Berlin Talent campus wins hearts

On Thursday, the Berlinale Talent Campus #6 marked the end of another successful edition with a closing ceremony and announcement of the winner of this year's Volkswagen Score Competition.

For six days, 350 up-and-coming international filmmakers were invited to the three theatres of the Hebbel am Ufer. Podium discussions with renowned film experts, excursions, screenings and workshops: over 80 events with a total of 150 experts made up this sixth Campus edition and offered the Talents, Berlinale guests and other interested visitors a diverse programme related to this year's Campus theme "Screening Emotions - Cinema's Finest Asset". Highlights included events with Stephen Daldry, Mike Leigh, Julie Delpy, Sandrine Bonnaire, Stephen Frears, Fernando Eimbcke (Campus Talent in 2003, in Competition with Lake Tahoe) and Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. The actor joined screen colleagues Kate Henshaw-Nuttall and Maria Schrader for the first panel discussion of the week, "Love International", to discuss how love stories on the big screen can influence the lives of the audience - and vice-versa. "My movies are fairy tales, dreams made of dance and music, that speak of the most important things in our lives: love. It can be helpful, at least in movies, if there are the taboos and danger zones that exist in real life relationships. In India this is the case - and our film industry definitely profits from it", says Shah Rukh Khan.

One day - one movie. The Garage Studio, like the Script & Doc Station, the Volkswagen Score Competition, the Talent Project Market, the Talent Press and the Berlin Today Award, is one of the hands-on programmes of the Campus. On the last day of the Campus, all four ‘Garage Flicks' produced during the week - On Time (David Bradley Halls, Canada), It Could Happen to You (Juliane Block, Germany/Malaysia), E.D.D.I. (Victoria Hayford, UK) and The String Puppet (Alexander Frank, Switzerland) were publicly screened in HAU 1. The short films can also be watched online at http://www.berlinale-talentcampus.de/.

The highlight of the final Campus day was the closing and award ceremony for the Volkswagen Score Competition. Campus director Dorothee Wenner and actor Thomas Heinze moderated the evening. Heike Lichte, Head of Volkswagen Public Relations, announced the winner of the competition: Conrad Oleak (Germany) received the award for his new scoring of a film excerpt from Platz im Schatten by Sophie Narr. Mentor and two-time Oscar® award-winner Gustavo Santaolalla and jury members Klaus-Peter Beyer, Martin Steyer and Martin Todsharow were impressed: "Conrad Oleak succeeded in creating his own unique microcosm. Through his use of silence he allowed the film to breathe. He established an acoustic signature to complement the film's visual one." The winner will be invited by Dolby on a one week trip to Los Angeles to visit the best Hollywood sound studios, as Hubert Henle, Director Production Services (UK) at Dolby, made known. Following the award ceremony, the Campus and Volkswagen invited the guests to a closing party in the Adagio club of the Berlinale Palast.

Together with the Federal Foreign Office, the Campus launched the "Focus Africa" initiative in order to take a more in-depth look into contemporary African cinema. Numerous young African Talents were invited to Berlin. As Patience Tawengwa, a Talent from Zimbabwe, put it: "I'm absolutely fond of the Campus, it's a great networking opportunity. I began to establish relationships with artists from all over the world, including with a script consultant from Uganda - we already started to plan a project in Zimbabwe in 2009, absolutely phenomenal!".