KEY POINTS:
These are dizzying times for film, and this year's Berlinale felt like a party at the edge of a precipice. Stars like Kate Winslet (for The Reader) and Michelle Pfeiffer (for Cheri) paraded dutifully, Tilda Swinton was president of the jury, more film buyers turned up and the programme was better than usual.
But the sense of financial peril remained. Rumour had it that the market was full of creditors chasing down debts. Leading US sales companies were busy working out which European non-payers to blacklist while banks continue to shut their film finance arms.
Berlin is a perfect bellwether for the state of the industry, particularly "speciality" cinema (anything non-Hollywood) because the European film market rivals the film programme in importance, and the films are mostly selected from those that have no chance of being at Cannes.
And yet, bad or good, the films were easier to enjoy than last year's grim parade.
BBC Films' An Education, for instance, lived up to its Sundance hype.
This delicately told age-gap drama from Denmark's Lone Scherfig sees 23-year-old Carey Mulligan stepping deftly either side of the child-adult divide as the 17/18-year-old schoolgirl who finds herself being charmed by Peter Sarsgaard's older man.
A sharp critique of the meaning of learning, An Education couldn't be more timely.
Another foreign director working in Britain was Rachid Bouchareb, whose London River was warmly received.
It features Sotigui Kouyate as a French-resident Muslim and Brenda Blethyn as a Christian, both of whom travel to London in search of missing children after the 7/7 bombings. They meet in Finsbury Park, north London, and find ways past prejudice to help one another.
There were mass walk-outs too from Sally Potter's fashion industry drama Rage, yet for me her boldness in making a film purely of talking heads set against variously coloured screens deserved at least respect for innovation.
Performances varied wildly but model Lily Cole's naturalism was affecting, Jude Law was at his best in drag as model Minx, and Judi Dench gripped as a fashion critic who gets fired.
Berlin's best film for me had no stars in it. Katalin Varga is a brilliantly atmospheric Hungarian-British-Romanian production about a peasant woman whose husband kicks her out when he discovers their 11-year-old son is not his but the result of a rape.
The mother, played with electrifying presence by Hilda Peter, takes the boy by horse and cart up into the Carpathian mountains, where the forests seem to speak to her, and finds the men who raped her.
- OBSERVER
