Documentaries outshine competition at 61st Berlinale

It's odd when a film festival starts and the industry's attention is focused elsewhere. That was the fate of the 61st Berlinale, with all eyes on an empty chair in the jury panel rather than on the screens.

At the traditional opening press conference where the festival jury - this year presided over by Isabella Rossellini - is announced, there was a special tribute to a member of the jury unable to attend. This was the director Jafar Panahi, recently jailed in Iran and banned from making films for 20 years because of his political beliefs. An open letter from the director was read out, which he began by stating: "The world of a filmmaker is marked by the interplay between reality and dreams."

He added: "Ultimately, the reality of my verdict is that I must spend six years in jail. I'll live for the next six years hoping that my dreams will become reality. I wish my fellow filmmakers in every corner of the world would create such great films that by the time I leave the prison I will be inspired to continue to live in the world they have dreamed of in their films."

At each screening of competition films, an empty chair is being kept open for the Iranian director. In addition, all of Panahi's films are being screened throughout the festival in the relevant sections.

Today a panel will be hosted at the Berlinale Talent Campus and the World Cinema Fund with Iranian filmmakers including the actor and director Rafi Pitts, about censorship in Iran.

There was also a small demonstration against the imprisonment of Panahi. But it was, of course, the protests in Cairo that were grabbing the majority of the attention. The first night of festivities in Berlin was overshadowed by the expectation that Hosni Mubarak would resign as Egypt's president during a public address on television. In the event, of course, Mubarak did not resign until the following day, but it just showed what a grip the events in Cairo have taken on the public consciousness worldwide.

By sheer serendipity this was echoed in a trio of documentaries that illuminated the first weekend of the festival screenings: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Sing Your Song and Mama Africa, the factor that all three have in common being the singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte.

Directed by Goran Hugo Olsson, the remarkable The Black Power Mixtape is made up of footage found in the archives of the Swedish television channel Sveriges Television. The news footage includes images of Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver and Angela David and pictures of Cleaver as the Black Panthers' "minister of information" from the makeshift office set up in Algeria after the group was outlawed in the US.

Belafonte, 83, was in Berlin for the festival and remarked after the screening: "That film about America and the Black Power movement, I think it's extremely important because I, being part of that history, am very much aware about how much it is that the generations of today just do not know."

He added: "I hope in the final analysis that young people today will make films that are more interested in recording the remarkable events of their time as we tried to do in our time. I am amazed that the Swedish artist could have found such footage and dug into the archives so they had a story to tell. I think that today we should be more conscious of the use of film and especially for social drama and social history. There is a lot going on in Tunisia Cairo, and Yemen and will be going on in other places, and I hope that filmmakers will understand that we are a tiny universe and as much as we can document what takes place will help service the intellectual growth of citizens of the future."

Sing Your Song, by contrast, is a celebration of Belafonte himself. Susana Rostock's documentary focuses mostly on the role of the singer in the heyday of the civil rights movement, when he was often seen at rallies in the company of Martin Luther King Jr.

Also of interest is footage of Marlon Brando, who introduced Belafonte to his first wife and was always available to come and help the star of Carmen Jones whenever called upon to fight for social justice.

The documentary also shows some of Belafonte's anti-apartheid activism, something that also comes up in Mika Kaurismäki's documentary Mama Afrika, about the late South African singer Miriam Makeba, who spent half a century travelling the world to promote the anti-apartheid cause. In 1962 Belafonte helped her gain entry to the US, where she appeared at John F Kennedy's birthday party at the White House in Washington.

It's lucky the documentary strand has been such a success, because so far the competition entries have not lived up to Panahi's wish for films of an inspiringly high standard.

JC Chandor's Margin Call, starring Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany and Demi Moore, is set on Wall Street on the eve of the international financial crisis in 2008. Taking its lead from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) in dramatic, dialogue-led execution, it sadly lacks punch and offers no new insights into the global meltdown.

With Ralph Fiennes's directorial debut, Coriolanus, it certainly helps to have some knowledge of Shakespeare's play. The action is set in an imagined Rome, and the language is occasionally hard to follow in the midst of all the explosions. Two semi-autobiographical films about adolescence from female filmmakers also disappointed: Paula Markovitch's El Premio (The Prize), about growing up in Argentina under dictatorship, and Vanessa Mahoney's New York tale Yelling to the Sky, starring Zoë Kravitz and Gabourey Sidibe.

The competition selection suffers in comparison not only with the documentaries but also with the excellent films in the supposedly second-tier Panorama section. The section's opening film Tomboy, by the French director Celine Sciamma, is outstanding. As the title suggest it tells the tale of a girl who'd rather be a boy. The girl in question is 10-year-old Laure who has recently moved to a new neighbourhood and pretends to be called Mikael to her new friends. Expertly told, it's an entirely believable and touching tale of adolescence.

The Japanese director Iwai Shunji made the brilliant All About Lily Chou-Chou in 2002 and Vampire, his first English-language film, is an intriguing, subtle but playful take on the vampire genre. Starring Kevin Zegers as a serial killer, it's an eerie tale of alienation, concentrating on the melancholy of life rather than horror.

More conventional but also good are the Belgian director Michael R Roskam's thriller Bullhead and the John Michael McDonagh's Irish-set comedy The Guard with Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle as an Irish policeman and an FBI agent working together on a case.

However, the most memorable film of the festival so far has been Lee Tamahori's The Devil's Double, which is very loosely based on the life of Latif Yahia, who worked as a body double for Uday Hussein, the elder son of the ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

The British actor Dominic Cooper plays both characters in the performance of a lifetime. The story is overcooked, but with moments of brilliance and crassness in equal measure. It is destined to be a cult classic.

The 61st Berlin International Film Festival ends on Sunday. Visit www.berlinale.de/en for details.