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The hands-on training programme for film critics and journalists participating in the Berlinale Talent Campus started - and also the films!

"Normal School" - Design by Fiction, Guido Pellegrini, Argentina

Celina Murga's Berlinale Forum film "Normal School", "Escuela Normal", tries to capture the restless, tumultuous, and abrasive political landscape of modern Argentina. It ignores the actual politicians and media figures, choosing to focus instead on the upstarts, the youngsters and teenagers who are just learning about the perils of the democratic process through student elections. Through their arguments, alliances and rivalries, these kids are both the future of the country and also its past, fresh-faced versions of the dinosaurs who already run the State. The contradictory shadows of revolution and cyclical monotony dance across their concerned faces.

Murga has crafted a documentary so dominated by interactions, dialogues and characters that it actually feels scripted. The words are almost too precise and the moments too revealing. The kids cannot help but exude a certain self-consciousness, perhaps because performance is not just the stuff of films but of life itself. People regulary adopt characters, react according to context, and talk to the improvised audience of their friends. Observed by a camera, the kids in "Normal School" are both themselves and performances of themselves – a duality heightened by the student elections they’re involved in. Politics is performance, as the film perhaps unconsciously suggests.

By design, "Normal School" moves like a fiction. Every conversation and scene, even down to individual shot compositions, looks just slightly rehearsed. The camera isolates individual faces as they speak, follows a faculty member down several hallways and finds plenty of anecdotal treasures and little details. Murga has carefully selected her footage and edited it to the rhythm of a fictional drama. There are no interviews and, outside of a few passing glances at the camera, the fourth wall is almost never broken. If many films of the Argentine New Wave are fictions that look like documentaries – from "La Ciénaga" to "Crane World", "Bolivia" and "Lion's Den" – then "Normal School" is the opposite, a documentary that reaches towards fiction.

''The woman in the Septic Tank''

The woman in the Septic Tank - Poor d'or, Anders Wotzke, Australia

In a Filipino slum, a desperate mother fights back tears as she chaperones her daughter to the doorstep of an elderly Caucasian man, ready to make a transaction that she'll forever regret. This sequence, preceded by a child publicly defecating in the street, is the very definition of poverty porn, almost to the point where you expect to see UNICEF listed in the production credits.

How could Cannes resist!

Redeemably, however, the above sequence invites ridicule in Marlon Rivera's refreshing Berlinale Forum satire "Septic Tank", Philippines. The mother and her child, we discover, are fictional characters within a film currently being developed by a trio of latte-sipping filmmakers who think shock and manipulation are a sure-fire way to win an Oscar. As they make their way to a cast meeting with their lead actress Eugene Domingo – a popular Filipino comedian playing herself and hilariously sending up actor egocentricity – the three toss around ideas on how to create the ultimate festival film, re-imagining the same sequence over and over again with every narrative and stylistic cliché imaginable. Would it hit harder if it were a gritty docudrama or a campy musical? What if it were the mother’s son, and not her daughter, being pimped to the paedophile?

Film-within-a-film

Laughs abound no matter what tropes they try, particularly when viewed in the festival environment where there's a high chance everyone in the cinema has recently seen the kind of film Rivera is ridiculing. Screenwriter Chris Martinez doesn't miss an opportunity to lampoon the current trends of Filipino cinema, where he implicates local filmmakers like Brillante Mendoza for exploiting the impoverished in a bid to gain festival accolades. Martinez's material is bolstered by first-time director Marlon Rivera's crack comedic timing and naturalistic staging, even if budgetary restraints cause the cinematography and lighting to be a little rough around the edges during scenes where it shouldn't be. The musical numbers, for example, would have hit higher satirical heights had they looked glitzy and overproduced. Elsewhere, shaky DV footage is effectively employed to lend the film-within-a-film an authentic documentary feel, where not even the camera's lens is immune to the grime of the ghettos. Therein lies the power of "Septic Tank"; despite its blatant cynicism, there's still something highly disquieting about watching these indie buffoons scout the actual slums of Manila for their film, gleefully planning shots as xylophone-ribbed children look on in starved bewilderment. Sure, you're still able to laugh at the wry hypocrisy of it all, but never does the knowledge evade you that those children aren't acting.

