Chinese film to kick off Berlin festival

A film by Wang Quan'an, the Chinese director who won the Golden Bear for Tuya's Marriage, will open the Berlin International Film Festival in February.

His newfilm, Apart Together, follows the fortunes of lovers separated when one, a soldier, flees to Taiwan in 1949 to escape the Communist revolution. They reunite 20 years later. Festival organizers hailed Wang, 44, as "one of the most important Chinese auteur film-makers of the younger generation."

The festival will be bookended by Asian films with a contemporary drama by veteran Japanese director Yoji Yamada About Her Brother (Otouto) closing the festival.

Asian films have traditionally had a strong presence in Berlin and the Forum documentary program, also announced Tuesday,includes a strong slate offilms from Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China.

Quebec director Jean-Franois Caissy is debuting his documentary, La Belle Visite (Journey's End) in its international premiere in the Forum program at Berlin.

La Belle Visite is a meditation on the final years, following the lives of two dozen seniors over five seasons in a beautiful Quebec community by the sea. Caissy, raised on the Gasp Peninsula, is the director of 2005's La saison des amours (Mating Season) and has previously screened La Belle Visite at the Montreal Documentary Film Festival.

Imani, by Ugandan director Caroline Kamya, the story of the lives of a former child soldier, a breakdancer and a young maid, was shot in Canada, Sweden and Uganda.

The Forum program announced a full slate of 34 films. Among them:

• Head Cold by Gamma Beck of Berlin.
• Sunny Land by Aljoscha Weskott and Marietta Kesting of South Africa.
• Au revoir Taipei by Arvin Chen of Taiwan.
• Black Bus by Anat Yuta Zuria of Israel.

The Berlin Film Festival is scheduled to screen The Ghost Writer, the film Roman Polanski has been working on while under house arrest in Switzerland awaiting possible extradition to the United States on charges of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.

Martin Scorsese's new thriller Shutter Island, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and My Name is Khan, starringBollywood heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan, are also in the program.

The Berlin festival runs Feb. 11-21.