(Courtesy Berlin & Beyond)
Back in the mid-’90s, when Goethe-Institut San Francisco cultural director Ingrid Eggers launched the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival, the two cities shared global artistic reputations for thrilling innovation and fearless transgression. Cultural moments and movements pass, of course, and we can see in retrospect that Eggers’ splendid conception coincided with the ending of an era rather than its peak.
Although the fall of the Wall released pent-up energy from the East, Berlin was no longer the thrilling underground music, fashion and film hub it had been in the ’80s. San Francisco’s artist community, meanwhile, was devastated by AIDS and staggered by rising real estate prices about to be turbocharged by the dot-com boom.