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18 News maltatoday SUNDAY 4 MARCH 2018 WE shut the doors to the taxi and look up; we are in the spaceship in the middle of the city. Berlin's Pots- damer Platz is a hyper-modern com- mercial centre of the German capi- tal, rising like a glass-and-metallic Phoenix from a post-war scorched earth. It is also the unofficial seat of the Berlin International Film Fes- tival, for whose 68th edition I'm graciously invited by the German Foreign Office's erstwhile cultural outreach arm, the Goethe Institute. A well-curated grassy mound framed by blue water pipes separates our hotel from the backside of the Platz commercial core. One of our friendly and diligent guides would go on to explain that no, the pipes aren't an art installation – Berlin simply has to organise its municipal plumb- ing in this way because its ground- water level is just too high. Yes, this vibrant and cosmopolitan European capital – a capital of culture all year round, in so many ways – is basically a swamp. But it's clear that a tenac- ity to simply make things happen is what helps it rise out of that same swamp day in and day out. It's a te- nacity to dream, even if the stark skin of the city appears to be an affront to the twisting, winding idea of what we expect dreams to be like: the phan- toms of our subconscious that create indelible images. In short, the very heart of cinema, which we have all been gathered here to celebrate. >>> • <<< The hotel has a soundtrack. True to the Nordic provenance of its brand, its corridors are draped in wallpaper evoking endless leafy forests popu- lated by tall, thin trees. But a random array of ambient noises will envelop your ears as soon as you exit your room – chirping birds and hooting owls, the occasional rustle of leaves and that calming "OooooOooooh" effect that's the universal marker of the meditative state. I've always hated flying, and even the roughly three-hour trip from Malta to Berlin is enough to bring on effects akin to jet lag. I emerge into the forest-corri- dor for a second time – I forgot my festival pass the first time around – and just as I'm about to head down for the elevator, I spot one of my would-be delegate colleagues. We would have seen each other on a booklet diligently (that word will crop up again and again) prepared for us by the Institut a week or so prior to the trip, and I spot this guy as being the Bosnian of our group. We greet each other in a common tongue – I made it clear that I'm of Serbian origin on the WhatsApp group that's created for us upon ar- rival – and I can't help but slot him in as a typical specimen of his breed of ex-Yugoslav: approachable, imp- ish – always rearing to make a good- humoured joke. We descend down to the lobby to meet the others for dinner, and when a young Saudi Arabian film- maker apologises for her lack of knowledge of the region, she asks, "But aren't you guys neighbours?" "No," my new Bosnian friend shoots back, a wry grin having set- tled all but permanently on his face, "We hate each other". >>> • <<< The group, we soon learn, is al- most comically diverse – a United Colours of Benetton-style global gathering which would view any kind of tribally-mandated suspicion of the Other as being ridiculous at best, dangerous at worst. To ham- mer it even more closely to home, at dinner I find myself seated next to a Croatian counterpart who, being one of the only other members of the press in the group, ends up be- ing my main film-going companion for a couple of screenings that fateful week. For the rest, I'm flanked by the Italian and Turkish representatives – a fact that gives our Bosnian friend another chance to crack a joke. "The Mediterranean people just gathered together... come on, guys, this is so boring!" That's just before our hosts clink the glass for our attention... only to evoke every more national stereo- types in jest. "Well, the good news is that you're all in Germany. And we're so glad to have you and host you here. The bad news is... you're in Germany. Which means that tomorrow's 08:30 ap- pointment will in fact start at 08:30." >>> • <<< And so it goes. Our dreams are in- terrupted early, to be remembered as faint images over a bountiful breakfast buffet; while we discuss the previous day's events and any film screenings we manage to sneak into in between. (This becomes some- thing of a running joke: the fact that we have to squeeze films in between other activities when we're here for a film festival). It soon becomes clear that the group is united in its love for film but varied in its priorities. Us film critics are keen to just see what's out there that we can report back home about, but the filmmakers and festival organisers are on the look- out for Berlinale parties... one night it's the Portuguese, one night it's the Serbians. As someone who writes about film and is only just starting to experiment with writing for film, I feel somewhat disconnected from this networking rigmarole. So when I'm not watching films, I'm taking in the city. And one thing becomes abundant- ly clear pretty early on as we explore Berlin: it's a city resistant to dreams in more ways than one. Or at least, Berlin's dreams are not dreams as we know them. This only has a little to do with the city's stark architec- tural designs, as I mentioned earlier (meaning that they're closer to the dreams of the mathematical block- buster mind of a Christopher Nolan – whose 'mind-heist' film Inception will have us believe that concave- twisting glass buildings are the ex- tent of dreamy psychedelia). Sure, the classically German adherence to efficiency is very much in evidence, even as the wintry woodlands that ring parts of the city – with trees stripped bare of foliage and caked with the remnants of last night's snow – evoke Grimm's fairytale im- agery or, to bring up a more recent but just as pungent reference, the creepy and time-bending German Netflix series Dark, whose showrun- ners were also at the festival to de- liver a talk on story structure – one of the many events I failed to nab tickets for in time. But for all these hints of mystery, it's deliberate and clear-eyed hu- man impositions which engulf the city, in ways that are often inspiring and beautiful but which leave little room for the imagination. And if we are to speak of dreams from the lens of one of their most famous and enduring philosophers – Sigmund Freud – contemporary Berlin stands as precisely a rigid, assertive bulwark against the kind of subconscious de- mons Freud wrote about. The fallout of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall are memorialised and dissected in public, with in- formative, accessible and – above all – harrowing displays which appear to state in no uncertain terms that, "No, we do not want the repressed to return." >>> • <<< But for all of their fetishisation of accuracy and punctuality, the Ger- mans can in fact mine the trenches of the dreamlands like it's nobody's business. And their pioneering ped- igree in the world of cinema bears this out with unique force. The legacy of what was subsequently dubbed the era of German Ex- pressionism gave us hallucinatory, haunting masterpieces like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Murnau's vampire classic Nosferatu and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Stark, black- and-white silent films that play like gilded, carved-out nightmares put on beautiful display. Our contemporary desire for natu- ralistic representation, exacerbated only by the obsessive and constant filming and recording of day-to-day minutiae on mobile phones – a real- ity exploited beautifully in one of my favourite Berlinale 68 films, Jenna Bass' South African body swapping young adult dramedy High Fantasy – often makes me nostalgic for a time when the German Expression- ist style was in fact the norm. The Berlin International Film Festival is run on dreams, as TEODOR RELJIC finds out during a trip to the German capital where he celebrated the art of cinema with an international group of varied but largely like-minded filmmakers and cineastes Dreaming of a kinder world Though centralised in the glittering and ultra-modern Potsdamer Platz, the Berlin International Film Festival takes place in cinemas across the entire German capital The customary morning queue for Berlinale tickets