''Higway''

"Highway" - Staring at the Road, Janaína Navarro, Brazil

A road can have different meanings. For some, the road is a trip, for others, the road is part of the quotidian. What can be an obstacle on that road, also depends on the point of view. In Deepak Rauniyar's "Highway" (Berlinale Panorama) we follow the journey of a long distance bus, that travels from Darjeeling to Kathmandu, facing different situations, which force the passengers to bond as a group.

The atmosphere? Almost surreal

Besides a mechanical problem, their main obstacle is the Bandhs – common strikes in India and Nepal which disrupt everyday activities, as well as also blocking traffic. The first aspect of interest in "Highway" is how this important political factor figures in the movie. As we don't know the exact reasons for these strikes, they appear like an unpredictable external event. This unpredictability, as well as our ignorance of the political motivation behind the Bandhs, creates an almost surreal atmosphere. At this point, "Highway" resembles Julio Cortazar's short history "The Southern Highway", where the infinite and seemingly immobile traffic acts like a fantastic external factor, that stimulates the connection between human beings. The film's focus however is not only on the journey per se, but also – and mostly – on different conflicts between the people inside the bus and those who await them in Kathmandu. Almost everyone in this bus must be in Kathmandu urgently, therefore, they pretend to be a wedding bus, since those are not forbidden to pass the Bandhs. At this point, the movie touches a delicate ambivalence between politics and the respect for local tradition.

Staring dead ahead

Even though the film approaches difficult subjects with an appealing simplicity – homosexuality, transsexuality, adultery – it's multi-layered, mosaic structure is excessive. The characters are already united by the fact that they are in the same bus together.

Of particular interest is the way the presence of cellphones is used in "Highway", as they serve both as a bridge between people, as a reaffirmation of our loneliness and lack of control. A cellphone out of service can mean both a technical problem or a real problem – or a problem we imagine. What was invented to make us feel more secure and closer to each other can also be the cause of emotional stress. As the film comes to it's end and the group breaks apart, the final sensation also resembles the conclusion of Cortazar's tale: a feeling of the emptiness of facing the reality of life, where everyone is "staring dead ahead, exclusively dead ahead."

''All Devided Selves''

The Berlinale Forum Expanded - Videos Critical and Clinical, Katja Cicigoj, Slovenia

If we read the title of "Critique and Clinic", the Berlinale Forum Expanded exhibition at Kunstsäle Berlin, as echoing Deleuze's "Essays Critical and Clinical", we can see why experimental film and video might be a way for filmmakers to critique and clinically approach the problems of civilization.

Deleuze analyses how several writers mould the rules of the dominant language, as well as rational discourse in general, how they "schizophrenise" it in order to perform an internal critique of dominant modes of social life. We could translate this concept to film to see how video-makers twist the dominant rules of narration through moving images to create socially critical discourse. Ken Jacobs demonstrates how a fairly abstract visual language can be combined with other tools to shape a politically engaged meditation: his "Seeking the money king" (US) consists of animated stereoscopic images adding up to a morphing, shiny landscape, into which the viewer can project his or her own visual associations spurred by the musical score (made of quotations from pre-war thrillers) and the author's own textual commentary on his country.

Masculine society sucks

Meanwhile Eline McGeorge's "A world of our own" (Norway/GB) perhaps most clearly testifies to this subversive "schizophrenising" of filmic language: the five-minute sensory overlapping of found footage, several soundtracks, and visual and voice-over semi-quotations (from Virginia Woolf, Maya Deren, Rosa Luxemburg and others) engages the viewer into associatively tying the pieces of the video-text together into a meditation on a female revolutionary subject. It's as if McGeorge is not quite satisfied with "a room of her own", now wanting to create "a world of our own."

