"Good Bye, Southern City" participates in 57th International Berlin Film Festival

The Berlinale was set up in 1951 by Oscar Martay, a film officer with the American Military Administration in post-war West Berlin, to western political and cultural ideas in a city surrounded by the Communist GDR. Alfred Hitchcock's "Rebecca" (1940) opened the first festival.

Since then, the festival has evolved into one of the leading film festivals in the world and a few specific features have consistently marked the festival program: the importance of social/political cinema; a noticeable bent toward Hollywood cinema, which is not common among other European films festivals; and, especially in the last few years, an interest in Asian films.

This year's festival features 22 films in international competition. The first days saw the premiers of the "The Good German" (2007), Stephen Soderbergh's new film with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett that tells the story of an American journalist entangled in a murder conspiracy in post-war Berlin. Shot in black and white with equipment from the 1940s, this film mixes archive material with contemporary film techniques. Another premier was the new film by Robert De Niro, "The Good Shepherd" (2007), starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie and Alec Baldwin, detailing the founding years of the CIA.

"Goodbye Bafana," directed by Bille August and starring Joseph Fiennes, Dennis Haysbert and Diane Kruger, depicts the 20-year friendship between Nelson Mandela and James Gregory, one of his white prison guards, on whose memoirs the film is based. Mandela has disputed the depth of the relationship Gregory depicts in the book but the film adds to the vogue for films based on recent historical events.

Another film based on real events is one of the two German entries in the competition, "Die Faelscher" (The Counterfeiter) by Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitsky. The film tells the story of the world's biggest cash forgery, carried out towards the end of World War II in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which became known as Operation Bernhard. The film focuses on imprisoned forger Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), originally from Odessa, who is put in charge of the production of fake British pounds and U.S. dollars. The questions of personal responsibility and issues of collaborating with the enemy splits the team. As Stefan Ruzowitsky said at the press conference after the premier, the film's creators tried to make the characters as ambiguous as possible.

The film is based on the autobiography of Adolf Burger, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor. His life story is fused with the biography of another real master forger, Salomon Smolianoff, of Russian origin, also engaged in the operation in Sachsenhausen. "Notes on a Scandal" shows a completely different, yet no less masterfully and brilliantly depicted psychological drama of a very intimate and controversial kind. Set in a London school it features the love/hate relationship between two teachers played by Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett — both of whom have been nominated for Oscars for their roles.

The official competition program is not everything the Berlinale has to offer. More than 350 other films are being shown in various categories — including Panorama, which aims to discover the new art-house films of the coming season, young German cinema in Perspectives Deutsches Kino, and Forum, which searches for contrast and contradiction in new cinema all over the world.

Another film is a Russia/Azerbaijan co-production, "Good Bye, Southern City,
("Proschai, Yuzny Gorod"), a feature film film set in Baku during and after the fall of the Soviet Union that traces the changing social landscape.

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