Berlin festival adds French, American films

Movies from French directors Andre Techine and Jacques Rivette, and the U.S. production Bordertown, starring Jennifer Lopez, were among the eight films added to the Berlin International Film Festival Monday.

The latest entries to the Feb. 8-18 festival join a program that already includes Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd and Steven Soderbergh's The Good German.

"We have succeeded in getting films by important directors of international cinema to come to Berlin," festival director Dieter Kosslick said in a release. "We are equally delighted by the work of young filmmakers, whose stories and ways of telling them we think [are] important to present to a big audience."

Techine's Les Temoins (The Witnesses) traces the emergence of AIDS in the early 1980s and stars Emmanuelle Beart among others.

Rivette's Ne touchez pas la hache (Don't Touch the Axe), is based on a Balzac novellaand features Guillaume Depardieu.

In Bordertown, Lopez plays a Chicago-based reporter sent to Mexico to investigate the killings of women in the city of Ciudad Juarez. Directed by Gregory Nava, the film also features Antonio Banderas, Maya Zapata and Martin Sheen.

Screening out of competition will be Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, and The Walker, the latest film from festival jury head Paul Schrader.

Other films added Monday to the official programinclude:

• The German-Austrian co-production Die Faelscher (The Counterfeiters), which traces a Nazi operation near the end of World War II to forge millions of British pounds in an effort to weaken the British economy.
• In In Memoria di me (In Memory of Myself), Italian director Saverio Costanzo's story of a young man who enters a monastery.
• Czech director Jiri Mezel's Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale (I Served the King of England), an adaptation of a Bohumil Hrabal novel.

Organizers have yet to announce the final 11 entries in this year's planned official competition of 26 movies.

Last year, the festival's top Golden Bear award went to Jasmila Zbanic's Grbavica, a movie examining how a single mother and her 12-year-old daughter struggle with the aftermath of the Bosnian war.