The eruptive means of escape

The revolutionary nature of what is perceived by society as insanity (as that which disrupts the normal rational way of functioning) has been advocated throughout Deleuze's work; a few works in the exhibition directly address this point. "There is something in the air" explores the escape of Indian women from a strict moralistic and patriarchal society into insanity through the contrast between voice-over first-person narration of the "diseased" women and associative images; meanwhile Luke Fowler's "All divided selves" perhaps best summarizes the central idea of the exhibition read through Deleuze's work: his documentary, composed of found footage, investigates the revolutionary work of psychiatrist RD Laing in the 1960s, who advanced the then-brave hypotheses that those deemed insane are just unable to fit into the dominant socio-political structure and are thus forced to find psychologically eruptive means of escape. This inspirational exhibition takes the idea of exploring the revolutionary potential of "deviant" psychologies or artistic forms seriously, exploring the formal possibilities of the video medium to create cuts into the normalized way in which we perceive our world and society.

''Man for a day''

"Man for a day" - Chicks with Their Father's Mustaches, Makbul Mubarak, Indonesia

"A nurture it is, not a nature", says Diane Tor, the main character of the documentary "Man for a day" (Katarina Peters, Germany), screening at Perspektive Deutsches Kino, about several women trying to experiment with their sex and gender roles by physically living as men. Diane Tor is their mentor.

Anybody studied Gender Studies?

The film starts as a Judith-Butler-for-Dummies, a way of showing how powerless women are and of examining how dominating men are. Tor guides the audience toward several possible conclusions: should women disarrange males' eternal stalwartness? Or should they learn to tolerate their own inferiority? The film is divided into several chapters, beginning with Tor showing how to dress like a man, followed by her explaining some thoughts through interviews. These interviews are important, showing how serious the film is, proceeding from some premises on sexual performativity, and not just stupid deeds done by some desperate girls. These premises crawl to the next level where these women perform some mimetic acts: they copy how men paw their legs on the ground with a full sense of "ownership", show how smoke vaporises from the cigarettes of a gentleman, demonstrate how to mess around with cars, and so on. The sight of those women spying on men in the street, zigzagged with images of them emulating those men, makes for some effective erratic humour.

It is a men's, men's, men's world

The next stages come as we expect: the women successfully sneak into men's toilets and convince their parents how boyish they are. Judith Butler's concept of sexual performativity, which is mirrored on the sexual identity as a nurtured instead of natured thing, joins the idea of women who are usually watched by men, now becoming spectators of men. They also let themselves be affected by men's behaviours and finally turn into one.

Just a joke?

The film takes a theoretical premise that is usually explained incessantly in hundreds of pages in philosophy books and explains them in a playful way. You can laugh yet still grasp the whole concept. Instead of building a serious documentary like those of Sophie Fiennes, Katarina Peters chooses to spread the whole idea through the kinds of jokes you could find in a book like Cathcart and Klein's "Plato and Platypus Walk into the Bar". Peters chooses to concentrate on a specific case and induct it in a bigger scope that she never spells out; you just suddenly realise that it is a pity to stop thinking when the movie itself ends. Katarina Peters embroiders a convincing joke on the gender gap in society. Perhaps her next feature will be Fanon-for-Dummies.

Score Competition participants pose with Sakamoto

Breathing Music into Movies - Berlinale Talent Campus 2012 Score Competition, Michał Oleszczyk, Poland

They're thirtyish, they're passionate about music and they all have plenty on their plates this week. Christoph Fleischmann (33) from Germany, Pablo Pico (29) from France and Enrica Sciandrone (30) – a british resident from Italy – are all participants of this year's Berlinale Talent Campus Score Competition. They have only a couple of days to compose a full score for a five-minute animated short by Juan Pablo Zaramella.

Come along with the music

A story of a light-bulb factory worker who dreams of constructing a balloon to escape his life of numbing labour, "Luminaris" has Chaplinesque overtones that weren't lost on Pico: "I wanted parts of my score to stress the mechanical nature of the protagonist's routine, and juxtapose them with his private world of more jazzy rhythms." Sciandrone also went the silent-movie way, if in a more sweeping fashion: "I tend to gravitate towards orchestral music and I'm a big fan of John Williams, even though some of his work may seem old-fashioned today." All three "talents" had to prepare sheet music for their compositions, which were then performed by a full orchestra. Marcie Jost, head of the Score Competition says "one of the key factors during the qualification process was to get people with orchestral experience. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to handle the big task ahead of them."

