ZDF-Aspekte
Berlinale Special, 1991 (in German)
From 1985 to 1993 I penned a column for the Berlin International Film Festival, FilmFestJournal.
In those years, the start of the Berlinale season for journalists was a press conference a couple of weeks before the first curtain rose over the stage of the Zoo Palace cinema with its 1,070 seats. One cold January day in 1991 I was standing at the coffee buffet in a stuffy and smoky hotel conference room (yes, people smoked back then) with dozens and dozens of other journalists, waiting for the first press conference to begin. A colleague from ZDF, Carola Wedel, who I knew when we both worked for SFB, surprised me by stepping up to me and asking out of the blue if I would consider presenting four short onscreen humor pieces for the four-part ZDF-Aspekte show to be broadcasted in February from the Berlinale. Would I?!? Of course I would! And the rest of history. Below are the four commentaries.