Films Mix with Memories in Berlin
By Roger Garcia

My first visit to the Berlin International Film Festival was as a producer, not a programmer. It was in the mid-’80s and I was presenting some of my short films from Hong Kong in the International Forum for Young Cinema. At the time, Berlin was still a divided city—I remember trudging through the snow to see the Wall, climbing up on a wooden platform and looking over to the other side where East German soldiers stood stiffly at attention or paraded with their trademark goose step.

The Forum, much like Cahiers du Cinema, has been a formative influence on the way I practice cinema. Guided by the visionary curiosity of its director, Ulrich Gregor, it showed that films could be valued and celebrated because of their opposition and their differences. Experimental films were as important as genres (Cahiers du Cinema had taught me that genres were as important as experiments) and most importantly, a film festival program was not just a collection of interesting movies but an articulation of cinema, lessons in film for eager students.

I remember standing in the cold with many others, trying to get into the old Arsenal Kino (as important a shrine to cinephilia as the Cinémathèque Française) for a screening of Wim Wenders’ Reverse Angle: New York City, still a marvelous film d’essai made for French TV. Wenders, a favored adopted son of the city, was around, bobbing up and down Budapesterstrasse or at the Einstein Café after wrapping for the day on Wings of Desire.

Today, the Berlin of that film and the Berlin of my first visit have disappeared. Traces of the Wall are all but gone. Where I once peeked over at the East, now stands the shiny complex of multiplexes, film museum, hotels and restaurants that is the center of the unified city’s film festival. Ulrich Gregor has just retired, but the unconventional spirit of the Forum lives on in his successor, Christoph Terhechte.

Last year the Forum premiered Jonas Mekas’s 320-minute As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. This year we were treated to James Benning’s film ode to the California wilderness, 271 minutes of evocative and atmospheric landscapes.

There was a sidebar of independent Chinese films, the Tunisian Satin Rouge in which a straitlaced widow finds her true calling as a belly dancer, and the wonderful Manzan Benigaki a deceptively simple film about persimmon-peeling machines in Japan (!) made by documentary master Shinsuke Ogawa and finished by Chinese filmmaker Peng Xiaoling. I first met Ogawa at the Forum in 1986. He died in 1992, but watching him on the screen this year reminded me of the Forum’s other lesson: that film festivals are not only about films, but friendships too.