Berlin - Next month's Berlin Film festival will attempt to present the human side to recent events with Berlinale organizers unveiling Monday another batch of films competing for the fest's main awards.
Among the films to be shown at this year's festival will be Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima.
After his Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood will present the second movie in his two-part project looking at the legendary battle on the Japanese Pacific island in February 1945.
While Flags of Our Fathers recounts events as experienced by GIs, Letters from Iwo Jima tells the same story from the Japanese point of view. The cast in the European premiere features Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya and Tsuyoshi Ihara.
'We have succeeded,' said festival director Dieter Kosslick, 'in getting films by important directors of international cinema to come to Berlin.
'We are equally delighted by the work of young filmmakers, whose stories and ways of telling them we think is important to present to a big audience.'
Earlier this month festival organizers released a list of seven films to be screened in the Berlinale's main competition with the rest of the total of 26 movies to be announced later this month.
The 57th Berlin Film Festival will also include the World premiere of German-Austrian co-production Die Faelscher (The Counterfeiter) by Stefan Ruzowitzky which looks into the biggest counterfeiting operation ever pulled off.
Towards the end of World War II, the Nazis forged millions of British pounds in order to weaken the enemy's economy.
A counterfeiting plant was set up with prisoners in the concentration camps in Germany. Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow and Marie Baeumer play the leading roles in the film.
Based on real events, director Gregory Nava's US-production Bordertown about a series of murders of Mexican women workers in the border town of Ciudad Juarez in the early 1990s is a have its world premiere in Berlin.
The film stars Jennifer Lopez as well as Antonio Banderas, Maya Zapata and Martin Sheen.
Andre Techine's Les Temoins (The Witnesses) is set in the early 1980s against the emergence of AIDS. Starring Emmanuelle Beart, Michel Blanc, Sami Bouajila and Julie Depardieu, the film is to have its world premiere at the Berlinale.
Representing the Czech Republic in the Berlinale's main competition this year's will be Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale (I Served the King of England) from director Jiri Menzel.
His film Larks on a String, won the Berlin Film Festival's coveted Golden Bear in 1990.
Another world premiere will be Jacques Rivette's love story, Ne touchez pas la hache (Don't Touch the Axe), about a beautiful duchess who wards off the advances of a very passionate military officer.
Starring Guillaume Depardieu, Jeanne Balibar and Michell Piccoli, Rivette's film is the screen adaptation of a Balzac novella.
Others movies to be shown in Berlin, include The Walker, about an escort used by elegant but lonely society ladies in Washington DC and the world premiere of In Memoria di me (In Memory of Myself) by Italy's Saverio Costanzo.
The Walker stars some of Hollywood's top actors including Woody Harrelson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin and Willem Dafoe.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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