Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick's 2001 decision to use the festival's competition as an international launchpad for the strongest German cinema has long been a success, and 11 years later it's still paying dividends.
German films have been shining at this year's festival, also known as the Berlin Film Festival, with Christian Petzold's Barbara, set in the former East Germany nine years before the Berlin Wall came down, being much admired.
Apart from praise for Petzold, a critics' favourite in Germany and one of the so-called Berlin School of aesthetically-driven filmmakers, the film's lead actor, Nina Hoss, has emerged as a frontrunner for the acting Silver Bear, which she won previously for the same director's Yella in 2007.
Also worth noting is this year's Berlinale Retrospective, The Red Dream Factory, devoted to the relationship between German and Russian film and the important role it played in the development of cinema aesthetics.
during the 1920s and early 1930s. Among titles included are 1929's Um's tägliche Brot (For Our Daily Bread); 1930's Zeitprobleme. Wie der Arbeiter wohnt (Problems of Our Time. How the Worker Lives); and the celebrated 1924 Russian science fiction film, Aelita.
The film is set in a secluded East German village during the summer of 1980, and portrays the stifling day-to-day grind of Hoss's doctor, who is torn between her desire to flee to the West and her growing attachment to a fellow physician, said Hollywood Reporter, which went on to describe it as a "skillfully mannered, meticulously acted" and "slow-burning Cold War drama that will reward patient viewers with its ultimate emotional payoff."
News agency Reuters meanwhile said Barbara "gave the festival's audience a harrowing reminder of what life was like two decades earlier behind the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall that stood just a few meters to the east of theatres where the Berlinale is based."
Hoss is probably best known to Australian audiences for playing the female lead in Hermine Huntgeburth's 2005 film The White Masai, based on the true story of Carola Lehmann, a German who married a Masai tribesman following a holiday romance.
One of the other two German films in competition Hans-Christian Schmid's intense drama about a family reunion, Home for the Weekend, has also been winning admiration. Screen International called it a gift for its "uniformly excellent" cast. Prominent among the players is Lars Eidinger, who made a big splash on stage as Hamlet in the acclaimed Schaubühne Berlin production seen at the 2010 Sydney Festival.
Family drama is not a new subject for Schmid, whose 2006 film Requiem - an unsensationalist take on the real-life case given the Hollywood treatment in The Exorcism of Emily Rose - gained a Berlin best actress for Sandra Hüller.
