The best of times.

• Author: Cockrell, Eddie

One of the top film festivals in the world, Berlin at forty-six is also one of the oldest and most well organized of such events. And, following the maxim that a film festival is only as good as the movies made in the last year or year and a half that can be snagged by programmers, to state boldly that the 1996 edition of the program offered the best lineup in recent memory must mean that worldwide film production is up - read: business is good - and the movies are better than ever - read: the critics and public are happy. Right?

Well, yes and no. Business was brisk in Berlin, and the critics, not to mention the all-important public audiences, liked what they saw. But while there were certainly good films from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal to be seen, it required somewhat more effort to find them in the huge program (more than three hundred titles) than, say, Sense and Sensibility, which won the Golden Bear grand prize in the international competition section. However, once located, Spanish- and Portuguese-language cinema yielded some gems.

While Argentina produced only eleven films in 1994, the number was up slightly in 1995, thanks to a new film law that brings the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audovisuales and TV coproduction funds into the financial mix. Two of the best were in the International Market section. Just as his directorial debut, Wild Tango [Tango feroz, La leyenda del tanguito], beat Jurassic Park at the local box office in 1993, Marcelo Pineyro's second effort, Caballos salvajes [Wild Horses], bested Batman Forever with Argentine audiences. Hector Alterio and Leonardo Sbaraglia star as a mismatched duo on the run from the cops in the stunning beauty of Patagonia.

Eliseo Subiela is quietly gaining a reputation as one of the most visionary filmmakers in the world. His new film, No te mueras sin decirme a donde vas [Don't Die Without Telling Me Where You're Going], is a sublime meditation on love, memory, reincarnation, and the movies, as Buenos Aires projectionist and part-time inventor Leopoldo (Dario Grandinetti) develops a machine to view and record dreams and stumbles across his soul mate from a previous life. One can only hope that this beautiful film, a box-office smash in Argentina, will avoid the fate of Subiela's previous work, El lado oscuro del corazon [The Dark Side of the Heart], which never acquired a distributor in the United States.

The Argentine/Uruguayan coproduction of Patron [The Landowner] is...