This year, five TIFF 2012 Studio participants are attending the co-production market and other events at the Berlin International Film Festival. Over the next few days, they will blog about their experiences and insights gained from conversations with international producers and industry execs. In this installment, Scythia Films producer Daniel Bekerman discusses lessons from the Talent Campus and the business of the European Film Market.

Check out more blogs from Berlinale here.

If you have ever watched a squirrel frantically running back and forth bringing nuts to its nest, you have a picture of what it’s like to be taking on the Berlinale Talent Campus while also doing business at European Film Market (EFM). I’ve been stockpiling inspiration at Talent Campus and then running a few blocks over to EFM to attach sales agents, finance, promote and network. I’m definitely stretching the metaphor here but I think that the “foraging for nuts” part – the learning and idealism found in Talent Campus – is as essential as the “putting the nuts in the nest” part – which EFM has proved invaluable for.

Festival director Dieter Kosslick opened the Talent Campus last weekend with an amusing speech about “making babies.” He said that one of the reasons he founded the initiative was to put people together from around the world to share their disparate perspectives, presumably with the hope of finding new ways of thinking. He said that if we can’t communicate with people that are different than us then we have no hope of peace. I’m quite sure that the “babies” also has an intentional double meaning: the potential for collaborations on future projects between participants, and the semi-notorious partying at the Campus which may well be leading to literal offspring.

Right after Dieter’s speech I dashed over to EFM where I passed posters for Shark-nado (yes it’s a movie about a tornado full of sharks, not that there’s anything wrong with that) on one side and “An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker” (not about a tornado full of sharks) on the other side. My team in Toronto had done a masterful job of setting my meetings in between Talent Campus events and it all worked beautifully, minus any time for eating or sleeping. My first time at EFM, I’ve been impressed by the diversity of both the sales companies and the projects they are looking at.

It does seem that there is a home for every film here, whether that home is a company like Film Nation or a digital aggregator.

The Campus is not strictly right-brained learning; I’ve gotten great practical knowledge of everything from the minutia of the German funding system (of course, key for co-productions) to packaging transmedia projects for the market. Nevertheless, Dieter’s theme of building a better world through the communication tool of movies pervades. I’ve been genuinely humbled by hearing the stories of my fellow participants. I’ve heard about what it’s like to be an auteur filmmaker in Uganda, how to raise financing in Slovania, and discussed the challenges of political storytelling with filmmakers from Iran.

Will any of those conversations help finance my current slate? Probably not. But in an industry that fears innovation as much as it needs it, Berlinale Talent Campus has reinforced my conviction that I can’t let commerce solely dominate my regrettably finite attention.

The Studio program is TIFF Industry’s first year-round program, open to Ontario-based producers and aimed at developing next-level creative and business skills and knowledge of the global marketplace through panels, programs and seminars with Canadian and international film experts.