Fan Fare

Berlinale goes green…sort of

The Berlin Film Festival used to distribute tonnes of press releases, media kits, brochures and other information from filmmakers trying to get the attention of thousands of journalists every day, filling some 1,500 cubby-hole media mailboxes with piles of paper that few ever needed or read.

That all changed this year when Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick decided to abolish the paper practice and take a few other fledgling steps to protect the environment – such as switching lighting systems on the red carpet to use more energy efficient lights and using hydrogen-powered cars to shuttle celebrities to and fro.

“I’m a practising greenie,” Kosslick told a group of foreign journalists recently. “We decided to do away with the press mailboxes because they’re outdated and waste a lot of paper. Every day it seemed like paper the equivalent of 5 hectares of Brazilian rain forest was being distributed and most of it just thrown away. We had to dispose of all that paper in the evening. It just wasn’t right.”

Kosslick, who lives in a country where fears of climate change run high and protecting the environment is a mainstream political issue, admits the festival has a long way to go still and tried to downplay any notion that the festival was putting a big emphasis on going green.

“We need a lot of electricity on the red carpet, for instance, because it has to be well-lit,” he said. “This year we’re using some low-voltage lamps to try to save some energy.” Kosslick, who has been running the festival for the last decade,  said the pro-environment changes at the festival were the result of the work of many of the filmmakers themselves.

“We couldn’t go on showing films that involve making the world a better place and then not do anything in that regard ourself,” he said.

Now if he could only get some of the celebrities and movie moguls to fly on commercial flights – or take the train — rather than arrive in private jets.

Moody director? I would be!

Swedish director Lukas Moodysson might not be the happiest of filmmakers at the moment. It’s hardly surprising, given that his latest movie “Mammoth“, starring Gael Garcia Bernal, was roundly booed by reporters and critics after a press screening at the Berlin film festival.

Critics have panned the examination of globalisation and economic migrants. The film’s average mark in Screen International’s informal poll of reviews is 0.9 out of four, or below a poor rating. Five out of eight critics deemed it plain “bad”.

It must be a crushing blow for someone who has invested so much time and effort in a project, only to have it dismissed with a few strokes of the critics’ pen.

Still, it could be worse. Sally Potter’s ultra-minimalist fashion send-up “Rage” scored even lower in the poll, notching just 0.8 on average. Not even the sight of Jude Law in drag was enough to stop dozens of audience members walking out of its press screening. At least Potter won’t be too badly out of pocket. The movie cost less than $1 million to make.

The overall quality Berlin’s main competition lineup in recent years has come under fire, but I can’t remember seeing two such low-scoring entries, and both premiered on the same day.

On a happier note, well-crafted low-budget dramas from Iran and Uruguay are faring better and are favourites – as we approach the festival’s halfway stage — to take the Golden Bear for best film.

Too much ‘escapism’ at Berlinale?

“Escapism”, we were warned, was going to be a recurrent element of many of the entries in this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the world’s first major cinematic barometer since the global financial meltdown began. People are yearning to escape for a few hours from the economic gloom and doom, the film experts were saying before the Berlinale’s curtain went up.

Yet even knowing that, it was still difficult to predict how far French director Francois Ozon (“8 Women”, “Swimming Pool”) was going to take viewers on a most bizarre journey out of our depressing little lives in his newest film “Ricky“, which made its world premiere in Berlin.

(Spoiler alert - if you’re one of Ozon’s few non-French fans and plan to see the film, you might want to stop here — otherwise bon voyage) A struggling French woman meets a Spanish co-worker at the factory, they do what they always do in French films, and she gets pregnant. After their healthy baby boy is born — and about half way through the rather ordinary 90-minute film, it takes an extraordinary twist — the baby suddenly starts growing wings out of his shoulder blades. Yes, giant, powerful wings. And before long, he’s flying around his room. And not long after that, shortly after he turns into a media sensation, the baby boy simply flies away.

“You’ve answered the question yourself,” Ozon told a journalist at a news conference after the premiere when asked if he thought his film was an antidote for people craving an escape from the financial crisis. “Going to the cinema is part of our lives, to imagine living in a different, imaginary world. When you go to see a film, you want to see something different. This film is like a fairy tale.”

Are moviegoers looking for so much escape? And is a baby boy suddenly growing wings what they want to see?