Berlin Hidden Gem: Underage Robotic Provocation in 'The Trouble With Being Born'

Burhan Qurbani's Berlin Alexanderplatz, a modern-day adaptation of the 1930s-set literary classic, is the front runner for this year's German Film Awards, the Lolas, having picked up 11 nominations, including for best film. Berlin Alexanderplatz premiered at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.

Plans to tear down part of the hated ‘Berlin Wall’ in Piccadilly Garden have been approved by the city council’s executive.

The new measure comes into force today

The German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), one of Germany’s most prestigious film schools, has sacked its British director, Ben Gibson, following an incident during the Berlin Film Festival in which he exposed his backside to a female student during a heated argument.

By Tom Grater

A Jewish prisoner pretends to be Iranian to escape being shot and is then forced to teach Farsi, a language he doesn’t speak, to a Nazi superior inPersian Lessons, the new film from Ukrainian-born, Canada-based director Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog).

An impoverished laborer returns home one day to find that social services have taken his children, after the family’s increasingly dire circumstances push his wife to commit a desperate act. With a corrupt local administrator blocking the way to a fair hearing to get them back, the man decides to cross the country on foot in order to plead his case to the government in Belgrade.

Overshadowed by a grisly, racially motivated shooting in western Germany and the growing pains of new festival leadership, this year’s Berlinale served to illuminate the market dynamics and global issues set to impact the international film and television industry in the run-up to Cannes — provided coronavirus stays away from the Croisette.

Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof, whose sixth feature “There is no Evil” won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear on Saturday, is one of his country’s most prominent directors even though none of his films have screened in Iran where they are banned. In 2011, the year he won two prizes at Cannes with his censorship-themed “Goodbye,” Rasoulof was sentenced with fellow director Jafar Panahi to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking for alleged anti-regime propaganda.

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s drama “There Is No Evil” took home the top Golden Bear prize at the 2020  Berlin Film Festival.

It’s a brave young director who has the gumption to revisit Alfred Doblin’s 1929 Weimar Republic classic Berlin Alexanderplatz. A 1931 film version directed by Piel Jutzi was notably followed by Rainer W.

Director Burhan Qubani has always lived between two worlds. The son of Afghan refugees, Qubani was born in 1980 in the small town of Erkelenz in western Germany and grew up Muslim in a deeply Catholic society.

Who today has heard of Jan Mikolasek (1887-1973), once revered as a celebrated faith healer who is said to have helped millions (including the Communist president of Czechoslovakia and Nazi bigwig Martin Bormann) with his herbal remedies? A figure of blinding light and darkest shadow, he springs ambiguously to life in director Agnieszka Holland’s fascinating period drama Charlatan, in a dazzling perf by top Czech actor Ivan Trojan.

Films about mature romance are hard to come by, and even rarer are the ones that deal with the desires and yearnings of closeted elderly gay men in patriarchal Chinese society.

In a dark, shuttered South Korea devoid of people after a financial apocalypse, a naïve young gang knocks off an underworld gambling den and becomes the target of an implacable killer. Young writer-director Yoon Sung-hyun, whose 2011 coming-of-age drama Bleak Night won multiple Best New Director awards and heralded him as a leader of the next generation of South Korean filmmakers, fulfills that promise nine years later in the nerve-janglingTime to Hunt (Sa-nyang-eui-si-gan).

In a dark, shuttered South Korea devoid of people after a financial apocalypse, a naïve young gang knocks off an underworld gambling den and becomes the target of an implacable killer. Young writer-director Yoon Sung-hyun, whose 2011 coming-of-age drama Bleak Night won multiple Best New Director awards and heralded him as a leader of the next generation of South Korean filmmakers, fulfills that promise nine years later in the nerve-janglingTime to Hunt (Sa-nyang-eui-si-gan).

Are animals more precious than humans? For his debut feature, Eeb Allay Ooo!, Prateek Vats lets the audience decide what to make of the real-life monkey menace that has long plagued the high-security areas around government buildings including the Parliament in India’s capital, New Delhi.

Are animals more precious than humans? For his debut feature, Eeb Allay Ooo!, Prateek Vats lets the audience decide what to make of the real-life monkey menace that has long plagued the high-security areas around government buildings including the Parliament in India’s capital, New Delhi.

There is a white telephone booth with a rotary phone connected to nowhere that sits atop a hill overlooking the town of Otsuchi on Japan’s northeast coast. More than 30,000 people have used it to "speak” to deceased loved ones.

There is a white telephone booth with a rotary phone connected to nowhere that sits atop a hill overlooking the town of Otsuchi on Japan’s northeast coast. More than 30,000 people have used it to "speak” to deceased loved ones.