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In Berlin und Umgebung sowie in Leipzig laufen noch bis November die Dreharbeiten zur Romanverfilmung „Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstraße“, bei der Wolfgang Becker Regie führt.

Am Set von „Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstraße“ (v.l.n.r.): Regisseur Wolfgang Becker mit dem Cast Yvon Moltzen, Charly Hübner, Helena Landau und Leonie Benesch (Credit: Frédéric Batier – X Filme Creative Pool)

Nach einem Drehbuch, das Constantin Lieb geschrieben hat, inszeniert Wolfgang Becker noch bis November in Berlin und Umgebung sowie in Leipzig die Verfilmung von Maxim Leos Roman „Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstraße“.

In der Hauptrolle verkörpert Charly Hübner den kurz vor der Pleite stehenden Berliner Videothekenbesitzer Micha Hartung (Charly Hübner), der zum 30. Jahrestages des Mauerfalls von einem Journalisten zum Drahtzieher der größten Massenflucht der Ddr stilisiert wird. Als Hochstapler wider Willen verstrickt sich Micha in einem Gestrüpp aus Halbwahrheiten und handfesten Lügen. Und als das fragile Kartenhaus der Geschichte...

The 34th European Film Awards (EFAs), which were held virtually from Berlin, honoured and celebrated excellence in European cinema. The Saturday night ceremony was hosted by German actress and writer Annabelle Mandeng from Arena Berlin studio where the nominees and winners joined via video link. Bosnian filmmaker, Jasmila Zbanic’s film ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ which follows […]...

The European Film Awards, Europe’s biggest awards celebration, revealed its major winners during a mostly virtual ceremony on Saturday, December 11. The night was originally slated for an in-person event, but concerns about the Omicron variant moved festivities online. The powerful Bosnian wartime drama “Quo Vadis, Aida?” took home the top prize for Best Film, with its director Jasmila Žbanić and lead actress Jasna Đuričić also winning Best Director and Actress respectively. “Flee,” from Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen, also won in two categories — Documentary and Animated Feature.

The awards ceremony was hosted by German actor Annabelle Mandeng. The hybrid event saw nominees, presenters, and winners participating in a mixture of live, virtual, and pre-recorded formats.

“Quo Vadis, Aida” tells the story of the Srebrenica genocide, during which Serbian troops sent 8,372 Bosniak men and boys to their deaths in July 1995. The powerful story is told through the eyes of Aida,...

Update: Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida? was the big winner at the 34th European Film Awards tonight. The story of a woman’s fight to save her family during the true events of the 1995 Bosnian War genocide in Srebrenica scooped the top European Film prize as well as European Director for Žbanić and European Actress for Jasna Đuričić. (Scroll down for the full list of winners.)

Quo Vadis, Aida? was nominated for an Oscar at the 93rd Academy Awards and its triumph tonight was indicative of how the European Film Academy leaned this year. While the EFAs can be somewhat predictive of the Oscar for Best International Feature, this evening’s ceremony saw a fair bit of crossover from the 2021 Oscars.

Other winners that had already achieved Oscar recognition included Florian Zeller’s The Father which repeated with wins for Anthony Hopkins as European Actor and for Zeller and Christopher Hampton’s screenplay.

Organisers took decision due to “ongoing and unexpected developments of the Covid-19 pandemic”.

The European Film Awards (Efa) ceremony, to be held on December 11 in Berlin, will now go ahead as a mostly online hybrid event due to escalating Covid-19 cases in Germany.

Last week the ceremony was re-formatted as a “distanced live event” with no studio audience and just nominees present.

The new format will see nominees join via various live and pre-recorded digital formats. The host, German actress and writer Annabelle Mandeng, will still be present in the studio alongside some presenters, with other presenters joining online.

Organisers...

The European Film Awards scheduled to have been held in Berlin, Germany, on Dec. 11 will no longer take place as an in-person event.

The 34th European Film Awards ceremony was previously re-formatted as a distanced live event, with attendance limited to nominees and award recipients.

“Due to the ongoing and unexpected developments of the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Film Academy has decided that the upcoming ceremony of the 34th European Film Awards on Dec. 11 will be further adapted,” the Academy said in a statement. “The aim of the organization is to minimize risks for the people involved as much as possible.”

“The current situation forces the European Film Awards to take place in a completely hybrid form, with nominees and winners joining in various digital formats, pre-produced and live online,” the statement added.

