04/05/2007

Announced at yesterday’s press conference, Jan Bonny’s Counterparts (Gegenüber) [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], produced by Cologne-based Heimatfilm, will take part in this year's edition of Directors’ Fortnight.

Counterparts is Bonny’s first feature film and tells the story of a policeman, Georg, who loses control over the carefully maintained facade of his apparently harmonious marriage with primary school teacher Anne. When he comes up for promotion, the conflicts that have determined their married life for several years penetrate to the surface in the form of traces of physical violence, and tragedy takes its course.

It was also announced that Critics Week has invited Andrey Paounov’s The Mosquito Problem and the Other Stories (Die Moskitoplage und andere Geschichten), a Bulgarian/US/German co-production. The documentary tells the eventful story of the Bulgarian village of Belene, where the country’s most infamous Stalinist concentration camp was run and where a nuclear power station is now being built. The film’s German producer is Filmtank Hamburg.

Another German co-production that will be competing at the festival, in Un Certain Regard, is Roy Andersson’s You, the Living [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Pernilla Sandström
interview: Roy Andersson
film profile] (Sweden/Germany/France/Denmark/Norway). The German producer of the burlesque comedy about the imponderability of human existence is Thermidor Filmproduktion (Cologne).

International German star Diane Krueger will present the opening ceremony of the Official Program of the 60th Cannes Film Festival on May 16.