The race begins at the Berlin Film Festival

Germany says ‘willkommen’ to the 64th instalment of one of the world’s leading film festivals.

BERLIN: The 64th Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale) began on Thursday  with a heavy feeling in the air, amid grief over Philip Seymour Hoffman’s untimely death.

Hoffman had been meant to attend the prestigious Berlin event to promote his Sundance festival film God’s Pocket. Jury president and film producer-screenwriter James Schamus said that the legendary actor would still be there in spirit.

Director Wes Anderson’s comedy The Grand Budapest Hotel had its premiere at the event. His film has a star-studded cast including Ralph Fiennes, Bill Murray, F Murray Abraham and English actor Tllda Swinton, the relatively unknown and young Tony Revolori of California, and Irish actor Saoirse Ronan.

It is one of 23 movies in competition, of which 20 are under consideration for the festival’s Golden Bear trophy, which will be awarded on February 15.

Two powerful films, one looking at the plight of boys abandoned in Berlin, the other about an ex-convict haunted by his violent past, kicked off the competition for best picture at the festival on Friday.

A third competition film, the Northern Ireland-conflict themed ’71 capped the day with a harrowing look at a British soldier’s plight.

The film’s director Yann Demange said that his film could not have been made had it not been for Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday and Steve McQueen’s Hunger, both of which deal with “troubles” themes.

“Those two films meant that this film could exist because they had to happen first and of course they’re amazing movies,” said Demange.

German director Edward Berger’s Jack, starring the immensely persuasive first-time child actor Ivo Pietzcker in the title role, is the story of an 11 year old and his blonde-haired younger brother Manuel finding their way through a labyrinth of Berlin’s streets and its drugged-out nightlife.

It is one of four German films vying for the festival’s top prize, to be awarded next week. Berger’s film shows the older of the boys rising to the challenge of survival after his unmarried mother puts him in a children’s home because she cannot cope with the two at home.

Jack is bullied there and almost drowned by his main tormenter. He then runs away and embarks on an odyssey with his brother Manuel around Berlin to find his mother. Berger said he had deliberately tried not to make the film Berlin-specific in order to portray the universal problem of young people growing up in broken families.

“Right from the start, we decided not to show the clichés,” screenwriter Nele Mueller-Stoefen said. “We show the mother in a caring way, but we show Jack taking responsibility, which is something that happens often in a family.”

Published in The Express Tribune, February 10^th, 2014.

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