Return to Babelsberg
In a maximum security Roman prison. Although held to be a startling upset by the German press, the decision seems in retrospect to be hardly surprising. In its blurring of the border between the real and the represented, this film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, shares an aesthetic attitude towards the movie medium harbored by the chairman of the jury, British filmmaker Mike Leigh, whose intense and often unrelenting depictions of working class life are known for their gritty realism.A film festival such as Berlin is not only concerned with the latest products, but also with cinema history. These retrospective impulses also beat the advertising drum. 2012 marks the centenary of the founding of Germany’s major film studio in the town of Babelsberg beyond what were then the outskirts of Berlin. In honor of the anniversary year the festival screened a series of films stretching across the history of the studio, which remains to do this day Europe’s biggest. Friedrich Murnau,
