I’M NO STRANGER TO INTERNATIONAL FILM MARKETS, having attended the annual AFM over twenty times, but I’m a relative newbie at the 30-year-old European Film Market (EFM), which blows its lagging US counterpart away in number of screenings, movie quality, theatres, overall usefulness and scope. Not to mention endlessly flowing cheap beer and watermelon-sized pretzels.
This past February 15th to 23rd in chilly Berlin’s sleek Potsdamer Platz area, the EFM kept me busy morning, noon and night. In conjunction with EFM, the welcoming German city also runs its esteemed Berlinale International Film Festival at the same time, so my screening schedule was jam-packed with selections from both. This year marked my fifth Berlin jaunt, where, suffering from jetlag and insomnia, I plowed through 25 genre movies from all over the…