Berlin

HUMAN ZOO 

The non-competitive Panorama section of the Berlinale often contains the festival’s most provocative and sought after films. While the works are by lesser known filmmakers, the quality is consistently high and leave both audiences and critics with something to debate and ponder long after the lights come up. This year, the section is presenting 17 feature films in its Main Programme, 15 in Panorama Special, and 16 in its Panorama Dokumente series. In addition, as part of its celebration of 30 years of discriminating cinema, the section will present five favourites from its past as special events.

The Panorama Main Programme opened on 5 February with the Danish feature film, HUMAN ZOO by debut director Rie Rasmussen. In her much anticipated first film, she not only directs but plays the lead, a young woman who joins a deserter to escape the horrors of the Balkan crisis.

Panorama Special opened the following day with NORD (North) , the first work of Norwegian director Rune Denstad Langlo. With his fine sense for seeing the comic in the tragic, he tells of a man’s search for his baby son in the icy north.

While there is no one unifying theme in this year’s program, the topic of globalization is a strong one that unites many of the films on tap. In THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD, an American indie documentary by Mike Bonanno, Andy Bichlbaum and Kurt Engfehr, the focus is on the Yes Men, subversive cinema guerrillas who expose the economic crimes of leading industrial and bank institutions (a very timely subject indeed). Other films exploring the tensions and opportunities of globalization include THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, GARAPA by José Padilha and COYOTE by Chema Rodríguez.

Regions of conflict that have international implications are also being presented front and center.

Udi Aloni’s KASHMIR: JOURNEY TO FREEDOM (USA/Israel) impressively presents the opposite of what we commonly see of this region in the Western media: here it is a matter of restoring peace and of how resourceful people become in their fight for it. The impact of uprooting people and the disorientation that provokes is also explored in such films as Helga Reidemeister’s WAR AND LOVE IN KABUL and Khalid Gill’s KISS THE MOON, an affecting film about transgenders in conservative Pakistan.

As part of its 30th anniversary, the Panorama is presenting this week a rare revival of the 1973 television film THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT, the biography of iconoclastic “sexual warrior” Quentin Crisp, expertly played by John Hurt. Crisp also figures in two later films on his life, RESIDENT ALIEN (1990) and AN ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK (2009). The special celebration screenings includes THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK (1989), the Oscar-winning documentary on the real life of slain gay rights leader Harvey Milk, memorably incarnated by Sean Penn in this year’s biopic MILK (also being presented at the Panorama). As insiders already know, the films worth catching and cherishing are in this impeccable program, curated by Wieland Speck.

Sandy Mandelberger, Berlinale Dailies Editor