Frankfurter Rundschau 08.02.2007

"The Berlinale doesn't start until this evening, but it has already hit its first scandal," reports Daniel Kothenschulte. "The hotly awaited Chinese economy-boom drama 'Lost in Bejing' by female director Li Yu, which was due to run in the Competition, was banned at the beginning of the week by the Chinese censorship authorities. Now it seems it is allowed to be shown after all – but having been cut by almost a quarter of an hour. How should one meet these demands? It would be awful to be in the position of the artist who is being forced to mutilate her own work – but the situation is equally bad for the festival management, whose political integrity is at stake."


Die Zeit 08.02.2007

In the new films showing in the Competition section of the Berlinale from Clint Eastwood, Robert de Niro and Steven Soderbergh, Georg Seeßlen met mostly broken heroes of a broken patriotism which he sees as a consequence of the disastrous Iraq war. "Not anger but mourning dominates. Just as the Vietnam war broke out in American cinema in the Seventies with it a storm of bloody, dirty, torn images, the Iraq war is bringing images of paralysis, powerlessness and torture in war films, horror films, blockbusters and trash movies alike. Alienation."

In a heated theological discussion with Kardinal Walter Kasper, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk expresses his hopes for a "peaceful utilisation of monotheistic energies." After all, he says: "The greatest achievement of institutionalised Christianity is, to extend the metaphor, that it has given rise to a highly developed reactor technology. What in naive hearts might easily spark combustive mania can, through ascetic and meditative practice and learnable forms of spiritual inquiry, be contained within a workable format." Or as Kaspar puts it: "Religion is never cool."


Berliner Zeitung 08.02.2007

Gerhard Midding reports on the ups and downs in the French cinema landscape: "There's a fatal oversaturation in the country's roughly 5,000 screens, which has led to a rotation tempo like that in the USA with a high number of prints and expensive PR campaigns. Filmmaker Alain Resnais, himself a passionate moviegoer, recently said in an interview: 'I'd love to see all my colleagues' films, but most of them are only screened for a few weeks after they come out.' Nevertheless, film-country France has also found a solution to this problem. Every autumn in Paris a festival is held for forgotten and ignored films."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 08.02.2007

"Of course you can degrade Wojciech Jaruzelski, but what's the point?" asks Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk. The comment comes in reaction to an initiative by President Lech Kaczynski to degrade the former Polish head of state to the rank of private. "After all, for the current governing team Jaruzelski was a communist general, that is to say a false, phoney general. Consequently his military rank must also have been spurious. So why strip him of it? As an inverse way of acknowledging it? There's an absurd whiff of contradiction to all this." See our feature "Not a living soul around" by Andrzej Stasiuk.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 08.02.2007

Christian Gasser portrays the Geneva comic artist Frederik Peeters whose best known comic "Pilules Bleues" (blue pills) describes his relationship with his HIV-positive girlfriend Cati. "He draws the complications of the day-to-day relationship laconically, and with a sometimes twisted, sometimes black humour, he describes how the emergency state of health becomes normality. He does make HIV and AIDS harmless, but he does take the drama out of it. You get used to everything Frederik Peeters says drily, 'Even living with HIV; the situation is complex but certainly not tragic'."