Focus Features

A woman awaits the tram, but may or may not be attending the festival...

The local Bodega advertises the Berlinale. (What's the German word for bodega?)

The morning ritual of picking up tickets involves a fair amount of fanfare, including applauding the workers as they walk to their stations.

There is plenty of time in the morning to doodle on your schedule while waiting in line.

The Berlinale Bear, the lights, the scaffolding, and the fanfare.

And so it begins. There is nothing but trouble in this kids future. While his parents watch the actors, this toddler contemplates gambling.

Greta Gerwig dazzles in red.

Ben Stiller arrives and German camera phones go up in the air like lighters at a concert.

A fan hopes to get his Tropic Thunder poster autographed. "In a weird way I had to free myself up to believe that it was OK to be stupid or dumb." - Tug Speedman.

A videographer captures the evening’s pageantry.

Superman is upside down and a little out of focus but super nonetheless.

Let us not forget St. Valentine's Day was the day of Greenberg’s premiere. If these were scattered to please the passerby, that's a beautiful thing, but the cynic in me believes that they are, rather, an offering refused.

I have absolutely no idea what this means, but it looks German.

"I had no desire to be a film actress, to always play somebody else, to be always beautiful with somebody constantly straightening out your every eyelash. It was always a big bother to me." - Marlene Dietrich. And yet…

You had only to shift your eyes downward for the view to go south.

Alix Lambert is an artist, filmmaker, writer and photographer whose credits include the feature documentary The Mark of Cain, episodes of HBO’s Deadwood, and the recent anthology of interviews and writings about the criminal world, Crime. We interviewed her at FilmInFocus about Russian prison tattoos around the time of David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. When she traveled to Berlin during the Berlin Film Festival, we asked her to train her eye on what was happening below, above, and around the edges of the event. Her work can be found at www.pinkghettoproductions.com.