A film festival in the back of a taxi

Some of the biggest names in international cinema gathered Tuesday night at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Martin Scorsese was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Before receiving his trophy, Scorsese listened as German director Wim Wenders gave a laudatory speech to an audience of celebrities and local dignitaries.

Just around the corner, parked in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, a group of Berlin taxi drivers crammed into the back of a beat-up taxi van to watch a double feature culminating in Scorsese's 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”

Klaus Meier, who has been a taxi driver in Berlin since 1985, handed out bottles of soft drinks and beer, unscrewing the caps with the blade of a pocket knife. Irene Jaxtheimer, who runs a taxi company, handed out homemade popcorn. A generator outside the cabin powered a modest television, a DVD player and a small electric heater.

The unconventional screening, just outside a centerpiece event for one of Europe's most prestigious film festivals, was part of the improvised TaxiFilmFest. Running until Sunday, it is part protest against the dire state of the taxi industry today and part counter-festival celebrating the taxi's iconic place in the urban cultural landscape.

It also objects to an exclusive partnership agreement between the festival, known locally as the Berlinale, and taxi giant Uber to transport filmmakers between the city's cinemas during the event. The deep-rooted Silicon Valley company has drawn the ire of traditional taxi drivers around the world, with protesters packing for TaxiFilmFest screenings railing against what they see as an under-regulated rival.

Beeping horns from the busy street outside – some from sleek black Uber vehicles emblazoned with the Berlinale logo – blended with the street scenes of “Taxi Driver” playing from the tinny television speakers. “Ah, I really miss those mechanical fare boxes!” Meier said as the fares ticked away in the cab on the screen of the film's unhinged antihero, Travis Bickle, driving through mid-'70s New York with growing hatred and menace.

The backseat festival only shows taxi-themed films, and the potential repertoire is deep. Meier surveyed friends and fellow taxi drivers about which films to show and said he has received dozens of suggestions about films in which a taxi plays a leading role.

The first feature film on Tuesday was Barry Greenwald's quirky 1982 film slice-of-life documentary “Taxi!” about some strange characters who drive taxis in Toronto. The night before, a small, rotating crowd beat the rain to catch parts of it the 1998 French action comedy 'Taxi' a light-hearted film by director Gérard Pirès about sinister, Mercedes-driving German gangsters, hapless police officers from Marseille and a novice taxi driver with leaden feet who turns out to be the only one fast enough to catch the criminals.

An early hit at the TaxiFilmFestival, which started last Thursday, was “Under the bombs“, a Lebanese drama set during the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. In the film, a taxi driver from Beirut is hired to drive a woman to war-torn southern Lebanon, hoping to find her sister and son to find. Meier described it as “Shakespearean” and “a masterpiece,” and Berndt said it was clearly the “most moving taxi movie” he had ever seen.

But the clear favorite among attendees was Jim Jarmusch's “Night on Earth,” a quirky, episodic 1991 film about taxi drivers and passengers in five cities around the world. The roster for the Sunday night finale of TaxiFilmFest had yet to be chosen and Meier said he remained open to suggestions.

Between the screenings, the taxi drivers lamented the many misery in their sector, which they largely blamed on Uber and other multinational taxi apps. Tightly regulated local taxis with fixed fares are struggling against upstart competitors paying lower wages, they say.

Tobias Froehlich, a spokesman for Uber, disputed the idea that Uber was responsible for the rough state of Germany's taxi industry, saying Uber drivers had also become part of street life in German cities. “Taxis are in deep crisis almost everywhere, even in cities where Uber is not active at all,” he said.

The classic German taxi is as recognizable and distinctive as its checkered yellow counterpart in the iconic black cabs of New York or London. German taxis are traditionally a hefty Mercedes E-Class sedan, but are painted in a special, subtle and yet somehow indispensable beige – officially 'light ivory', or number 1015 on the RAL color chart, a color that was made mandatory in 1971 by the West German Ministry of Transport.

Festivalgoers squeezed into the back of the van on Tuesday also reminisced about better days of taxi driving, including transporting American and British soldiers of the occupying Allies stationed in West Berlin. (The French troops, the small crowd agreed, had less cash and rarely hailed taxis.)

Another taxi driver who stopped by Monday night, Michael Klewer, started out in East Berlin in 1988, driving a beat-up Trabant as a black market taxi. (Consensus: East Berliners tipped better.)

The days before the fall of the Berlin Wall were “blissful times, hard to imagine,” says Stephan Berndt, a Berlin taxi entrepreneur who now runs a company with about 50 drivers but started driving taxis in West Berlin in the 1980s to pay his money. through university.

Back then, a student could make ends meet by driving just a few shifts a week, he says. Now margins were tight, he said, increasing pressure on taxi drivers to break even.

He said he was also concerned about the disappearing cultural importance of the iconic taxi, and about the strange cast of characters who have long made their living as drivers. If taxis were to disappear from Berlin's streets, Berndt said, “a large part of a city's culture would be lost. All that flair – and that's why I love this job so much – would be completely lost.”