The best news first: Angelina Jolie along with Brad Pitt and Entourage is since Tuesday in Berlin – and will continue until early next week. The prolonged presence of the Berlin-loving couple from Hollywood glamor is the best thing that could happen Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick, because if it was missing its festival in recent years to something, then big stars.

And so we are in the midst of the eternal debate about what does a film festival to play in the A-League. The simple sounding, but very tricky answer is: the best, artistically valuable films in competition – and the most glamorous, the biggest stars on the red carpet.

Yet both are getting very difficult, especially align if, as Kosslick, the Festival in the hostile February refrigeration needs, and not, like Cannes and Venice in May and September, about palm trees and beach and has a lagoon city as a backdrop. As one of the top three festivals, the Berlinale has the advantage not to take place on a picturesque site (Venice) or in a Cote daze-Kaff (Cannes), but in a world city. Anyone who has ever been moved, however, at temperatures below zero between the towers of Potsdamer Platz, you know that one of the cities bonus given icy winds quickly damn case may be.

Bread and Butter Festival

Transported through the discontent can weather the festival guests like from the competition films. Also in Cannes and Venice run not only jewels of cinematic art, on the contrary. But only in Berlin, each candidate is under the general suspicion is shit or simply boring to be – there are a chill and art films often have a very unholy alliance.

What’s unfair, of course, as the Berlinale has it anyway hard enough precarious is the position of the festival in February, you know, partly because results from the early Academy Awards and the end of January-starting the Sundance Festival in the U.S., a sandwich situation where the tastiest coverings – Hollywood stars and interesting American movies – are regularly forced out under pressure. The Berlinale is then only bread and butter, say, Europe and the rest of the world.

And as art house films from Asia, Arabia, Eastern Europe or South America arrive at the German public is able to find each year to the audience. While competitors from Cannes and Venice like to take the world by storm up to the Oscar-winning, enter Bear candidates more often the direct route from the Berlinale Palast on the night program of 3sat.

However, the wrong of Dieter Kosslick not in the past few years are going. He made a virtue of necessity, strengthened the share of German productions in competition, and reanimated the rescued from the seventies reputation among the most political film festivals to be. So there are this year with Christian Petzold (”Barbara”), Hans-Christian Schmid (”What’s left”) and Matthias Glasner (”Grace”) is equal to three German directors competing for the Golden Bear, this is the bestseller adaptation “The Wall” (from the book by Marlen Haushofer) and Martina Gedeck in addition to the Panorama series and Doris Dörrie’s new romantic comedy “Happiness” in the Berlinale Special program. Werner Herzog’s documentary series “Death Row” on U.S. prisoners sentenced to death should be seen as Volker Schlöndorff’s Nazi resistance drama “The sea in the morning.”

You can complain about this tasteful selection of the usual number-safe-German suspects and complain, for example, that the independent filmmaker Klaus Lemke (”Rocker”) with “Berlin for heroes” was not loaded into the competition. Lemke, 71, wants to avenge Kosslicks ignorance now on Thursday evening, just before the opening gala, with a naked body-demonstration on Berlinale Palast. The mini-scandal when it does occur at these temperatures would miss the Berlinale audience, of course, it would have been the wild man a competitive place.