my first encounter with the berlinale.

today also was for me a laundry day (just like cindy, except i only used 5 minutes of my time doing this). i washed some clothes, but mainly i slacked off around, went to kreuzberg for a walk, and bought a week pass for the city transport system. i was on and off at bootlab, working with this subtitling issue and also went to haus der kulturen der welt to pick up my accreditation for the berlin film festival. i am one of the 500 filmmakers who will show a film at the berlinale talent campus, and who will also come to lectures and workshops to learn and meet other filmmakers. some of the persons who will teach us are lynn hershman, mike figgis, alessandro baricco, wim wenders.

today i saw like 50 films of the other filmmakers who are in the same programme as me. i was interested in watching world cinema from faraway places, the kind of things you would never see in normal life. i was expecting a wonderful and intelligent filmmaker from sudan or angola, maybe someone in afghanistan or nicaragua, but nothing at all from this countrys. still, there is a lot of good stuff, you have on the one side the representational stuff you always get -which is not always good-, and good projects. i'm sorry to say so, but i saw like many films from the countrys i would've liked to see amazing stuff coming on. and it seems at the end, the good stuff will come from nowhere else than the usa and west europe. as if it really was true that the rest of us are years behind. as if we are still trying to compete, as if we didn't have our own way.... and yes, true, sometimes that seems to be the case. i was talking about this with 2 colombian videoartists during transmediale. i said i'm getting tired of this ambassadors from the third world who come to represent our kin, and who most of the time are trying to be exactly as their counterparts in the developed world, or even worse, most of the time are imitating old projects. does this means there is no identity and race in cyberspace? does this mean we are all the same? does this mean media art has mediatized the artists producing this in peripherical places? is there something that we can do which is not to be always following trends years behind? i think so. i believe in a different world.

tonight in bootlab there was a performance where diana mccarty eat military survival food from the u.s. army, which is unlwaful to possess or even sell (she sold it to brian holmes for only 2 dollars). this was during a marathon against war.

i also talked a lot to krystian woznicki about sms storys, that is, mobile phone narrative. we talked for at least 3 hours about narrative where sms is involved. i met krystian during the dvd days in berlin, 3 years ago.