I am a Berliner

Berlin is always a special city, but to be there this February during the 75th Berlinale, big cinematic festival, it was a special experience.

Every corner, every shop window, every place where a poster could be hung was marked by something reminiscent of the Festival. Wherever you were in the city, everything would remind you that the Berlinale was in progress and that you should join it - you couldn't see where the city started and where the Festival started.

On the other hand, Berlin in this situation has not lost any of its disheveledness and charm that make it so attractive. Those who are in it for the first time must have fallen into a trap, but the most beautiful kind when you don't know where to go first, but you want to be everywhere. And not only do you want it, but you are constantly afraid that you will miss something, that you will miss something and that you will leave the city regretting something. Those who have returned to Berlin do not repeat this mistake, especially if they are there for the Berlinale. It's a big deal to strike a balance between watching movies and being in the city, and so some schedule had to be prepared in advance. It is enough to look at the fact that around 300 films were shown at the Festival, and you will understand what I am talking about. You can't watch all the movies you want, nor can you go to all the places you want or think you want in Berlin.

This is my third visit to Berlin, and the Berlinale is just an occasion, a good excuse to breathe the Berlin air again. Everything is there like last time, and everything is new at the same time. Because now this is Berlin that lives through the film, in all its fullness. And the film often knows how to be more real than life. Therefore, he asked himself a big question - how not to be just a mere protagonist in all that and how not to be just a secondary character in one small scene of that movie called Berlin this February.

So finding a balance between being in movie theaters and on the streets was what was needed. This was supported by the fact of how the functioning of the Berlinale was conceived. Berlin, as a big city, has many cinemas and it was a shame not to use them to show films from the Festival. The central meeting place was Potsdamer Platz, where there are several halls, as well as the main one, the Berlinale Palastom. There, every day, you could see rivers of people coming out of the first morning screenings as if it were the most normal thing in the world, something that happens every day.

However, the real pleasure was still being in completely unknown spaces because it would also mean going to parts of the city that you had probably never been to before. And Berlin is a city you don't need a map for. Wherever you go, you will be in the right place - you will come across a space where films from the Festival are shown. Wandering through Berlin thus becomes a kind of pilgrimage to films that, whether you like it or not, constantly come to meet you.

Thus, films were shown, among other things, on Alexanderplatz, a place that is a veritable beehive. Endless columns of people are coming to meet you, it's crowded, but at the same time everything is in the best order because it's as if everyone has their own direction, moving along the drawn lines that they follow and from which they don't deviate.

From there you can go to a slightly more western part of Berlin and thus have a different viewing experience. One of the cinemas there is an old fashioned one, polished, made for the neighborhood it is in, for the people it is closest to, and therefore they come to it if they want to see just a few films at the Festival. In it, I will hear a big ovation for Želimir Žilnik and thus make sure how much the Berlin audience really knows and appreciates him.

A little further north, there is a cinema that is part of the Academy of Arts and whose hall is designed for showing films, but also for staging theatrical plays, and which exudes sophistication like the entire building. I will be there, at the screening of the restored copy Dirty Harry, to have the opportunity to meet people who saw that film at the time of its premiere, fifty years ago. At the same time, two young people will sit next to them, whose parents were probably not even born at the same time.

Not far from this one, there is also a more modern type cinema, with several halls that do not have the uniformity that you would imagine in such cinemas, but a tradition is woven into them that says that films have been shown in that area for more than a hundred years. There, thanks to the simple question of whether the chair next to her is occupied, the conversation will begin with the lady who has been coming to the Festival for 35 years and mostly watches films that will not be distributed but are shown only at the Festival, and therefore she is also asking for certain recommendations from you, whom she has just met. And so it will seem to you that everyone who is in Berlin at that moment is curious and insatiable of movies.

Then, in a slightly more eastern part of Berlin, you can find yourself at a screening in a huge, oval hall that will be largely filled with children. A film about a boy growing up in the circus will be shown, and the reactions of all those children will be priceless. The power of the film image will be very well seen through it. It's probably almost everyone's first time at the Berlinale, and they probably don't know what it is at all, but what they see on the really big screen will cause undisguised reactions.

In fact, the audience structure at the movies is a cross-section of Berlin in miniature. You can look around you, observe all these faces and wonder if they are from Berlin or came just for the Berlinale, if they follow films at all or only watch them when the Festival is taking place, if they came running from a past screening, or after touring the city they decided to come to a movie. What is certain is that they are all Berliners, at least while they are in Berlin. This fact makes it great because at the same time they will accept everyone who comes to it as their own, but with all the individual characteristics that all those people carry in themselves, and bring to it. And this is noticeable at every step, on every Berlin sidewalk.

One personal experience best speaks in favor of this. You are walking around Berlin, quite casually, without any goal or meaning, and at one point a man speaks to you, in English. He wants to know the easiest way to get to the Technical University because a large part of the public transport is on strike, so he is not sure which active lines run there. When you tell him that you are not sure either and that you would have to study it further, he will be a little surprised. "Aren't you from Berlin?", they will say. And you will just smile sweetly and thank for the compliment. And you will think to yourself, without any hesitation:

I am a Berliner.