Here is a little round-up of a few films from a smaller strand. Forgive the relative brevity, but I don't want to fall behind and have this stuff still to right about tomorrow: This maybe the Berlin Film Festival's 61st year, but it is also the 41st year of the event's interesting and diverse strand of smaller features known as the "forum" - or the "international forum of new cinema" to those less keen on brevity. And it is indeed an interesting and eclectic mix on show this year, ranging from Richard Ayoade's Toronto smash Submarine (which is brilliant by the way) to small documentaries like the Korean Cheonggyecheon Medley:A Dream of Iron directed by Kelvin Kyung Kun Park. A Dream of Iron is a lo-fi (in other words very cheap looking) elegy for a passing way of life: that of steel workers in the centre of Seoul, who were historically so vital in the country's rapid economic growth in the latter part of the twentieth century but are now in danger of extinction in an advanced modern city. The narration was a tad too florid for my liking and the imagery often comes across as tacky - with its director using a lot of 1980s pop video-style visual effects - but it makes some interesting insights into the power and social significance of metal and the men who manipulate it. It is often a little too wacky for its own good though and the programme's insistence that "Park has created a documentary milestone" is faintly laughable. Much better, and certainly the best films I've seen at the festival so far aside from True Grit (which I refuse to count seeing as it's out everywhere in the world right now pretty much), are a couple of short feature films from mumblecore director Joe Swanberg. Each running at just over 70 minutes, the prolific Swanberg's Silver Bullets and Art History took me completely by surprise and were both really compelling. (Though, as an aside, the majority of the audience didn't seem to agree with me as a packed theatre was almost empty by the end of the double bill). Both films bare an uncanny number of similarities aside from the cheap, portable mumblecore aesthetic and naturalistic (presumably improvised) dialogue. In both Swanberg plays a film director who gets (too) close to his female lead. In both there is a lot of frank nudity and an almost voyeuristic level of obsession from the director as he watches dailies - usually on his own and in the dark. Both concern low-budget filmmaking and much of the sex takes place among actors within the film, spilling messily over into their "real lives". Yet there are also a lot of differences, tonally and narratively between the two pictures. Silver Bullets is darkly comic as it follows two pretentious directors and an actress who floats between them. It is full of gems, delivered by Swanberg's character (a massive asshole) who talks up the merits of art for art's sake and dismisses the idea of making "entertainment". He is also a complete fraud, who (by his own admission) makes movies to "get close to interesting people" (in other words: to do sex scenes with women he fancies). By contrast his counterpart, making a lowly werewolf movie, relishes entertainment and the movie making process and admits he has pretensions but is embarrassed about them and keeps them to himself. It is interesting how Swanberg's character cheats on his girlfriend in a sanctioned way: on camera and therefore as "work" or "art". Whereas the werewolf film director kisses his leading lady briefly and is rebuked, though the moment has much more emotional honesty and is much less sleazy as a result. The final shot is breathtakingly brilliant and the conversations are impossibly well observed. Art History is less fun, a little longer and works less well as a movie - accounting for the bulk of the walk-outs during the evening. But it was not without its merits. It is an even more sexually frank film than the other, with a really inspired basic concept which sees two actors meet and perform an intense love scene. They hit it off so well that they, between takes, become real lovers only for the on-screen relationship to sour. Is the art compromised by their off-screen history is one of the central questions raised. It is also brutally honest about the reality of sex in movies, in all its awkward glory. It is a much more straight-faced movie than Silver Bullets, and could be accused of being a much more ponderous affair - and to its detriment. The takes are longer and the jump-cuts seen sparingly in the other film are wholly absent here. It is interesting that a director has made two such similar films in the same year, yet each is so subtly different. Clearly not to everyone's taste, and if you dislike "mumblecore" movies then avoid like the plague, but these two Joe Swanberg films saved my film-going day here in Berlin. They showed me that the best films might not lie in the competition, but in this intriguing band of films that make up the 41st forum.
A regular film and video games contributor for What Culture, Robert also writes reviews and features for The Daily Telegraph, GamesIndustry.biz and The Big Picture Magazine as well as his own Beames on Film blog. He also has essays and reviews in a number of upcoming books by Intellect.
Here is a little round-up of a few films from a smaller strand. Forgive the relative brevity, but I don't want to fall behind and have this stuff still to right about tomorrow: This maybe the Berlin Film Festival's 61st year, but it is also the 41st year of the event's interesting and diverse strand of smaller features known as the "forum" - or the "international forum of new cinema" to those less keen on brevity. And it is indeed an interesting and eclectic mix on show this year, ranging from Richard Ayoade's Toronto smash Submarine (which is brilliant by the way) to small documentaries like the Korean Cheonggyecheon Medley:A Dream of Iron directed by Kelvin Kyung Kun Park. 
A Dream of Iron is a lo-fi (in other words very cheap looking) elegy for a passing way of life: that of steel workers in the centre of Seoul, who were historically so vital in the country's rapid economic growth in the latter part of the twentieth century but are now in danger of extinction in an advanced modern city. The narration was a tad too florid for my liking and the imagery often comes across as tacky - with its director using a lot of 1980s pop video-style visual effects - but it makes some interesting insights into the power and social significance of metal and the men who manipulate it. It is often a little too wacky for its own good though and the programme's insistence that "Park has created a documentary milestone" is faintly laughable. Much better, and certainly the best films I've seen at the festival so far aside from True Grit (which I refuse to count seeing as it's out everywhere in the world right now pretty much), are a couple of short feature films from mumblecore director Joe Swanberg. Each running at just over 70 minutes, the prolific Swanberg's Silver Bullets and Art History took me completely by surprise and were both really compelling. (Though, as an aside, the majority of the audience didn't seem to agree with me as a packed theatre was almost empty by the end of the double bill). 
