Even Hollywood might find itself hard-pressed to match the sort of magic emanating from Berlin just now. The Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale, is in full swing, attracting glitterati from around the globe – including 19,000 professional visitors from 115 countries.
The public program is the main course, some 400 films. Most of them are either international or European premieres. Among this year’s anticipated showings are the mainstream, Hollywoodesque Safe House with Denzel Washington, Werner Herzog’s devastating documentary Death Row, the English offering All Divided Selves, and the powerful, Arabic film The Last Friday.
Some 300,000 tickets have already been sold to the assorted showings. That’s where the formal action is, inside the cinema houses. But there’s a subtler buzz in Berlin when the Berlinale’s on, one that comes from the workshops and panel discussions – not to mention the hundreds of ad hoc roundtables that spring up in coffee houses and bars around this hip, historic, town. This is where the artistic sparks start to fly, where the principal players transform from two-dimensional black and white cut outs into 3-D, in-the-flesh human beings.
This is exciting stuff.
You can be part of it. Air Berlin fields nonstop Miami flights to Berlin, as well as nonstop New York Kennedy flights to Berlin. United offers nonstop New York/Newark flights to Berlin.
Story by Jerry Chandler
(Image: www.berlinale.de)
