It’s that time of year again – our programme team has braved the bitter Berlin cold (minus 16!) to head on out to the 62nd Berlin Film Festival in search of films, partnerships and creative ideas they can bring back to Bristol, to Watershed, and to you.

Before our Head of Programme Mark Cosgrove packed his bags, he sat down to share what he’s most looking forward to at the Festival:

Mark will be Tweeting his instant responses to the films he’s been seeing along with Maddy Probst, our Programme Producer, on #shedbff throughout the Festival – so check back regularly to see what is getting them excited, and what’s not quite made the cut.

Every year Mark and Maddy attend festivals around the world in search of great new voices in cinema. Berlin is a key date in their calendar, and many of the films screened there go on to awards-season glory: last year’s Golden Bear Winner, Iranian drama A Separation, is the favourite to scoop the Oscar® for best foreign film later this month.

Berlin also has quite a different character from the other festivals – Cannes, Venice, and Toronto to name but a few – because it frequently engages in political discussions. Last year it became a platform to protest against the arrest of Iranian director Jafar Panahi (whose secret film This Is Not A Film will be screening here in March) and this year the programme features films and documentaries about the Arab Spring, Japan’s nuclear disaster, and dissident Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei.

This year’s lineup also includes Steven Soderbergh’s latest Haywire, his ode to the action films of the 1960s and 70s, Angelina Jolie’s war film In The Land Of Blood And Honey, about a Serb commander who falls in love with a Muslim prisoner and Werner Herzog’s epic documentary On Death Row, a companion piece to his Into The Abyss, which we’ll welcome in March.

British director James Marsh (Project Nim, Man on Wire) makes a return to narrative filmmaking with Shadow Dancer while fellow Oscar® winner Kevin Macdonald (Touching The Void, The Last King of Scotland) goes back to his documentary roots with Marley, a look at reggae legend Bob.

If you’re not on Twitter we’ll be sharing all of Mark and Maddy’s Tweets on DShed, where you’ll get to hear their first thoughts on all the films they manage to squeeze in (and with more than 2,000 screenings a day they’ll certainly have their pick).

While you’re there, check out the Festival Diaries section, which includes all of the reports Watershed staff have created as they’ve attended festivals – previous Berlinales, Toronto, Tampere, Cannes, Singapore, South by Southwest, Ars Electronica and more. That way you can see exactly what they said when Lars Von Trier made a certain Hitler quip at Cannes in 2011, how Four Lions went down in Berlin in 2010, and bumping into the co-founder of Twitter at South by Southwest 2010.