The ceremony will be hosted by German actor, moderator and writer Annabelle Mandeng at a studio located in the Arena Berlin,...

The European Film Awards has cancelled its plans for a physical ceremony this year due to rising Covid numbers in Germany.

A small ceremony for nominees only was due to take place in Berlin on December 11. Instead, it will now take place in a hybrid of digital formats, including pre-produced and live online.

Positive cases in Germany have been rising consistently over the last two months, reaching close to 60,000 per day on average this past week. Further concerns over the Omicron variant have seen governments across Europe react by introducing stricter measures.

The move by the European Academy raises further questions about how film and TV events will be impacted by the pandemic’s fourth wave, which looks likely to be a factor across the winter. The Berlin International Film Festival, which is set to run February 10-20, continues to prep for a physical event and organizers are considering additional...

The European Film Awards have bowed to the inevitable. Amid an alarming rise in Covid-19 infections in Germany, the European Film Academy said Wednesday that it has canceled the planned in-person ceremony for this year’s EFAs.

Like last year’s honors, the 34th European Film Awards will be an online-only affair, preproduced and streamed live from Berlin on Saturday, Dec. 11.

The 34th edition of the European Film Awards will be hosted by German actress, moderator and writer Annabelle Mandeng from a studio located in the monumental Arena Berlin, where this year’s ceremony was always planned to take place. Several presenters ...

The European Film Awards have bowed to the inevitable. Amid an alarming rise in Covid-19 infections in Germany, the European Film Academy said Wednesday that it has canceled the planned in-person ceremony for this year’s EFAs.

Like last year’s honors, the 34th European Film Awards will be an online-only affair, preproduced and streamed live from Berlin on Saturday, Dec. 11.

The 34th edition of the European Film Awards will be hosted by German actress, moderator and writer Annabelle Mandeng from a studio located in the monumental Arena Berlin, where this year’s ceremony was always planned to take place. Several presenters ...

"You want to be something you cannot be. You want to be good in a world that is bad." Kino Lorber in the US has debuted their own official US trailer for the acclaimed, award-winning German epic drama Berlin Alexanderplatz, from filmmaker Burhan Qurbani. This premiered at last year's Berlin Film Festival and later won four German Film Awards including Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Score. This was also listed as my #2 film of 2020 on my Top 10 list from last year, as it reminded me of City of God in many ways. Qurbani is the third filmmaker to reinterpret the classic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (a mini-series by R.W. Fassbinder was released in 1980). This modern day update follows an an undocumented immigrant from West Africa named Francis, played by Welket Bungué, who spirals further into the drug scene in Berlin in order to survive. This also stars Albrecht Schuch,...

Other winners included ‘Undine’ actress Paula Beer and documentary ‘Collective’.

Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round swept the European Film Awards on Saturday (December 12), winning four awards including best film, director, screenplay and actor for Mads Mikkelsen.

Scroll down for full list of winners

Accepting the best screenplay prize via video link, sat alongside co-writer Tobias Lindholm, Danish filmmaker Vinterberg said: “In a time of confinement, financial crisis and death, our attempt to make a life-affirming film has somehow succeeded.”

Best actor winner Mikkelsen dedicated his award to “a shining light who is not here anymore”, Ida Vinterberg – the daughter of...

The twin pillars of Alfred Döblin’s epochal 480-page 1929 German-language novel and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s deeply influential 15-hour miniseries, first broadcast in 1980, together create an overarching shadow from which Burhan Qurbani’s relatively svelte three-hour contemporary reworking of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” struggles to escape.

Although promising a deep-cut dash of contemporary topicality by reimagining the main character as an undocumented African immigrant, there is the sense that the unimpeachable craft and performances — especially from rivetingly charismatic lead Welket Bungué — ultimately add up to just too slick a package. Qurbani’s take starts off confident in the newness of its approach but soon comes to operate as a well-oiled, smoothly functioning machine for the manufacture of bad luck, fatal flaws and tragic, poetic justice. It misses out on the source material’s caustic, messy edge: the way the grime of the very Berlin streets can work itself like grit into the gears of fate.

The Berlinale lineup already includes films from Jia Zhangke, Matías Piñeiro, and more, but now the competition slate has arrived and it’s an incredibly promising selection. Headed by Carlo Chatrian, it includes many of our most-anticipated films of the year with Christian Petzold’s Undine, Hong Sang-soo’s The Woman Who Ran, Tsai Ming-Liang’s Days, Philippe Garrel’s The Salt of Tears, Abel Ferrara’s Siberia, and Caetano Gotardo & Marco Dutra’s All the Dead Ones, plus recent festival favorites: Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow and Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Check out the lineup below and return for our coverage.

