Electric destruction

Gegen die Wand, Berlin Film Festival

The news from Berlin is loud, clear and startling. When the Film Festival jury, headed by actress Frances McDormand, announced its awards on Saturday, all the expected big names - Ken Loach, Eric Rohmer, Theo Angelopoulos, John Boorman - were left empty-handed. Instead, the Golden Bear was won by Fatih Akin, 30, for Gegen die Wand (English title Head-On), a last-minute entry in the competition; other key prizes also went to work by younger directors virtually unknown outside the rarefied festival circuit. Message: old-guard, make way for the next generation.

In Head-On, Akin's electric fourth film, the characters are torn between their selfdestructive urges and a simultaneous, irrepressible lust for life. Sibel, 20, needs to escape from her suffocating, traditional Muslim family to throw herself into drugs, rock 'n' rock and above all lots and lots of sex with as many partners as possible. Cahit, 40, is a bitter down-and-out who drowns his anger in beer, bar-fights and a failed suicide. They contract an unpromising marriage of convenience but end up falling in love. It's a story full of sex, blood, flashes of black humour and a desperate romanticism: a raging bull of a movie, at once brutal and poetic.

Akin's parents are Turkish. But he was born in Hamburg; like his characters - who speak German to each other - he's thoroughly assimilated, yet still feels the aching tug of his cultural origins. This is most definitely a German film, the first one in 18 years to win the top prize in Berlin (or at any other major festival) - but a German film of a new kind. With Head-On and other vibrant movies like Run, Lola Run, Nowhere In Africa and Goodbye Lenin, this national cinema is finally, after years in the wilderness, emerging once again as a force to conjure with.