Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more
This year's Berlin Film Festival proved that director Dieter Kosslick is honouring his committment to be political, proportional and popular. Ekkerhard Knörer only regrets that aesthetic criteria got left by the wayside.
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Jafar Panahi's "Offside" blows the whistle on female football fans in Iran. In Claude Chabrol's "Comedy of Power", a muck-raking Isabelle Huppert comes up against the fattest cats of all. And Amir Muhammad's "The Last Communist" portrays over 80 people before finding just that.
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A terribly simple tragedy: Valeska Griesebach's film with non-actors, "Longing". A nymphomaniac cop meets his match in Pang Ho-cheung's well-manicured "Isabella". And Mani Haghighi's "Men at Work" asks how many middle-aged Iranian men it takes to budge a rock.
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Rafi Pitt's "Zemestan" starts in bleakness and ends in despair. John Hillcoat brings Nick Cave's sweaty outback epic "The Propostition" seamlessly to the big screen. Matthew Barney has a whale of a time with Björk in "Drawing Restraint 9". Michael Winterbottom's "Road to Guantanamo" is 95 minutes of collateral damage.
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Storm Saxons and a shaved-headed Natalie Portman have people flocking to James McTeigue's "V for Vendetta". Cinema at its most despicable: Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Invisible Waves", and loving a serial rapist: "Der Freie Wille" by Matthias Glasner.
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Detlev Buck's "Tough Enough" looks at the life of a rich boy in a rough area where the ultimate insult is "victim!" Terence Malick's "The New World" is little more than soft colonialist porn. Robert Altman's "A Prairie Home Companion" is good, harmless family entertainment. Chen Kaige's "The Promise" desires to blockbuster. Stephen Gaghan's "Syriana" is an introductory seminar on the dirty ol' oil business. And Oskar Roehler's "Atomised" has taken the horrible out of Houellebecq.
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The festival got off on a gentle note with Marc Evans' "Snow Cake". Blood, sex and gore - but not for gore's sake - soon took audiences by storm, though, with Sono Sion's "Strange Circus". Pernille Fischer Christensen's "En Soap" was sadly just a washout. And "Close to Home" by Dalia Hager and Vidi Bilu shows 18-year-old girls struggling to sound authoritative in their army uniforms on the streets of Jerusalem.
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This evening, Marc Evans' film "Snow Cake" will open the Berlinale film festival 2006. Ekkehard Knörer is keeping his eyes peeled for the mad and the beautiful, the puzzling and the devasting, understatement and excess. Stay with us for a front-row seat.
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Poor old Berlinale: nonstop snow, not enough stars, little Hollywood interest, an overdose of political films and wishywashy films d'auteur. Sounds like a washout - but a host of Chinese independent masterpieces and Julia Jentsch saved the day. By Ekkehard Knörer.
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