Competition

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Germany / Netherlands

by Burhan Qurbani

with Welket Bungué, Jella Haase, Albrecht Schuch, Joachim Król, Annabelle Mandeng, Nils Verkooijen, Richard Fouofié Djimeli

World premiere

Dau. Natasha

Germany / Ukraine / United Kingdom / Russian Federation

by Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Jekaterina Oertel

with Natalia Berezhnaya, Olga Shkabarnya, Vladimir Azhippo,...

The Berlin International Film Festival on Wednesday morning revealed the main competition lineup and gala selections for festival’s 70th edition.

The festival, which begins February 20, will screen 18 films in competition, including movies from Sally Potter, Kelly Reichardt, and Eliza Hittman. Six are from female directors.

Among the gala presentations is Pixar’s” Onward.” The Dan Scanlon-helmed urban fantasy includes the voices of Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Octavia Spencer, Mel Rodriguez, Kyle Bornheimer, Lena Waithe, and Ali Wong.

Here is the complete list:

Competition

“Berlin Alexanderplatz” (Germany/Netherlands)

Director: Burhan Qurbani

Cast: Welket Bungué, Jella Haase, Albrecht Schuch, Joachim Król, Annabelle Mandeng, Nils Verkooijen, and Richard Fouofié Djimeli

“Dau. Natasha” (Germany/Ukraine/United Kingdom/Russia)

Directors: Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel

Cast: Natalia Berezhnaya, Olga Shkabarnya, Vladimir Azhippo, Alexei Blinov, and Luc Bigé

“Domangchin yeoja” (“The Woman Who Ran”) (South Korea)

Director: Hong Sangsoo

Cast: Kim Minhee,...

The Berlin International Film Festival has unveiled its 2020 line-up, with 18 films playing in competition from directors such as Abel Ferrara, Sally Potter, Christian Petzold, Hong Sangsoo, Kelly Reichardt and Eliza Hittman.

Abel Ferrara’s Willem Dafoe starrer “Siberia” is a world premiere in competition, as is Sally Potter’s “The Roads Not Taken.”

Among the U.S. films at the Berlinale, Reichardt’s “First Cow” is an international premiere, and so too is Hittman’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.”

Pixar’s latest animation, “Onward”, also has its international premiere out of competition in the Special Galas section.

Previous Berlin Silver Bear winner Christian Petzold’s latest, “Undine”, world premieres, while Iranian director Mohammed Rasoulof, who is not allowed to travel outside his home country, world premieres his latest, “There is No Evil.”

Six out of the 18 films in competition are helmed by female directors.

The 70th edition of the festival...

The Berlin Film Festival revealed its main competition lineup and additional galas this morning at a press conference in the German capital.

The lineup includes new films by Sally Potter, Kelly Reichardt, Abel Ferrara, Christian Petzold, Hong Sangsoo and Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof (who is unable to leave Iran due to a travel ban). Scroll down for the lineup in full.

Artistic director Carlo Chatrian confirmed that all main cast and all directors – other than Rasoulof – are due to attend the festival. Guests are set to include Hillary Clinton, who is the subject of Nanette Burstein’s docu-series Hillary; Stateless star and producer Cate Blanchett; Willem Dafoe, star of Abel Ferrara’s Siberia; and Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning and Salma Hayek, the stars of Potter’s drama The Roads Not Taken.

The 18-strong competition lineup includes six films by women directors. Last year, 17 films were selected for the competition with seven helmed by women.

Alexanderplatz

Alfred Doblin’s acclaimed 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz has been remade as Alexanderplatz for Afghan-German director Burhan Qurbani’s fourth feature. First adapted in 1931, Doblin’s seminal text was famously made into a fifteen-hour television series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1980. Produced by Leif Alexis, Jochen Laube and Fabian Maubach through Sommerhaus Filmproduktion, Lemming Film, Zdf, and Arte, the film is lensed by cinematographer Yoshi Heimrath (who also worked on Qurbani’s Shahada in 2010 for We Are Young. We Are Strong in 2014). Starring in the lead is Welket Bungue, supported by Jella Haase, Joachim Krol and Annabelle Mandeng. Qurbani competed for the Golden Bear in 2010 with Shahada.…...