It's all about meeting people at the Global Speed Matching session. © David Ausserhofer, Berlinale 2013

By Kaleem Aftab, Berlin International Film Festival 2013

The Berlinale Talent Campus gathers together 300 emerging filmmakers from around the world during the Berlin Film Festival in an effort to introduce them likeminded individuals and help make those tricky first leaps into the film industry.

The broad-ranging event is open to actors, directors, cinematographers, distributors, editors, film critics, producers, production designers, score composers, sound designers and screenwriters. What’s amazing about the Talent Campus is that the event is not a one-size fits all event, for example, those with films at rough cut stage are given advice by professional mentors so that their films have a better chance of moving from the editing suite into the cinema, while actors are paired with a crew who are encouraged to shoot a short film during the 6 day event. There is quite literally something for everyone.

There are also talks and workshops with legends of the film industry. This year, highlights include discussions from luminaries such as Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, the great Director of Photography Mathew Libatique, the only woman to win a Palme d’Or Jane Campion, British social-realist Ken Loach, and acting legend Anita Ekberg. There were so-called ‘speed matching’ events in which directors met with cinematographers, producers and screenwriters. There were workshops about independent filmmaking, film financing and distribution as well as editing and sound studios. Given the status of the campus, it’s unsurprising to learn that there were 4,443 applications vying for a coveted spot on the 11th edition. Just getting selected is like finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

One of the lucky 300 this year was Cairo based Abdullah Al-Ghaly. The attendees are housed in hostels together and while the fostering of new working relationships is a big part of the campus, it’s the hard word that really counts; “I came with my debut documentary called ‘Cairo – Ar-rehebet’. It’s a documentary about a strange family and their home in the mountains of Libya. My father is half-Libyan and was an officer in an army, he moved to Egypt where I was born. The story came about as the revolution in Egypt and Libya and it made me search for my homeland, and he says that now that these uprisings have occurred he feels safe enough to tell me why he left Libya.”

Al-Ghaly got a place on an editing program that takes place away from the main Hau buildings that host the talks and most of the workshops. There are 10 editing suites in which the selected films are incubated and talked about. A central part is the guidance given to the filmmakers by industry experts, during the week he was advised by Dick Fontaine, Susan Korda and Jakob Kristian Hogel.

He explains, “On the first day we discussed the projects, introducing our film and meeting the mentors. We then worked with our mentors and on the final day we made a presentation.”

He said his most important lesson was that he now saw the need to understand, “Different perspectives. If only Arabs are watching my film they know lots of information about Libya and the situation in the Middle East. But here I’ve learned that the foreign mentors and other campus talents don’t know as much about the region, so this made me think about what information I need to relay to make it reach a wider audience.”

The 28-year-old, born in Alexandria, liked drawing and watching movies from his teenager years. He was just 16 when he made his first animation film had started toying with a video camera. He says about the campus, “Sure I will become a better filmmaker because of the experience.”

One of the mentors working at the Talent Campus is film editor Andrew Bird. His credits include editing Fatih Akin’s Golden Bear winner ‘Head-On’ and Miranda July’s ‘The Future.’ He had been a mentor at the talent campus for three years and says, “An editing mentor works in an editing suite and hopefully helps to improve a film that is already in the process of being editor where the editors and the filmmakers have somehow hit a wall and need a little bit of new input and editing mentors look at the film and look at the rough cut of the film and then spend a day with the filmmaker and editor and give new input and encourage them to do something new.”

He says that for the mentors as well as the talents there are benefits of attending the campus. “For the experts its great to come into contacts with all these challenge and see that there are people who are still around who think film can change the world. For the talent I think it’s great that they can get input from people who have been working in the industry for a long time. It’s also great for them to start building up their own network of people and that will help them.”

The Talent Campus is undoubtedly the most exciting part of the festival. Just entering the Hau building gives a huge sense of excitement and to see so many creative mind being encouraged and helped to pursue their dreams is electric. For those sceptics asking if it really helps, Bosnian director Jasmila Zbanic won the Golden Bear best film prize a couple of years after attending the talent campus.