, of course, the publicity of the festival. Meanwhile the press has announced the imminent landing in Berlin of another top Oscar contender, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who will be here to meet the press after screenings of the other most touted film of the year ,"CAPOTE", following in the considerable wake already stirred up everywhere else by "Brokeback Mountain", with Ledger's breakout role therein as a macho gay cowboy. So we have this year's two top Oscar contenders for Best Actor showing up in Berlin, literally back-to-back. The main difference is that Heath's film, "Candy", is in competition whereas "Capote", which was already screened at an A-festival (Toronto) is not. In any case, whether competing or not, "Capote" is the hot ticket of the week beyond any doubt, and the double billing of these two emerging superstars is a "casting" coup by fest director Dieter Kosslick..

In the Forum Section, which tends to spotlight first or second films of unusual interest, Turkish born but Berlin reared Aysun Bademsoy, came up with a wonderful documentary about Turks in double exile entitled "Am Rand der Staedte" (on the edge of the cities). In the film she interviewed four families of Turks who, after many years of hard work, having made their bundle in Germany, elected to return to Turkey to live out their dotage in the old heimat. One problem -- the old country is no longer "home" to them. Where they once lived in traditional Anatolian villages they are now located in sealed-off, impersonal high-rise retirement communities by the sea, where they are even less at home than they were in the German diaspora. Most of the people interviewed speak Turkish but a few throw in some Turkicised German to comic effect. The women turn out in every case to have been the go-getters who motivated the move to Germany in the first place, while their men-folk, it seems, just came along for the ride. Two of the women, divorcees and still not unattractive in middle age, talk of the difficulties they had raising Germanized children in a broken Turkish home. One chubby daughter in her early twenties, sporting a dreadlocks type hairdo, didn't even speak Turkish when she first "came home" and longs for the far more familiar life she led as a teenager in Germany. An elderly man bemoans the fact that, having renounced his permanent residency in Germany, he cannot get a visa to go back "just to embrace my grandchildren one time before I die". He adds that it is illegal immigrants to Germany who have given legitimate would-be visitors like himself a bad name. It's all about living on the horns of a life dilemma. These homeland returnees have become so westernized, after decades of residence in Germany, that their neighbors who never left, regard them as some kind of low-level traitors and even call them "Almanlar" (Germans) as a term of derision. On the other hand they harbor a great nostalgia for the "better life" of Germany where they were never really accepted either by the indigenous Teutonic populace.

While this is not exactly a tragic film, for after all, these returnees from exile are not exactly living in dire poverty, nevertheless, living in these isolated protected seaside communities by the sea on the Turkish Riviera (in the vicinity of Mersin, where director Bademsoy was herself born) their existence has become a kind of gold-lined internal diaspora. The screening I attended was the absolute world premiere of this film, and as far as I could tell, there were few if any German Turks in the audience, for the entire Q and A dialogue following the film – (hardly anybody left the packed Delphi Theater) -- went on in German. When the film is released commercially here it is bound to become a major-major hit in the large Turco-German community, but I saw this as a film with a much larger audience potential, because it speaks to immigration and returnee problems everywhere -- with striking parallels even to the Mexican "migrant-worker' obrero communities in the United States. I would love to see how a Mexican-American audience would respond to this magnificent inspection of people trapped in a prosperous "double exile".

From the old Delphi theater in chic Charlottenburg, West Berlin, far removed from the Potsdamer Platz glass tower nexus of the festival in Mitte, I trotted over to a late screening at the Art Nouveau Kino Palast on Kurfurstendam, the elegant Berlin Chausee often compared to the Parisian Champs Elysees. The kino itself, built in 1953 in the Art Deco pre-war style, is one of the last survivors of classic cinema architecture in Berlin and is worth a visit on that account alone. The film on view was an "art documentary" by British artist Tacita Dean who now resides in Berlin, and features Larry Kardish, film curator of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. The title of the film is "Uncles" and we'll see why in a sec. The film opens with one of the uncles preparing breakfast in a typical British home. We then move to a sitting room where another uncle, who actually looks like a younger twin brother of the first uncle, is sitting and chatting with Mr. Kardish, in what turns out to be a double interview with these two droll old Englishman, who, it turns out, are both sons of two very distinguished pioneers of the British film industry. The film, incidentally, was shown without benefit of German subtitles, so a viewer hoping to appreciate the film to its full extent, would have to be quite familiar with Colonel Blimp style British English of the uncles (humph-humph, well you know old chap…) as well as the more parsable American English of Mr. Kardish. At the beginning the two British gentlemen were most discretely identified as the sons, respectively, of Basil Dean (aha! – the Dean connection), founder of the once famous British film Studio known as Ealing, and a prolific writer, producer and director : the other gentleman, the son of Michael Balcon, (1896 – 1977) a prime mover in the British film industry and producer of over 200 British films between 1923 and 1963, including all the Alec Guiness comedies of the fifties which put British film on the world map. Significantly, because of being married to sisters, both of these chaps are uncles of director Tacita Dean. While the discussion which takes place during the 77 minute running time of the film is a treasure chest of British cinema lore, particularly around the time of WW II, viewers unfamiliar with the subject and careers under discussion may find this not much more than a bunch of rather esoteric talk, and, in fact there were a certain number of walkouts at different points in the proceedings. On the other hand, the film also works on the level of an intimate family portrait and study of family relationships. I found the two uncles quite droll and charming, and, because I am interested in British cinema history, extremely rich in personal insider information on that account.

"Uncles" was presented in the context of a 'Tribute to Larry Kardish', who over the years has done much to popularize and introduce German cinema to New York audiences. The screening was attended, not only by Mr. Kardish himself and director-artist Tacita Dean, but by a number of other prominent Berliners as well, among them, Juliane Lorentz, the widow of Rainer-Maria Fassbinder (!). After the screening this group of people connected with Kardish was transported in a small fleet of black cars to a most elegant restaurant where the dinner-discussion continued well beyond midnight. As spin-off I hope to be able to be able to present an interview with Juliane Lorentz-Fassbinder in the very near future.

by Chaim Pevner, Berlin