Director Roland Emmerich will lead the jury for the 2005 Berlinale, organizers announced today.
Planners have also unveiled eleven of the titles that will screen in the Berlinale competition. Set to compete are the previously announced opening movie, Régis Wargnier’s "Man to Man" and ten other films (listed below, details provided by the festival).
In "Gespenster" (Ghosts), a German-French co-production, director Christian Petzold (Die innere Sicherheit /The State I Am In) recounts the story of the Frenchwoman Françoise whose daughter was abducted as a small child in Berlin. After years of uncertainty, she thinks she has finally found her daughter when she spots the vagrant young woman Nina (Julia Hummer).
Marc Rothemund’s "Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage" (Sophie Scholl – Hope and Resistance) portrays the last six days in the life of the young woman who co-founded “The White Rose”, a resistance group, before she was executed by the Nazis in 1943. Julia Jentsch (Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei /The Edukators) plays the young student who refuses to abandon her convictions even when her life is at stake.
In Hannes Stöhr’s episodic comedy, "One Day in Europe", which is set against the Champion League Finals, tourists in Moscow, Istanbul, Santiago de Compostela and Berlin fall prey to thieves. And so emotions boil over at all these locations. This German-Spanish co-production features Erdal Yildiz, Florian Lukas, Miguel Lira, Boris Arquier and others.
The French entries in the Competition include Le promeneur du Champ de Mars" (The Walker of the Champ de Mars) by Robert Guédiguian and "Les temps qui changent" (Changing Times) by André Téchiné.
Based on Georges-Marc Benamou’s biography of the same name, "Le Promeneur du Champ de Mars" (The Walker of the Champ de Mars) depicts François Mitterrand’s last days in which he reveals intimate secrets and personal memories to his confidant, a young journalist. Michel Bouquet (Toto, the Hero) plays the former French President.
In Téchiné’s film, Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu are lovers who, after a separation of thirty years, meet again in Tangiers. Yet they still have a long ways to go to work out their feelings for each other.
American director Wes Anderson, who last participated in the Berlinale Competition with the grotesque family tale "The Royal Tenenbaums," is to present "The Life Aquatic", a zany underwater comedy about an eccentric family that is hunting down a deadly shark. Bill Murray, William Dafoe, Anjelica Huston and Owen Wilson co-star in the main roles.
In "Asylum" (USA/Ireland), director David Mackenzie takes a look at the profound self-destructiveness of an obsessive ‘amour fou’ in prudish Great Britain of the1950s: Natasha Richardson plays the wife of a psychiatrist who begins a passionate affair with one of her husband’s patients. Sir Ian McKellen (Lord of the Rings) and Hugh Bonneville (Iris) also star in the film.
Mark Dornford-May has set his screen adaptation of Bizet’s opera “Carmen” – "U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha" (Carmen in Khayelitsha) – in a South-African township. The film has been made entirely in the country’s official language Xhosa. In this South-African directorial début, the title role is played by the international opera star Pauline Malefane, who is herself from Khayelitsha.
A different view of Africa is given by "Hotel Rwanda", a British/ South-African/Italian co-production running as a European premiere hors concours in this section. Director Terry George tells the true story of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle, nominated for a Golden Globe for this role) who during the civil war sheltered more than a thousand Tutsi refugees from the Hutu militia.
Gu Changwei, one of China’s most famous and successful cinematographers (Farewell, My Concubine), will give his directorial début at the Berlinale with "Peacock", a world premiere. In it he portrays the daily life of a family in a small town in the province of Henan. The story begins in the 1970s, after the Cultural Revolution, and ends in 1984.
