The Berlin film festival used to be an oddly contradictory affair. It was known for elaborately kitsch opening and closing ceremonies and competition films heavy on social conscience: champagne on the red carpet, kale juice on the screen.
This year’s Berlin was differently strange. The February 2021 festival was online only, but offered the best crop of titles in recent memory. This year, a slightly shorter festival went live again – and if only its selections had been in the same league, it might have offset the event’s strangely desolate feel. The festival’s distribution market had gone online, meaning fewer delegates, partly because of Germany’s still tough Covid restrictions, which insisted on daily tests as a requirement for access to press screenings. All this made the unusually quiet Palast area feel like an art installation tribute to the bygone days of Checkpoint Charlie.
