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The Berlinale opens with Snow Cake

Sadanand Menon

The 56th Berlin International Festival has 350 films lined up for screening

Berlin: The Golden, Silver and Crystal Bears were the only ones not shivering here as the 56th Berlin International Film Festival got off to a start, a warm one, on Thursday. Almost as if by design, as a metaphor of what Berlin looks like, the Festival opened to great fanfare at the Berlinale Palast with the world premiere of Marc Evan's sumptuously shot, but rather sentimental and melodramatic, Snow Cake. The British-Canadian co-production narrates the story of a man (Alan Rickman) caught up in a series of improbable coincidences, maudlin guilt and a mindlessly cheerful final resolution.

The protagonist in Snow Cake gives a lift to a stranger, a young, chirpy girl. Within minutes, their car is smashed up by a speeding truck. The girl dies on the spot. Deeply traumatised, he traces her address and goes to apologise to her mother, an autistic woman, played by an over-acting Sigourney Weaver. Many-a tear-jerking scene later, we discover that he too had a teenager son who was killed in a similar road accident and that he had avenged it by killing the truck driver. He was just out after having served a prison sentence.

While on that occasion his passion was for revenge, this time round, the film seems to say, he is more inclined to forgiveness. This film could easily have joined the ranks of any number of such films in the Malayalam and Tamil market with themes of improbable coincidences, internal symmetries and concluding epiphanies of soppy sud. Hardly a film suited to open such a cutting-edge event.

Major turnout

However, the astounding number of fans present on Marlene Dietrich Strasse after the noon preview of the film to catch a glimpse of Ms. Weaver and get her autographs signalled a major turnout.

The main Competition section, the Panorama, the Children's Film Festival, the International Forum on New Cinema, the Gay Films or `Teddy' section, all are host to some 28 world premieres and over 30 debut films. The other exciting set of events at the `Talent Campus,' which Indian festivals can certainly learn from, is an excellent interface between over 500 young filmmakers and students of cinema from around the world with some of the world's best editors, cinematographers and scenarists.

The names include Jim Clark, Angie Lam, Sabine Krayenbuhl, Park Chan-wook, Christopher Doyle, Anthony Dodd Mantle and Stephen Warbeck.

The icing on the cake will be an interface on the work of influential Polish director Kieslowski by Wim Wenders, Agnieszka Holland and Andres Veiel, moderated by author and film critic Peter Cowie.

India's official entry for the Competition section this year is Budhadev Dasgupta's Bengali film Kaalpurush. One of the members of the eight-member Festival Jury is the flamboyant producer-director from Mumbai, Yash Chopra.

By the time the curtains come down on this festival after the screening of over 350 films, an abundance of universes of the imagination would have been spun into existence, rippling out into the real world and celebrating and challenging the lives we inhabit.

This year's event is indeed likely to go down as the `Brrrrlinale' after rounds of snowfall through the afternoon spread a white carpet over its famous red carpet on opening day.

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The Berlinale opens with Snow Cake

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