...distinguished, films are displayed competitions that receive the lion's share of media attention while more audacious work is relegated to sidebars that are usually only covered with any depth by specialized film magazines.

The fifty-eighth edition of the Berlinale (February 5th-15th) flaunted all of the strengths and weaknesses of a full-blown megafestival. Although superficially more egalitarian and attentive to the needs of the local audience than Cannes, a young woman who works for the festival confided to me that Berlin delegates a total of thirty-two levels of accreditation for press, industry, and sundry dignitaries. The schism between the overall dross of the competition entries and the relative vibrancy of the primary sidebars, "Panorama"--and especially "the Forum" (whose full name is "The International Forum for New Cinema")--is congruent with the slightly perverse modes of stratification that predominate at the most glittering festivals.

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This being said, a cursory dissection of the competition films provides a useful gloss on what, despite the presence of a few oddball anomalies, is considered commercially viable on the arthouse circuit. The Golden Bear winner, for example, Jose Padilha's Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), was a supremely polarizing film that nevertheless provides insights into the precarious...

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