Berlinale 2017: Beyond the Competition

It's hard to know how to approach a festival like the Berlinale. The natural inclination is to gravitate towards the highest-profile Competition titles, but the festival is so sprawling and boasts such an extraordinary range of films, it offers ample rewards for the adventurous cinemagoer who digs into as many of the strands as possible. I skipped a number of competition films this year in order to explore the Forum, Panorama, Retrospective and Berlinale Special strands, choosing films largely at random in the hope of stumbling across a gem, and the hit rate was gratifyingly high. Here are ten non-competition discoveries I made that represent the variety and richness of the Berlinale programme, and which are worth keeping an eye out for if they ever arrive at a cinema near you.

Read the rest of my article at The Skinny