The film “The Lark Farm” is sure to stir up controversy at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. It takes a close look at Turkey’s most sensitive taboo — the 1915 genocide against the Armenians. Extra security has been brought in for the Wednesday evening premiere.

All that was missing at the Festival Palace was the wave cheer, given the level of enthusiasm with which Dieter Kosslick, the festival’s director, staged the opening gala of the 57th Berlin International Film Festival last Thursday. Once again, Kosslick has managed to position the German capital as a world-class film city, and this year’s Berlinale again vies with past festivals in its relentless determination to deliver euphoria.

The French film “La Vie en rose,” the first film on the festival’s schedule, matched the effusive mood of the event. In the film, director Olivier Dahan tells the life story of singer Edith Piaf, sumptuously portraying her descent into drug addiction and disastrous love affairs. The president of the festival’s jury Paul Schrader — himself a writer, director and film critic — has said he sees film as a kind of museum, or cultural memory bank. It’s an interpretation that clearly applies to this year’s festival.

Steven Soderbergh’s black-and-white drama “The Good German,” provides a good example. George Clooney portrays an American reporter in post-World War II Germany who is tragically in love with a beautiful but mysterious woman (Cate Blanchett). The American thriller “The Good Shepherd,” starring Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon and Alec Baldwin and directed by Robert De Niro, is a story about the early days of the CIA. In the historical drama “Die Fälscher” (”The Counterfeiters”), Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky describes how inmates at the Nazi concentration camp in Sachsenhausen were forced to print British pound notes in a counterfeiting workshop.
Read more at Spiegel