The comedy “Hail, Caesar!” by Joel and Ethan Coen is to open the 66th Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale, on Thursday night. Between February 11 and 21, 434 films from 77 countries will be screened.
The competition program includes 23 films. Eighteen titles are in the competition for the main prize, the Golden Bear, including the film “Death in Sarajevo” by the B&H academy prize winner Danir Tanović.
The movie is set in a hotel in Sarajevo, where a dinner is being prepared for the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. The co-production realization of Bosnia and Herzegovina and France, based on the play by the French philosopher Bernard-Henry Levy “Hotel Europe”, also speaks of the Sarajevo assassination and the personality of Gavrilo Princip.
“I used some of those moments as a foundation on which I started creating my own vision of the present Sarajevo, the present Bosnia and Herzegovina, my vision of that assassination, of all those repeated stories we keep arguing over – whether Gavrilo is a terrorist or a hero, whether Franz Ferdinand is a victim or an occupier,” the director Danis Tanović said.
Other films running for the Berlinale prize are “Alone in Berlin” by Vincent Perez, about a young couple from Berlin who defies the Nazism, “24 Weeks” by Anne Zohra Berrached, a portrait of a woman who finds herself in a moral dilemma, and “Soy Nero” by Rafi Pitts, about a young Mexican fighting for US citizenship with a riffle in his hand, on the Middle East.
The refugee crisis is in the focus of the 66th Berlinale, thus the motto of this year’s review “The right to happiness, to home, to work…” is not surprising.
(Source: fokus.ba)
