Berlin's brave new world

"America has never paid any attention to other people, so it''s absurd for Bush to say that it''s all in the best interests of the Iraqi people."
Question: Which politician said this at which political forum?
Answer: It was Richard Gere, actor, not politician, speaking at the 53rd Berlinale, which is a film festival, not a political forum.
Or, maybe, it is?
The Berlin Film Festival was born in 1950, which means that its history is tied up with the history of the Cold War.And Berlin, more than any other city in the world, stood at the middle of the Cold War, just because of where it stood. Right there in the middle.
There were many cultural reasons for holding Germany''s international film festival in Berlin, but the political reason must have been the deciding factor: Berlin was where Germany was divided and Berlin itself was split into West Berlin and East Berlin, a cruel fate for Germany''s proudest and largest city.
The fact that Berlin stood deep in East Germany made life pretty difficult for Berliners as the 1948-49 blockade demonstrated. But the location also meant that the city would become a showcase for Western values.
The Berlinale certainly did: by promoting the free expression of ideas, ideologies and political philosophies through cinema, the film festival located in a Western "island" in East Germany, could show what freedom really meant.
Sometimes that freedom was too much for both sides (Remember, it was the Cold War). George Stevens, the American film-maker was once head of the festival''s jury when Berlinale decided to show a film on Vietnam.
He was so angered, he threatened to leave. When The Deerhunter was shown some years later, all the East Germans wanted to stage a walk out! Years later in 2003, in a completely different world, the motto of the festival is ''Toward Tolerance''.
That spirit was brilliantly captured by three films in Competition. Good Bye, Lenin! is a tragicomical farce (if you can imagine such a combination) made by German director Wolfgang Becker and set in East Berlin, soon after German reunification.
There''s a bit of Rip Van Winkle (and Bollywood) in the movie; because the central character is an old woman who goes into a coma for eight months and misses the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Will her weak heart be able to cope with the changed political realities, especially because she was a dedicated Communist political worker? Her devoted son decides not, and so makes their 700 square foot apartment into the last remaining bastion of East Germany.
But the pace of change is so fast that his attempts to keep up (or rather, down) appearances gets more and more difficult. For example, how does he explain the large Coca Cola sign outside their window?
Rezervni Deli from Slovenia and directed by Damjan Kozole is about illegal refugees escaping night after night from Croatia into Italy. The title''s English translation is Spare Parts, and that cynical reference to refugees shows how quickly saviours can turn into exploiters in situations where moral scruples suddenly become expendable.
The best film of the Berlinale for me was Michael Winterbottom''s In This World. Here was a British film, financed by the British Film Council, from money raised by the National Lottery which talked about the plight of Afghan refugees.
Winterbottom made the film, he said, because of the widespread prejudice he encountered in his own country against Afghan refugees. The questions he asked were: Why did the Afghans want to come to Britian? How did they come? What kind of hardship did they have to go through to get across?
Taking the story of a boy and a young man, In This World recreates their unbelievable journey from Peshawar to London. They are hidden amongst crates of oranges in trucks, inside goods containers in ships, caught and deported several times, yet carry on stoically and single-mindedly.
Made with a digital camera and shot in the original, real locations, the film makes us believe we are watching actual events unfold before our very eyes.
In This World''s unemotional tone makes its message even stronger; that in this world there should be tolerance and understanding, and in a future, better world, perhaps there will be no borders between people.
How appropriate for Berlin, which ten years ago did away with its own divided self and its own divided border.