The breath of life

"The great thing is that we all have different musical backgrounds and sensibilities", says Fleischmann. "For example, I went against the mechanical nature of the characters' movement. I wanted to breathe life into them, even though they resemble floating paper figures, with no leg movement whatsoever." Luckily, I was able to witness the process of Pico tweaking his score, with layer after layer of effects being lovingly piled upon one another. As the film's hero takes a heavy kick in the pants, the sound effect is surprisingly understated. "I didn’t want to go for the obvious underscoring of the image by the music", says Pablo.

It started with Sakamoto

The project's general overseer – as well as the head of the Score Competition jury, Ryuichi Sakamoto is the Oscar-winning legend and electronic-music pioneer whose credits include Bernardo Bertolucci's "The last emperor" and a number of other scores for the likes of Brian De Palma and Nagisa Oshima. Sakamoto, whose schedule unfortunately proved too tight to enable an interview, arrived at the studio to look at the Talents' work exactly as I was leaving the premises. I did get a glimpse of his black-cloaked, supremely regal figure, moving gracefully and greeting the Talents with a near-fatherly warmth. I bet that some day in the future, it will be them nurturing young talent of tomorrow.

Distribution: The invisible guiding hand gets its due, Tina Hassannia, Canada

For the first time in the Berlinale Talent Campus' ten-year history, the Campus now includes "Film distribution Talents". Young, emerging distributors from ten countries met on Saturday to tell their stories and compare notes. Some noticeable trends that surfaced during the discussion included problems with digital conversion and promoting niche markets (documentary, art house and foreign cinema) which are a tough sell in their respective countries dominated by mainstream and/or Hollywood cinema.

The young entrepreneurs

Despite the sometimes unsurmountable obstacles faced by these young entrepreneurs, they are an integral, if often invisible force in the film industry. Sigrid Limprecht, head of the Bonner Kinemathek who helped to found and organize the distribution programme for Talent Campus, believes the profession should be recognised as part of the creative process in the production cycle. "It's kind of a misunderstanding that you can only talk or think about a film after seeing it", she says, but it's a misconception she hopes to change given this year's Talent Campus theme: Changing Perspectives. "We need changing perspectives because if we don't look for talent in distribution then we will have a huge pile of products and nobody's seeing it."

No distribution, no screening

The countries represented in the distribution programme include Mexico, Argentina, UK, India, Germany, Norway, Macedonia, Belgium, Puerto Rico and Turkey. One of the Talents, british distributor Oli Harbottle's company Dogwoof specializes in international documentaries inside the UK. DVD and video-on-demand (VOD) distribution is their main market because multiplex chains ask distributors for a 16-week window between theatrical distribution and DVD/VOD releases. The delay can cause a loss in revenues, which is why Dogwoof opts for DVD/VOD. "A core thinking in our business is to get the films out as widely as possible as quickly as possible", he says. "The decision is: do we want to be in a handful of theatres where it's not really our audience anyway for the sake of losing eight weeks of potential revenues?"

"Changing Perspectives"

In contrast, Mexican distributor Estrella Araiya does not engage in the VOD business because of the scarcity of high-bandwidth access in the country. Unlike the UK, digital technology is slowly catching up in Mexico – this includes digital projection equipment. The 80 independent theatres her companies, Kid Sister and Vendocine, partners with will be slow to switch to digital projection due to the high costs involved. Obtaining 35mm prints is dependent on the filmmaker, but in cases where there is no print available Araiya produces a Blu-ray version to screen in theatres. "Changing Perspectives" is a theme with many applications in the film industry, and the painful digital evolution apparent in film distribution is no exception.

Fotos: ©Berlinale Talent Campus