I feel like one lucky kid;

By some happenstance my time Berlin overlapped perfectly with the Berlinale Internationale Filmfestspiele. It’s the world’s most attended festival, with near to 400 films screening and hundreds of thousands of visitors.

The advertising for the fest was eye-catching to say the least; the city’s icon and animal on it’s coat-of-arms is the bear. With relatively inexpensive (though sometimes hard-to-get) tickets, the Festival is open to all levels of the public.

All in all I ended up catching four films; two with my Contemporary European Cinema class: Je ne suis pas mort and  Ze Marksa… and two on my own: …Moddhikhane Char and Side Effects.

I saw the first two films at the Cubixx theater near Alexanderplatz; nothing too special except that it’s built vertically and our theater was on perhaps the equivalent of the sixth or seventh story; it was also tremendously large with gorgeous, comfortable seats. €3.95 will get you either a water or a beer, Hello Germany.

Char I saw at the Delphi Filmpalast near Zoologischer Garten- it’s old and beautiful. The last film, Side Effects, I caught at Friedrichstadt-Palast. It’s a gigantic, state-of-the-art 1,900 seat theater with the largest stage in the world at 2,854 square meters of performing space. Furthermore, the projection equipment is supposed to be the best available, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful projections I’ve ever seen. Jaw dropping stats aside, the movie was great.