For the first time in the history of the event, the Golden Bear goes to Turkey. Samir Farid reports from the Berlin Film Festival On Friday the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) awards were announced at the Berlin Film Festival, a day before the 60th Berlinale awards themselves, which were announced on Saturday. The jury headed by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog gave the Golden Bear for Best Film to the Turkish filmmaker Semih Kaplanoglu for Bal (Honey). This is Turkey's first grand prix from Berlin and its second from the three major world festivals (Cannes, Venice and Berlin). There will be occasion to review Bal in future issues of this newspaper. Suffice to say that, while this is a good film worthy of being honoured, perhaps it did not deserve the Golden Bear. It would seem to be a political decision to help integrate the Turkish minority in Germany by honouring a film from its country of origin. For his part the Romanian filmmaker Florin Serban won both the jury grand prix Silver Bear for Eu cand vreau sa fluier, fluier (If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle) and the Alfred Bauer Prize awarded in memory of the festival's founder. The other Silver Bears were as follows: Best Director -- Roman Polanski for (); Best Actress -- Shinobu Terajima for her role in Caterpillar (Caterpillar) by Koji Wakamatsu; Best Actor -- Grigori Dobrygin and Sergei Puskepalis (ex aequo) for Kak ya provel etim letom (How I Ended This Summer) by Alexei Popogrebsky; Outstanding Camera Work -- Pavel Kostomarov, also for Kak ya provel etim letom ; Best Script -- Wang Quan'an and Na Jin for Tuan Yuan (Apart Together) by Wang Quan'an. Eu cand vreau sa fluier, fluier is a testimony to the fact that Romanian cinema has been the most important in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It demonstrates the specific features of what might be called the New Romanian School: extreme economy of means (what the Danish Dogma movement termed "chastity"); mixing Aristotelian with postmodern dramatic approaches (with the latter obeying a strict time frame and the former presenting at once the inner and external reality of a given character). Most Romanian films depict the tragedies of life under the Nicolae Ceau_escu regime, which fell 20 years ago. Yet the present winner deals with a new generation of Romanians who did not live through the dictatorship but are suffering, rather, the reality of the present. It is about the relationship between two brothers, the elder aged 18, and their mother who works in Italy. The action unfolds entirely in a young persons' reformatory, and the setting does not change until the very end when the hero decides to whistle -- or, more precisely, to have coffee with a young woman undertaking research on young felons, even if he has to kidnap her in a terrorist operation to do so. As for the Chinese film Tuan Yuan, it is a sort of objective correlative for the separation of Taiwan from mainland China following the civil war that resulted from the rise to power of the Communist Party in 1948. An old man returns from Taiwan to Shanghai some 50 years after the war to meet again his lover, who has married another man (her husband fought on the opposite side at the time of her separation from the Taiwanese returnee): this woman's son is now 50, and he was brought up by her husband, but as it turns out he is in fact the son of her old lover -- an ironic affirmation of the unity of people across the political divide. The separation of Taiwan from the mainland, as the film thus demonstrates, prevented members of the same people from resuming normal relations across a newly created divide. Taiwan is perhaps the last battle ground for the Cold War, with the People's Republic of China insisting that the island must return to its administration and the Western world insisting that it should remain sovereign. The fact that mainland China is no longer communist has not contributed to an effective resolution of this issue. This is the fifth film by the Sixth-Generation director Wang Quan'an, who was born in 1965 and graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1991, a full decade after the emergence of the new Chinese cinema forged by, among others, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige. For 10 years Wang Quan'an was a script writer, then he directed his first film in 1999. Between Tuya's Marriage, his third film, which won the Golden Bear in 2007, and the present offering, he directed Weaving Girl, which received the Montreal Film Festival Special Jury Prize last year. For its part the French film , by the great Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski, is a faultless jewel. Filming was completed last June, but when Polanski arrived in Switzerland in September to receive an honorary prize from the Zurich Film Festival he was immediately arrested. As it turns out Polanski had fled the US in 1977 following a court case in which he was sentenced to prison for sex with a minor; little did he know that there exists, between the US and Switzerland specifically, a legal treaty providing for escapees who have not served their sentences. And to this day Polanski's fate has yet to be decided: he was under house arrest in a Swiss country house while he edited the film. On its publication in 2007 the British novelist Robert Harris's The Ghost was an instant best seller. No doubt the book's success has to do with the fact that it accuses Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister during the War on Terror of being an old CIA agent; in the novel and the film alike, he is named Adam Lang -- played by Pierce Brosnan. This is revealed through the man who is writing his