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Berlin Film Festival

Waiting For Clooney

Politics, sex and a three-hour documentary about a silent order of monks -- containing little dialogue -- will feature prominently at the 56th annual Berlin Film Festival, which kicks off on Thursday. As happens every year, there are worries about whether Hollywood stars will cancel at the last minute. But even if they do, the festival is expected to reflect a revival in German filmmaking.

The organizer of the Berlin Film Festival has said he would like to welcome the 450 Guantanamo Bay inmates on his red carpet when the show begins on Thursday. Dieter Kosslick's wish is likely to go unfulfilled but George Clooney is coming, along with a sprinkling of Hollywood stars including Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver and Natalie Portman.

Kosslick was referring to British director Michael Winterbottom's film "The Road to Guantanamo," a strong contender in the competition section of the 10-day "Berlinale," one of the three top European film festivals alongside Cannes and Venice.

It tells the story of three Britons captured in Afghanistan and detained for two years at the camp. Known as the "Tipton three,"after their home town in central England, they accused US soldiers of subjecting them to physical and mental abuse while they were being held. Winterbottom won the festival's top award, the Golden Bear, in 2003 for his film "In This World" about two Afghan refugees who try to escape to Britain.

"I'd quite like to greet the 450 prisoners who are being held in Guantanamo in breach of all human rights and are being tortured, on the red carpet," Kosslick told reporters ahead of the festival.

Other films on show with a political theme include "Syriana," a thriller about the state of the oil industry in which Clooney plays a CIA agent, and "Hamburger Lektionen" ("Hamburg Lessons"), a German documentary about the sermons of a radical Islamic preacher at a Hamburg mosque visited by three of the 9/11 suicide pilots.

But as usual, there is likely to be something for everyone among the program of 360 films from 56 countries being shown at cinemas across Berlin. The festival culminates with the announcement of the awards -- golden and silver bear statuettes weighing 4 kilos each -- for the winners among the 19 movies selected for the festival's official competition, 17 of them world premieres. The bear is the symbol of Berlin.

The movies not in the competition are divided into various categories, including a "Panorama" section for independent or art-house films as well as a section for children's films, German cinema and classics, among others.

Two bear winners have already been announced. British actor Ian Mckellen, who played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Polish film director Andrzej Wajda will receive lifetime achievement awards in the form of Honorary Golden Bears.

The festival will also be showing a film that has become an unexpected hit in European cinemas -- "Into Great Silence," a three-hour documentary about everyday life in a monastery high up in the French Alps. It contains virtually no dialogue.

Cannes ahead in the glamour stakes

By comparison with Cannes, the high-class French Rivera resort which stages its festival in the balmy Mediterranean breezes of early summer, the Berlinale seems to exert limited pulling power on Hollywood heavyweights. In 2004, the stars of the festival's opening film "Cold Mountain," Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, failed to turn up.

Last year, Kosslick was accused of launching the festival with a poorly received opening film, "Man to Man" about anthropologists hunting pygmy tribesmen in the Congo, just because its stars Kristin Scott Thomas and Joseph Fiennes had promised they would come to Berlin.

 
This year, organizers dropped "Heights" from its main programme amid media reports that its star Glenn Close had decided not to make the trip. "Snow Cake," a British-Canadian co-production starring Sigourney Weaver as an autistic woman, opens the fest and she is expected on the red carpet along with co-star Alan Rickman.

Despite the occasional paucity of stars, the Berlinale, now in its 56th year, has firmly established itself as one of the world's top film festivals. Unlike Cannes, Berlin allows the public into festival screenings and some 150,000 tickets were sold last year.

A film bourse, the European Film Market, runs alongside the festival each year and helps make the event a significant launch pad for European and Hollywood films at the start of the new year.

German revival

Besides, German films are enjoying increasing world success and will be more heavily represented in this year's festival than ever before. In previous years, home grown films unveiled in Berlin went on to become international hits, such as "Good Bye, Lenin!" or "Gegen Die Wand" (Head-On").

"Sophie Scholl -- The Final Days" about a student who resisted the Nazis was last week nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film, the third time in four years that a German film made it among the best five foreign movies after "Nowhere in Africa" in 2003 and "Downfall," about Hitler's last days, in 2005.

A total of 55 German-made films are being screened at the Berlinale, of which four have been included in the official competition, among them "Elementarteilchen" ("The Elementary Particles"), based on the best-selling, erotically charged novel by French writer Michel Houellebecq and studded with German stars including Franka Potente of "The Bourne Identity" fame. Another German entry into the competition is "Der freie Wille" ("The Free Will"), a brutal and explicit profile of a serial rapist.

One intriguing film being shown at the Berlinale is a thriller about East Germany's Stasi secret police, called "Das Leben der Anderen" ("The Life of Others"). It deals with a Stasi agent ordered to spy on a couple of artists in 1980s East Berlin, but who loses faith in the system and respect for himself the longer he spends eavesdropping on them.

The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, said he was disappointed not to have won a place in the competition. "But what is decisive is that more and more German filmmakers aren't just eyeing the critics or the public but are telling stories that they themselves find the most moving," he said. "Only then can you make really good cinema."

A record 18,000 people from the film industry, as well as almost 3,800 journalists and 520 young filmmakers, are expected to attend the show.