Russian Filmweek in Berlin

[link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_War_Memorial_%28Tiergarten%29 Evidence of the Russian's first entry into Berlin's film, this monument commemorates the 20,000 … Red Army soldiers who lost their lives in the battle for Berlin. The two tanks flanking the large Soviet soldier have been mythologized as the first two to enter the city, and the monument is still a site of pilgrimage and commemoration every year on May 8. Smaller than its oversized brother in Treptow, the memorial was mockingly nicknamed by postwar Berliners as The Tomb of the Unknown Plunderer. [link]

If you prefer your drama on stage rather than on screen, try taking in the modern dramas performed in this small 70-seat theater. During Russian Filmweek the theater will … be presenting Tchaikovsky's Wife, a dance piece, and Oblamov is dead, Oblamov lives!, a stage adaptation of Goncharov's famous tale of a man who would rather not get out of bed -- "a Slavic version of Forrest Gump." [link]

If the festival inspires you to alter your itinerary and take in glamorous goings on in Moscow and St. Petersburg, you'll be needing a visa from here. Hulking over … Berlin's main drag (and just a few steps away from the future American embassy), the Russian embassy was rebuilt on the site of its wartime ruins and finished in 1953. A puffed up mixture of Stalinist neo-classicism and local "Schinkelism," it is the only building which violates Unter den Linden's regulations on building height. [link]

The festival has chosen the beautiful Kino International for the opening festivities. Director Walerij Todorowskij's film In a Tight Spot tells the story of Denis, a … young DJ who begins selling drugs to finance his music career but soon finds himself caught up in a war between the drug gangs and the local law enforcement authorities. Denis wants only to return to his music but how to get out of his "tight spot"? Think Superfly on the river Don. [link]

The festival's main screening room is in this brutalist concrete building hunkered amidst the smart shops of Friedrichstrasse. With its library, cinemas, meeting rooms, … and exhibition space, the RHWK (Das Russische Haus der Wissenschaft und Kultur), with the generous support of the Russian Foreign Ministry, seeks to increase the friendship and mutual understanding of the Russian and German peoples. Can you say "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact"? [link]

One of the first sites of Russian filmmaking in Berlin, the conquest of the then Reichstag by Soviet troops on April 30th, 1945 and raising of the Hammer and Sickle was … repeated three days later in order to be photographed for posterity. The Battle for Berlin soon became a staple of the Stalin cult in postwar Russia. Today one can still view the graffiti scrawled by Russian GI's on the building's bomb-blasted walls. [link]

One of Berlin's favorite art-house cinemas, Arsenal will be screening two of the festival's films, both directed by women. Journey with Pets, a young woman's coming of … age story, won the main prize at this year's Moscow International Film Festival. Two in One blends two stories into one ironic drama and bills itself as "an avant garde experiment about Love and Death, Theater and Cinema." Make sure to buy an extra-large popcorn. [link]