Max Sobol at the Berlin film festival: Monday

I manage to start up an email dialogue with a London-based company about the film. Sadly, they’re predominantly involved in sales, but they seem interested and at least I can get some advice from them for later down the line.

At the Talent Campus again for most of the day. The first talk is about fate within cinema, the panel includes a broad range of internationals; a French director working in Israel, a Nigerian producer, Kosovan actress and Indian producer. I get very excited about the actress as she’s just appeared in the Dardenne Brothers film, The Silence Of Lorna. They made the Palme D’Or winning Rosetta, which if you haven’t seen you should -it’ll knock your socks off! It’s great taking in the perspectives of these four very different people from four very different countries and interesting to see what their priorities are.

Tilda Swinton appears at five and the entire audience goes weak at the knees. I keep expecting someone to shout out ‘We love you Tilda!’, we’re like a group of teenage girls at a Take That concert. She’s very down to earth, very well spoken and incredibly intelligent -I didn’t realise that she had originally studied to be a writer at Cambridge. She spends the whole talk trying to convince us that she knows nothing about acting, she calls it “dressing up and playing”, but keeps accidentally dropping flashes of a brilliance. It’s great to see someone at the top of the industry with a sense of perspective; people can get a bit too carried away with how important this whole shenanigan is.

I’m off now to see another short film screening, more on that tomorrow.

NEWS! (ish)

MOODYSON BOOEDYSON POTTER ROTTER
I had a chat with a radio reporter and I heard that Both Mamoth and Rage, by Lukas Moodyson and Sally Potter Respectively, received a bad response at their press screenings. Mamoth apparently went down so badly that the audience booed. Someone said that they remembered a similar thing happening at a Jenifer Lopez film in a past year, not a great comparison for Moodyson. I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve wrapped my eyes around it personally.

EVERYONE IS FREAKING OUT ABOUT MONEY!
Predictably, there is lots of chatter about how the film industry will be affected by the old global recession. Lots of talk about the need for greater creativity in business etc. This festival is the first real baromiter of what’s happening in the market and up at the European Film Market there is positive spin being put on things, but a noticeably quieter floor than usual. Great year to come and try and convince someone to give me £400,000 then.

We’ll talk more about the effect of the recession later. Until tomorrow – farewell!

Posted by Max Sobol
(image: Arta Dobroshi, in the Silence of Lorna)

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