-By Eric Marx

Screening the best films from around the world. That’s the lofty goal the Berlin International Film Festival set for itself since its launch in 1951. Often that’s meant wide-ranging movies with a global perspective, either on a gay/political track in the Panorama section or progressive/experimental fare over in Forum. By contrast, the mishmash Competition Program is an area whose selection criteria defy qualitative coherence.

This year’s contenders for the much-coveted Golden Bear were similarly jumbled. Few titles generated heated discussion, and in awarding the top prize to Turkish drama Bal (Honey), the jury chose a minimalist, slow-moving film whose spare emotional resonance will win few fans at the box office.

Bal tells the story of a young boy as he ventures into the woods to find his missing father, a beekeeper whose sudden disappearance throws into question the family’s means of earning a living. Filming in northeast Turkey’s heavily wooded mountains, director Semih Kaplanoglu expertly uses natural soundscapes to draw out the young protagonist’s sense of wonderment.

These kinds of dialogue-free moments allow the story to unfold in moods that provide authenticity, but they are put to far greater effect in If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, a prison drama about an 18-year-old juvenile delinquent (George Pistereanu) and his desperate bid to escape just five days before his scheduled release from a four-year stint behind bars. It won the runner-up Silver Bear and the Alfred Bauer Award for cinematic innovation and is the first feature film of director Florin Serban, the latest worthy addition to the new wave of Romanian cinema.

Whistle throws a spotlight on a subculture of Romanian youth abandoned by parents working abroad in Western countries as housekeepers and field pickers. When the deadbeat mother returns to take Pistereanu’s beloved younger brother Marius back to Italy to live with her, the 18-year-old juvenile delinquent’s anger explodes onto the screen in two painful confrontations that are the film’s high points.

While the leads are impressive, it is the supporting roles played by a cast of non-professionals, many of whom are inmates of juvenile prisons, which lend the film an acute sense of natural believability. Serban undertook a seven-month casting process, the kind of in-depth treatment which surely impressed jury president Werner Herzog.

Another multiple winner was Russia’s How I Ended This Summer, with well-known director and actor Sergei Puskepalis and young breakout star Grigori Dobrygin sharing the best actor award, and director Alexei Popogrebsky picking up an outstanding artistic contribution prize.

Here again, Herzog and his fellow jury members took a minimalist path in choosing a film with tightly drawn character portraits and a stripped-down storyline shot entirely on location in Chukotka, the easternmost tip of Russia.

This used to be an important research station, but Sergei, an experienced meteorologist and Pavel, a high school graduate, are now the only inhabitants. Soon a ship will arrive to pick up the two men, but not before a surprising psychological twist touched with bouts of madness, extraordinary endurance and a case of suppressed rage which turns into a nail-biting example of hysterical cowardice.

Popogrebsky says he found inspiration in the diaries of N.V. Pinegin, which were written in 1912 when Pinegin accompanied Russian polar explorer Georgio J. Sedov on his tragic attempt to reach the North Pole. Popogrebsky read these diaries as a 14-year-old.

“I have been fascinated ever since,” said Popogrebsky, “by this ability to come to terms with notions of time and space so drastically different from our common scale of hours and minutes, or blocks and metro stops.”

Sparing use of time-lapse photography beautifully captures the sense of fast-changing light and weather patterns. A day up in the Arctic north lasts weeks, since the sun never sets during the summer at this high altitude. And long, wide-angle shots establish a visually stunning, if bleak and desolate, backdrop of thick fog, sharp rocks and crashing waves breaking in off the choppy Arctic Sea. With two compelling lead actors and a muscular outward-bound feel, Summer should find large audiences on the art-house circuit.

The decision to award the Berlinale Silver Bear for Best Director to Roman Polanski for his film The Ghost Writer caused some controversy. The 76-year-old Polish director is under house arrest in Switzerland, facing possible extradition to the United States over a sex offense dating to 1997.

In a statement read out by the film’s producer Alain Sarde, Polanski said: “Even if I could I wouldn’t go, because the last time I went to a festival to get a prize I ended up in jail.”

The art documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop produced another no-show of a different sort with its camera-shy director, British street artist Banksy, who cancelled a scheduled news conference at the last minute. As in Sundance, the film generated strong buzz around never-seen-before footage capturing street artists at work. The questions posed by Banksy in his directorial debut—whether guerrilla art has sold out, what it’s become—are presented through the eyes of Thierry Guetta, a wannabe documentary filmmaker who ends up turning in his camera for the economic lure of spray-can self-promotion.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment was German director Oskar Roehler’s eagerly anticipated film Jud Suss: Rise and Fall. Germany’s contender in the official selection, this wartime drama follows the making of Joseph Goebbels’ now infamous anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Suss. The movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1940 and was a huge commercial hit across Europe, attracting an audience of over 20 million people, while making a star out of its reluctant lead actor, Ferdinand Marian. After the war, Marian’s career was then ruined because of his association with the film.

But Roehler—considered the enfant terrible of the German film industry—cheapens the effort by giving Marion a Jewish wife in order to ratchet up his moral conflict. And the seduction by Marian, in one scene, of the wife of an SS officer who shouts “Jew” lustfully as they make love was just too much cliché for viewers who booed throughout the premiere screening.

As for U.S. fare, movies like Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl, Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give and Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg were well-received but without any rave excitement.

Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, another American entry, touches on same-gender family questions but in an endearingly universal manner which is likely to see mainstream multiplex release. It stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a long-term lesbian couple whose lives are turned upside-down when their two teenage children contact their biological father (Mark Ruffalo). Said Moore: “For me, it is very much the portrait of a marriage and a family and about what it’s like to be married for a long time and to have children. I don’t think it matters what your sexuality is.”

As for humor, in Hans Petter Moland’s Norwegian gangster comedy A Somewhat Gentle Man, Ulrik (Stellan Skarsgård) is the gentle man who, at age 58, doesn’t see himself having much of a future after having completed a 12-year prison sentence for murdering his wife’s lover.  Ulrik is greeted by his old gangster friends urging him to take revenge on the snitch who sent him to prison. Slow-moving and deliberate, Ulrik exudes a calm, principled wisdom, providing a space for his lowlife buddies, a love interest and his car mechanic boss to act out their hilariously grotesque neuroses and slapstick buffoonery.