BERLIN: Two famous film veterans director Abel Ferrara and actor Willem Dafoe make the Italian, German, Mexican coproduction Siberia a tour de force fantasy that has earned the film a place in the main competition at this year’s Berlinale.  This is not the first time Ferrara and Dafoe have worked together and the close collaboration between them make you feel that this odd and sometimes frustrating excursion into Ferrara’s strange mind could not have been made with any other actor by Dafoe.

BERLIN: This is the fifth time in the main competition for German director Christian Petzold who has scored a slot in the lineup with Undine based on the myth of the water nymph which he has updated and set in contemporary Berlin.  Audiences will remember Petzold for his fine work on previous films Barbara, Phoenix and Transit that were major hits with critics and international art house audiences.  Petzold is a director that likes to take the woman’s point of view in his films and Undine is no exception.

BERLIN: An unlikely and daring choice for the main competition in Berlin the Russian, German, Ukraine, UK coproduction DAU.Natasha directed by Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and Jekaterina Oertel is the first film to emerge from the massive, multidisciplinary DAU art project an experiment in film and performance installation and probably some other things that no one has dreamed up a name for yet.  DAU is meant to recreate the experience of living everyday life in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and is set in a fictional Soviet research institute.

BERLIN: American director Eliza Hittman takes on the issue of teenage pregnancy and abortion in here lately film Never Rarely Sometimes Always which is screening in the main competition in Berlin this year. Hittman also wrote the script for this topical look at teenagers and the problems and choices they face.  Her previous films Beach Rats and It Felt Like Love also have tackled youth and anxiety but none so successfully as Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

BERLIN: American director Kelly Reichardt arrives in the main competition with First Cow an adaptation of Jon Raymond’s novel The Half Life sent in the Oregon wilderness during the early days of the American pioneers.  The pioneers in the Pacific Northwest is familiar territory for Reichardt as her highly regarded film Meek’s Cutoff about the fate of pioneers who died as they made their way west along the Oregon Trail was also set in this period.