autobiography for him: the ghost writer who will remain nameless. Lang cheats on his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) with his secretary Amelia (Kim Cattrall); Ruth cheats on him with the Ghost Writer (Ewan McGregor). The Prime Minister is eventually murdered by the father of a soldier who was killed in Iraq -- so does the ghost writer who has betrayed Lang's secret. Yet, though it depicts the post-9/11 world, this is not a political film. Yet it is Polanski's world, whose character has not changed since his earliest works, produced in his own country long before he started working in Hollywood and Paris, that this film presents: a sort of mixture of Kafka and Hitchcock. No doubt he was drawn to the novel as much as anything by the fact that the protagonist is nameless, like Kafka's protagonists. It also gave him a chance to poke fun at politicians, much as he pokes fun at humanity and human existence in other contexts. There is at the heart of the film a strong sense of the absurd, and perhaps its absolute cinematographic beauty is intended to compensate for this. *** The Berlinale this year celebrates its 60th anniversary, while Forum (the parallel programme devoted to the vanguard of world cinema, like Cannes's Directors' Fortnight, a consequence of the 1968 Student Movement) celebrates its 40th. Last Thursday the Forum screened the American filmmaker Laura Poitras' feature-length documentary The Oath, which premi�red last month at the American Sundance Festival, where it received the best photography prize. It is among several curated by the Berlinale from the programmes of Sundance, perhaps the most important independent film festival in the world today. It is also among several features scattered throughout the Berlinale's programmes in and outside the official competition that are about Arabs and Muslims. The screening seemed timely in the wake of Yemen being placed under the spotlight following the attempted blow up of an American passenger plane last Christmas eve by a Yemen-based Qaeda operative. Most of the action takes place in Yemen and most of the film is Arabic-speaking. It features such Yemini characters as Nasser, one of Bin Laden's bodyguards, and Salem, his personal chauffeur. The Oath is the second part of The New American Century, in which Poitras deals with the post-9/11 world from an American perspective. Part I, My Country, My Country (2006) was about the American occupation of Iraq; and it was widely successful, receiving a nomination for the best feature-length documentary at the Oscars which The Oath too may well receive this year. It is a film that avoids absolute statements and value judgements, less concerned with the good and the bad than with the causes of events and why they happened, seeking to present the viewpoint of the enemy too. Without in any way endorsing terrorist operations, it invites its audience to contemplate what the terrorists have to say for themselves and points up the contradiction between the West's belief in the rule of law and its flouting of legal principles in order to protect itself. In subtle and interesting ways it shows how, nearly 10 years on, terrorism has not stopped. Before the opening credits, there is black-and-white footage of Salem being arrested in Afghanistan in November 2001; then we listen to a message from him to Nasser after seven years of detention in Guantanamo, read by an actor. At this point Nasser, who is related to Salem by marriage, asking his child son, "Where is your uncle Salem?" "In jail in Cuba," the boy responds. "Who jailed him?" - "America." "Would you rather be a mechanic or a mujahid?" - "A mujahid." In a tightly constructed drama, the viewer moves from Sanaa where Nasser works as a taxi driver to Guantanamo where Salem is tried by the 2006 law and eventually released in 2009 -- we will see him return to his family in Sanaa. While Nasser speaks throughout the film, however, Salem refuses to speak; and he remains absent from start to finish. Through audiovisual documents featuring Bin Laden and interviews with Nasser, the film depicts the extremist Jihadi viewpoint, but it does not indicate that it differs from the precepts of true Islam. *** This year I was part of the FIPRESCI Jury as a member of the Egyptian Critics Association, which represents the country since 1974; I had been part of that jury as an individual before the federation was founded in 1972 (it is against the regulations of the federation for individuals to be part of the jury where there exist representative bodies in their countries). Upon my suggestion, for 20 years, invitations extended by FIPRESCI to the association were used to enable members who had not attended major international festivals. Yet this year in Berlin, perhaps as a result of the financial crisis, the jury was restricted to critics already independently invited to the festival. The jury was made up of nine members: three were to choose the best film in the competition (together with this writer, the Bulgarian Vladimir Ignatovsky and the Latvian Dita Rietuma); three to choose the best film in the Panorama; and three to choose the best film in the Forum. The proceedings of FIPRESCI juries are available for publication since 1969 -- another response to demands made by the 1968 student revolutionaries. The jury initially shortlisted , Tuan Yuan and the Austrian film Der R�uber (The Robber) by Benjamin Heisenberg. After seeing the Danish filmmaker Pernille Fischer Christensen's A Family, however, it was announced as the winner. A low-budget film that is widely accessible without making any artistic or intellectual compromises, it eschews grand narratives and hot issues, opting for the intricate details of private lives.
