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Most of the more rewarding movies screening outside this year's Berlin competition were modest in budget, scale and ambition. That said, however, Shane Meadows' 'Somers Town' (below) - though funny, touching and very watchable - is probably too modest for its own good. Expanded from a short and including footage intended as promotional material for the Eurostar rail terminal recently opened just south of its London setting, the film still manages to feel a bit stretched at 75 minutes. About the blossoming of a fragile friendship between a cocky mid-teen who has fled Nottingham for the London streets and the seemingly more sensitive son of a Polish construction worker, the movie uses black-and-white digital images to create a melancholy mood of urban lyricism. But while good gags arise from the lads' dealings with one another, their encounter with a slightly older French waitress doesn't ring true and Meadows resorts too often to music-driven montage sequences to pad out the skinny storyline.
Seyfi Teoman's 'Summer Book' is more meticulous in construction, no matter that its account of the experiences of a family in a small southern Turkish town during the youngest son's school holidays is related so gently that it takes a while to notice there's any plot at all; even when the most dramatic event in the film occurs, it takes place offscreen, after which life for most of the family and their friends continues fundamentally unaltered. But Teoman exhibits enormous sensitivity to the rhythms and textures of provincial life, and while this feature debut lacks the poetic resonance of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's quite similar work, its low-key intelligence bodes well for the future.
Travelogues don't usually feature in Berlin, but then Guy Maddin's 'My Winnipeg' - arguably his most extraordinary film to date - is no ordinary travelogue. Maddin's latest semi-parodic blending of silent-era stylistics, lurid melodramatics, surreal philosophical speculation and innuendo-drenched analogy finds him waxing lyrical and frequently hilarious on the pros and cons of his Manitoba home, a snow-blown metropolis where, if we're to credit his Freudian narration (delivered - quite wonderfully - live in Berlin), couples court around dead horses' corpses and sleepwalkers number ten times the national average. Dazzlingly imaginative, flagrantly absurd and yet clearly very heartfelt, 'My Winnipeg' was my own Berlin highlight.