{mosimage}BERLIN: The 62 Berlinale awarded its highest honour to a to a documentary by the veteran Italian directing team Paolo and Vittorio Taviani for their docu-drama Caesar Must Die about a group of criminals performing Shakespeare in a prison. Taviani's also picked up the Ecumenical Jury prize.

BERLIN: The 62 Berlinale awarded its highest honour to a to a documentary by the veteran Italian directing team Paolo and Vittorio Taviani for their docu-drama Caesar Must Die about a group of criminals performing Shakespeare in a prison. Taviani's also picked up the Ecumenical Jury prize.

{mosimage}BERLIN: The Lithuanian feature film Restricted Sensation by a Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius will take place tonight at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival. It is important to note that this is the only Lithuanian film that has made it to Berlinale this year and it will be screened as a part of a "Forum Expanded" programme.

{mosimage}BIARRITZ: The 25 edition of FIPA (23-29 January 2012 www.fipa.tm.fr) celebrated opening the doors of European television to global producers including central and Eastern European partners.

{mosimage}PRAGUE : Czech director Jan Sverak (www.sverak.cz ) is preparing a new project based on the Saul Bellows book Henderson the Rain King together with his long time production partner Eric Abraham of Portobello Pictures.

VENICE: British director Steve McQueen follows his critically acclaimed debut, Hunger, about a man who used his body as a political tool to fight for freedom, with Shame, which examines a man who creates his own prison through his out of control sex life.

VENICE: Roman Polanski’s Carnage is an adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s French stage play, God of Carnage, which was one of the most successful international stage hits of the past decade. Conceived as a four-hander for the stage the story brings together two couples in a Brooklyn apartment after their two sons, aged around 10 or 11, have quarreled on a local playground. The stronger boy armed with a stick has injured the other boy inflicting broken teeth, swollen lips and other bloody gashes.

VENICE: David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is a much more conventional film than his recent work with a mostly straight historical recounting of the intersection of the lives of psychiatrists Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and Jung's beautiful young patient Sabina Spielrein. The period pic set is in pre-World War I Zurich and Vienna and boasts a stellar cast with Keira Knightley as the troubled Spielrein, Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Frued. Vincent Cassel puts in a short but vivid appearance as the debauched psychiatrist Otto Gross.

VENICE: Faust is the final installment of Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s tetralogy on the nature of power and it has already succeeded in establishing itself as the most controversial entry in the Venice IFF competition. Critical opinion was sharply divided after the first screening with Sokurov’s work being branded either a masterpiece or utter rubbish. But no one was neutral which is perhaps part of what great art is all about.

VENICE: Swedish director Tomas Alfredson brings John Le Carre's 1974 Cold War spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to the screen in this big budget European adaptation of the novel. The BBC screen version of the novel is already well known from the hugely successful TV series that was exported around the world and Gary Oldman has a tough act to follow in his role as master spy George Smiley, a role that Alec Guinness made his own. But Oldman is equal to the task giving a masterful, if less likable performance than Guinness, as the veteran spy of the Le Carre novels. Oldman is much colder and grayer than Guinness and we feel perhaps less sympathy for him. But the loneliness of being a spy and the imaginary world they live in as well as the ruthlessness and moral ambiguity are all there in Oldman's Smiley. It is a performance that should win him a slew of awards in the coming year.