Berlin International Film Festival 2000

Nick Roddick, Moving Pictures veteran interviewer, will be interviewing the well-known and the budding new talent, as well as the other key players at this 50th Berlinale edition.

If you haven't seen the poster, you must have been walking around with your eyes down. It's everywhere, including the places where you thought they couldn't put posters. There's even, so I'm told, one in the ladies' loo of the Moving Pictures office.

Drive east on the Leipziger Strasse at night and the name is projected, eight stories high, on the side of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute. It's hard to escape Tuvalu. And once Veit Helmer, its director, has locked on to you, it's not easy to escape him, either.

Having spent 10 years of his life thinking about, writing, trying to raise the money for and casting his film, Helmer has since the international premiere in San Sebastián last September been devoting his not inconsiderable energy to promoting it.

Tuvalu screens here in the New German Films sidebar. It was, claims Helmer, promised a Panorama slot last summer, provided he didn't show it at any other festival first but he did, so he didn't get it. It's a film that divides people, but no one can deny that it is strange, surreally beautiful and quite sure of its world view.

Somewhat less prepossessing, but equally sure of his world view, Helmer reels off Tuvalu's festival career. "The film was premiered in San Sebastián," he says. "It won a FIPRESCI award in Ghent and an audience award in Kiev. It's been to London, Chicago... I guess around 20 festivals, and we got 12 awards. It won the Kodak Vision Award in Slamdance.

"It's strange to say, but I wouldn't have had this buzz here [every screening has been packed] if the film hadn't been shown at the other festivals. To be honest, I was really disappointed at not being selected for Venice. But now, looking back, maybe it was better for the film: it's better to build up than to fall down."

I first encountered Helmer when he called me back in November, trying to book advertising for the film in the Film Market Catalogue or rather, to talk a discount which he could then take to the sales agent, Bavaria.

My next sighting was in Rotterdam where, resplendent in a new suit, he had a party thrown in his honour by the Goethe Institut. Finally, he turns up in the Moving Pictures office and button-holes me about the film.

"The idea came when I was swimming in an indoor pool in Hamburg," he recalls. "I said, 'This is the perfect location for a feature film'. It was a very mystical place, with hallways and staircases. But I had to do a couple of short films before I met my writer, Michaela Beck."

The shorts were universally well-received, but they didn't immediately open doors. "It was a long journey," he says. "After my shorts, all the distributors said, 'Buddy, we will make our first feature together'. But it was a major which actually put up the money: sometimes, answers come from the direction you would least expect. Christoff Ott from Buena Vista [Germany] gave me a minimum guarantee. That convinced Filmboard Berlin Brandenburg to give me money, and I got some money from the commissioning editor at Sudwest Rundfunk. But it's a very small budget $900,000 and I got lots of support from my actors."

The casting, too, wasn't like other films. Tuvalu is made in an invented language, which meant Helmer didn't have to worry about whether his actors spoke German, English or whatever.

"Our dogma," he says, "is to use dialogue only if it can be understood in every country of the world. The film, as it is shown in Berlin, can also be shown in China and South America and anywhere else without subtitling or dubbing."

By his own reckoning, Helmer saw 1,100 people in 12 countries before finally casting French actor Denis Lavant (Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf) and Tadjikistan's Chulpan Hamatova (Luna Papa) in the lead roles. The film was shot in Sofia because, claims Helmer, it was the only place he could find a swimming pool sufficiently dilapidated yet still capable of holding water. But Bulgaria turned out to have other advantages.

"Film is disappearing," he says, "so we tried to work with the old techniques matte painting, for instance. My art director, Alexander Manasse, put glass in front of the camera and painted out all the buildings we didn't want to show.

"There were no computers used for making the film. We had a camera which was new in the twenties. We had arc lights which had to be switched off every 20 minutes to load them with carbon. And we couldn't find an anamorphic lens for the underwater scene, so I had to shoot it with a normal one."

The plan was to convert the image to anamorphic. But then, when it showed up on the editing table with the normal image viewed through an anamorphic lens, Helmer liked the result so much he left it. "As the camera is always turning around, it's a very surreal effect which nobody can understand how we got," he says.

For his next film, Helmer will be aiming for something less universal in terms of language. He is working with regular Paskaljevic and Kusturica collaborator Gordan Mihic. "He already wrote the most funny dialogue," he says. "But I don't think I ever want to use dialogue as a main tool to tell narration. I think I like to tell stories with images first, and give the dialogue another function."

* Footnote: in the time it has taken me to write this, Veit Helmer has called twice to see when his profile was going to run. Here it is Veit. Keep on trucking.