Berlin International Film Festival

TAKE ONE, June-Sept, 2003 by Tom McSorley

By design and by geopolitical accident, the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival did register the importance of moving towards tolerance in our troubled world. At another level, it also revealed that we are now rapidly approaching the end of filmmaking, per se. Almost every "film" I watched was shot with a digital camera and transferred to 35 mm, with varying degrees of aesthetic success. From Canada to China, from Russia to Hollywood, the cinematic apparatus is going, going, gone digital. The new image-making technologies promise much, but, as always, must be applied to meaningful stories; and such is not always the case in Berlin and elsewhere. Nevertheless, some things remain the same in the "new Berlin": those unmistakable ravens still mass in the cold skies over the city; the Potsadmer Platz is still ugly; and we still huddle in the cinemas dreaming of better times and better films. In 2003, however, we had something else to wish for--that those same skies where ravens fly will not soon be filled with missiles.

Tom McSorley is the executive director of the Canadian Film Institute in Ottawa and a contributing editor to Take One.