Berlinale. Competition lineup, round 2.

The Berlinale has announced 14 more Competition entries; add the nine announced in December, and that makes 23. Just three more to go before the program's complete. The new ones:

• Matthias Glasner's Der freie Wille (Free Will), with Jürgen Vogel, and Valeska Grisebach's Sehnsucht (Desire) make a total of four German films seeing their world premiere at the fest. The other two, announced earlier, are Oskar Roehler's Elementarteilchen (The Elementary Particles) and Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem.

• Another world premiere, though hardly a surprise, is Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, rolling on to SXSW in March for its North American premiere. The Berlinale's got to be tickled with Altman's honorary Oscar; this'll be an entry with artsy cred and a touch of the glamour the city and festival sponsors persistently call for. Two more American films will screen out of competition: Capote and, as many Austin cinephiles have already heard, V for Vendetta.

• Claude Chabrol's L'ivresse du pouvoir (Comedy of Power), with Isabelle Huppert. World premiere. I'll be thinking of you, Flickhead.

• Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, with Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg and the somewhat familiar premise of a man who "begins to confuse his dream world with reality," as the Berlinale puts it. Gondry's doc, Dave Chappelle's Block Party will be screening in the Panorama section.

• I'm beginning to suspect there are two or three Michael Winterbottoms. How can one man keep up that pace, like some British Miike, while holding the bar so high? His new one will be The Road to Guantanamo, mixing "elements of fiction, authentic reports and interviews." World premiere. Related: Lisa Bear asks Winterbottom about the film - and Tristram Shandy as well, of course - for indieWIRE.

• Michele Placido's Romanzo Criminale (Crime Novel), with Kim Rossi Stuart, Anna Mouglalis and Stefano Accorsi, based on a novel by Giancarlo De Cataldo.

• Pernille Fischer Christensen's debut, En Soap, with Trine Dyrholm and David Dencik.

• Michael Glawogger, whose doc, Workingman's Death, has impressed the few who've seen it, has a second feature: Slumming, starring August Diehl.

• Rodrigo Moreno's debut as a solo director, El Custodio. World premiere.

• From Iran, Rafi Pitts's Zemestan (It's Winter).

• Pang Ho-cheung's Isabella. World premiere.

One more European note before spending much of the rest of the day watching the Sundance watchers. In Die Zeit (and in German), Katja Nicodemus and Thomas Assheuer have a long interview with Michael Haneke. A snippet:

Haneke: Austria - I don't know how it is in Germany - is nothing more than a cultural province of America. Volker Schlöndorff wrote in your pages: "In my day, everyone looked to France." France was the focal point. There was Sartre, Camus, the New Wave, and so on. When I was studying, you could turn on the TV after 10 pm and watch a film by Resnais or Bresson. Not anymore. In France, for example, there are DVDs of all the classics with subtitles. If you walk into a DVD store in Austria, you get nothing. There's no market for it. My students have never had the opportunity to be introduced to anything like this.

Zeit: Are you saying that the market is erasing cultural memory?

Haneke: Of course. It's comfortable. Memory is always uncomfortable because it entails effort.

Posted by dwhudson at January 19, 2006 2:24 AM