A new war in Europe: This possibility has been so concrete in the past few weeks that there is even speculation about dates.
If Russian President Putin were to actually order an attack on Ukraine, when would be an appropriate time?
The soil conditions at the end of winter were mentioned again and again, and the Olympic Games in China were also considered a factor.
Nobody in the Kremlin would have thought of the Berlinale, it just happened to end on the same day as the sports event in the new world power.
And yet a film festival is also a moment of heightened geopolitical attention.
If only because there are many films in the program that are not only competing for the global audience.
Symbolic competitions are often fought out, conflicts from the real world are extended into the audiovisual space.
In the case of Russia and Ukraine, it has been evident for years that the dispute that erupted openly in 2014 and is essentially much older is also being contested with films.
Whereby the asymmetry that characterizes the relationship between an imperialist state and a smaller state that insists on independence comes into play.
Russia cares about Ukraine cinematically only marginally or implicitly,
This year, Taras Tomenko's documentary “Terykony” was shown in the Generation Kplus series of the Berlinale, which is aimed at a young audience.
The title is translated into German as "Taubes Gestein".
This can be related to the rubble in which the young protagonist Nastya searches for things of value.
It is the rubble of destroyed buildings in the city of Toretsk, which is very close to the line crossing the Ukrainian areas where separatists established their regime.
Until 2016 Toretsk was known under the Soviet name Dzerzhinsk.
Nastya once finds a biography of Lenin, a telling detail of the longevity of the Soviet Union's cultural imprint.
Tomenko gives his pictures from this exposed region a melancholy beauty that is also known from other films from the Donbass - actually a zone of ecological devastation, but which has revealed a post-apocalyptic life for several years.
Nastia has just turned fourteen, she's supposed to get her first passport soon, and of course she gives her gender as female, but she's unmistakably what you would call a tomboy in other contexts.
Or just a tomboyish girl who has to grow up more or less on her own, because her father is no longer there for her after being injured by shrapnel and her mother is also wrestling with problems of her own.
In a few years, "Terykony" will be seen as a touching contemporary document from a phase of uncertainty.
Nastia's adolescence is also a symbol of the transition to a future for which a political solution is difficult to imagine.
Of course she can go to Kiev or to Kharkiv, she has to find a home anyway first.
A scene in which Nastja's mother appears briefly evokes an association with another Ukrainian film at the 72nd Berlinale: "Klondike" by Maryna Er Gorbach ran in the Panorama and relies on a strong female character.
The story takes place in the summer of 2014 in the very area where debris falls from the sky one day.
A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 298 people on board was shot down by an anti-aircraft missile. According to all serious investigations, it was pro-Russian volunteers who had heavy weapons from the Russian army.
In “Klondike” one gets a plausible (albeit occasionally shimmering into the slightly surreal) impression of how much this separatist war destroyed an everyday life in which loyalties to Russia and Ukraine had easily coexisted.