BY PETER BOWEN

At dinner with several festival programmers during this year’s Berlinale International Film Festival (Feb. 9-19), conversation turned to festivals in general. “Sundance is for the filmmakers, and Cannes is for the press,” quipped one guest. And Berlin? “For the industry.” This year, that summation seems all the more true. As the festival continues to settle into the modern (albeit antiseptic) exhibition and offices spaces around Potsdamer Platz, the European Film Market has found a new home for itself in the grand Martin-Gropius-Bau, a rebuilt 19th-century museum just a few blocks away from the festival itself.

The emphasis this year, as it often is at Berlin, was on international politics. The jury president, actress Charlotte Rampling, announced this year’s winners as having “reflected the mood of the world today.” Some films demonstrated that “mood” as dire. The Golden Bear went to Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica, which revisited the horrors of the Bosnia war through one woman’s eyes. And the Silver Bear for Directing went to Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross for their docudrama The Road to Guantanamo, about the Tipton Three, a group of Pakistani-English youth who were arrested while in Afghanistan and held for more than two years in the Guantanamo prison camp before being unceremoniously released and returned to Britain. Other awards reflected the eccentric, rather than violent, mood of the world. Jafar Panahi’s oddball Iranian women’s soccer film Offside and Pernille Fischer Christensen’s transsexual Danish comedy A Soap tied for the Silver Bear. Sandra Hüller’s performance as a possessed young girl in Hans-Christian Schmid’s exorcism drama Requiem won her a Silver Bear for acting, and Moritz Bleibtreu won the male equivalent for playing the racist, randy teacher in Oskar Roehler’s vastly disappointing adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Elementary Particles.

Besides the world and European politics, the festival offered lessons in the politics of film. In the 10-page official brochure (Preistraeger) listing the myriad festival awards, the only American film of note was Robert Altman’s radio-show drama A Prairie Home Companion, which took home the Berliner Morgenpost Readers’ Prize. The Competition Section hosted the usual mix of high-profile American studio and independent work — including Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, Bennett Miller’s Capote and Terrence Malick’s The New World — all of which got a festival push before their German release. But few American independent films were found in the Panorama and Forum, categories historically supportive of such work.

Viewers interested in seeing new American work needed to pony up for a Market pass. The expansion of the Market, this year housing more than 250 participating companies from some 51 countries, also brought an increase in American films and sales reps. Within the multifloored building, the Weinstein Company and Focus Features took over grand suites of rooms, with the latter even serving as a photo backdrop for new chancellor Angela Merkel’s ceremonial visit.

In the Competition, with 5 of the 19 films being from Germany, the focus for festival director Dieter Kosslick was clearly local. But this cinematic collection did not mark the start of another German new Wave. Instead these films were positively nihilistic. The most obvious was The Elementary Particles, which simply translated Houllebecq’s nasty French worldview into German. Other films were even more direct in connecting sexual obsession with philosophical gloom. Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will plays out the age-old Calvinist theological struggle in the story of a serial rapist desperate to find a way back to normalcy, and Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing) dramatizes the elusive unpredictability of desire as a happily married part-time fireman inexplicably falls for a woman in a neighboring town and in the process ruins all of their lives.

Not all European stories were so pessimistic. Przemyslaw Wojcieszek’s The Perfect Afternoon uses the drama of an impending marriage to argue the case for Poland’s optimistic economic and cultural future. And Robert I. Douglas’s Eleven Men Out, about the hijinks of a gay Icelandic soccer team, simply reeks of good feelings and happy possibilities. Lukas Moodysson’s Container, a feature-length experimental piece that overlays a series of B&W footage with Jena Malone’s rambling voiceover about transgendered identity, Paris Hilton and new shoes, may not be obviously optimistic, but it certainly is another step in Moodysson’s brave march toward unmarketability.

Berlin has always been a strong supporter of odd, different and otherwise queer cinema. This year marked the 20th anniversary of the Teddy Award, an honor initiated by programmers of lesbian and gay film festivals and institutionalized into an industry-recognized mark of honor. To celebrate this bold queer bear, the festival programmed a sidebar retrospective of prizewinning films from the first winner (Pedro Almodóvar for The Law of Desire) to more recent recipients. This year the Teddy for best feature went to Auraeus Solito’s The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, a neorealist drama of a young teen finding solace and romance in the arms of a policeman. The Teddy for best doc went to Olivier Meyrou’s Beyond Hatred, a quietly paced exploration of the emotional damage the murder of a gay man in Reims, France, causes to his family. Interesting that the 20th anniversary also marked a shift from issues of sexuality to those of gender. Mexican director Julián Hernández, who won the Teddy in 2003 for his A Thousand Clouds of Peace, was back with Broken Sky, a richly romantic tale of two Mexican boys that expresses desire and rejection in terms that owe as much to modern dance as to melodrama.

If there was any storytelling trend to be spotted this year, it was the tendency towards narrative minimalism — stories with little character development, plot line or backstory. The most glaring, and maligned, example was Roderigo Moreno’s El Custodio, a study of an Argentinean bodyguard that ends with an inexplicable explosion, a film that one critic referred to as a joke with a 90-minute buildup. Also from Argentina was Alejo Moguillansky and Fermín Villaneuva’s The Prisoner, in which the lives of three young kids in Buenos Aires are filmed with little rhyme or reason as to why.

This same disdain for context showed up in many documentaries, generating a trend that one critic jokingly dubbed “documentary primitive.” German filmmaker Thomas Arslan’s From Far Away, for example, proposes to be a cultural voyage through contemporary Turkey, taking the viewer in effect from Europe into the Islamic East. But the film only delivers a choppy, elliptical travelogue with a video camera bouncing along on the dashboard of a car. Likewise the Brazilian-German doc Acts of Men, directed by Kiko Goifman, wants to explore the social and political consequences of a massacre near Rio in which 29 people were gunned down by a death squad with ties to the police, but what unfurls is a raggedy video catching the antics of local characters. And approaching Thierry Michel’s Congo River: Beyond Darkness, I hoped for something out of Jean Rouch or Joseph Conrad, but I walked away from a rambling trip on a barge with a garishly over-written voiceover.

A few of the most interesting films in Berlin this year, all dealing with stories from the Middle East, retold familiar political tales in a very different way. Dalia Hagar and Vardit Bilu’s Close to Home captures the tension of life in contemporary Israel though a story of two 18-year-old girls assigned to patrol the streets of Jerusalem as part of their military service. Mani Haghighi’s Men at Work may have been the highest concept film: a group of upper-middle -class friends stop on their way back to Tehran from a ski trip to try to move a rock that juts out from the side of the road. What starts as folly soon turns mythic and epic. Marwan Hamed’s three-hour Egyptian epic Omaret Yakobean, much like a Once Upon a Time in Cairo, manages to take the pulse of the current Egyptian world through sprawling melodramatic plot lines that include the rise of Islamic fundamentalist, political corruption, police-brutality class struggle, homosexuality and terrorism: a film as complex and vast as the festival itself.