Scots film roars into race for Berlin festival's Golden Bear

With two days to go before the announcement of the Golden Bear, 71, with its first-time director Yann Demange and unknown British cast, has been one of the most talked-of films of the week and has to be in with a shout of lifting a prize.

The drama, set in The Troubles of Ulster, was made by Angus Lamont's Glasgow-based production company Crab Apple Films, and written by Scottish playwright Gregory Burke.

While Burke's National Theatre Of Scotland show Black Watch dealt with the experience of the eponymous Scottish regiment in Iraq, 71 follows a nightmarish day in the life of a British solider lost, alone, in Belfast.

The film reminds me a little of Paul Greengrass's Green Zone, set in the Middle East, another rare hybrid of action thriller and character-driven political drama. Burke presents the sectarian conflict in all its complexity, not shying away from the machinations on all sides that kept the violence going.

For his part Demange has Greengrass's skill in orchestrating visceral action - a terrifying riot scene is brilliantly choreographed and shot, a nocturnal sequence in which the lost soldier (Jack O'Connell) is led by a Protestant boy through the streets is eerie and shocking, and the final cat and mouse through a Catholic high rise has you on the edge of your seat.

A less impressive, but still enjoyable Scottish offering here was God Help The Girl, the film directorial debut by Stuart Murdoch, of pop band Belle and Sebastian.

The story concerns an Australian girl (Emily Browning) struggling with depression, who checks herself out of a clinic and finds comfort, purpose and a sense of direction when she teams up with two English students, the trio of expats forming a band.

Other than the new medium, one could not call this a departure for Murdoch, whose wistful, narrative-driven songs and visual sensibility permeate the film. Fans of the music will be in seventh heaven; those more immune to an onset of whimsy will detect that the film is over-long and poorly paced.

But Glasgow certainly looks a treat. And it is refreshing to have the city used as a backdrop to a tale about young love and creativity, rather than the grittier stories it is usually home to. Murdoch himself was a major draw with the local audiences; the public screenings were heaving sell-outs.

A better music-oriented film, and one of the best films I have seen this week, was 20,000 Days On Earth, a documentary about and very much in collaboration with Nick Cave. The brooding maestro is in front of the camera throughout, followed between recording studios and concert stages, chats with friends, a session with a psychiatrist, and as he trawls over his vast archive of photos and objects.

Even the contrived situations seem to evoke genuine memories and reflections from this thoughtful, articulate, famously imposing individual. "The narrative of one's life does not make sense while living it," he observes, "only when telling it."

Other films that will certainly make their way to Britain included Calvary, a much more serious follow-up to John Michael McDonagh's cracking black comedy The Guard. That film's star, Brendan Gleeson, is again front and centre, as Father James, a Catholic priest who is told by a member of his congregation in confession that he is about to be murdered - for no reason, other than the twisted logic that the best way to condemn the sexual misdemeanours of the church is by killing one of its innocents.

He is given a week, during which time he continues to work amongst an appalling flock of buffoons, drunks, wife-beaters, corrupt bankers and ingrates. He knows who intends to kill him, we try to guess. This is not as perfectly realised as The Guard - McDonagh tries too hard with his cast of eccentrics - but Gleeson is magnificent as an idealistic, bullish, sad man, clinging to his faith while despairing at all around him.

A Long Way Down, based on Nick Hornby's comic novel about suicide, is pretty awful. Pierce Brosnan, Toni Collette, Imogen Poots and Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul play the four people who meet while attempting to kill themselves on Hogmanay, talk each other out of it and make a pact to stay alive until Valentine's Day. I can imagine a black comedy about this subject, but this broad, cheesy, near-farce - with its daft media subplot - was galling.

A much better comedy wins prizes for the longest title - The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window And Disappeared - and the most upbeat experience in Berlin this week. Based on the Swedish bestseller by Jonas Jonasson, it follows its indefatigable centenarian hero as he escapes from his retirement home in search of adventure, inadvertently picks up a suitcase full of cash and is pursued by police and murderous crooks.

At the same time, this eccentric chap recalls, a little like Woody Allen's Zelig, the famous people he has met and historic moments in which he has played an unlikely role, including the Spanish Civil War, the invention of the atomic bomb, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It really is a hoot.

But Berlin fare tends to be more serious. Other films vying for the Bear include Blind Massage, an unusual and intermittently effective Chinese drama, set in a massage parlour where all of the staff are blind; Adrift, in which Jennifer Connelly plays a Canadian mother who realises she may have healing powers, but is unable to save her own child; and In Between Worlds, which follows the very different struggles of a German solider in Afghanistan and his young Afghan interpreter.

Another much-admired German film is Stations Of The Cross, which concerns the ordeal of a 14-year-old girl at the hands of her strict Catholic parents. It has not been a very good week for religion in Berlin.