BERLINALE SPECIAL

The Berlin International Film Festival’s Panorama section has confirmed another documentary, Traveling with Che Guevara (Italy, 110 minutes) by Gianni Mina, which will contribute further to shaping the festival’s special focus this year on Latin America.

The film, made during the shooting of Walter Salles’s Motorcycle Diaries, illuminates the circumstances behind Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s motorcycle trip through South America in 1952 and how it politicized him.

Guevara, at the time a 23-year-old medical student, kept diaries about his six-month-long journey with his friend, the biologist Alberto Granado. The two traveled as leprosy specialists all across Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela.

Salles, who received the Golden Berlin Bear in 1998 for his film Central Station, convinced Granado to be his advisor on the film and to accompany the shooting. In Gianni Mina’s documentary about the film’s making, Granado clarifies incidents, recounts his own memories, gives guidance on details and lends his support to the actors Gael Garcia Bernal (Che) and Rodrigo de la Serna (Alberto).

81-year-old Alberto Granado told the documentary filmmaker, “Re-living all this seems like a dream”.

Both Gianni Mina and Alberto Grando are expected to attend the Berlinale for the film’s presentation. Walter Salles’s Motorcycle Diaries, on the other hand, is reportedly headed to Cannes.

The Berlinale has also announced the creation a new series in its Official Program, the Berlinale Special, which will include the latest works of master filmmakers as well as revivals of important films related to the Festival’s special focuses or to particularly explosive political topics.

This inaugural series includes four components:

1) the most recent films of directors Peter Greenaway (The Tulse Luper Suitcases, part 2, featuring Isabella Rosselini, Franka Potente and Ornella Muti) and Ermanno Olmi (Cantando dietro i paraventi / Singing Behind Screens);

2) three revivals: Jacques Demy‘s 1970 adaptation of the fairy tale Peau d’ane (Donkey Skin), starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Marais, Jacques Perrin and Delphine Seyrig (to be preceded by Agnes Varda‘s short film, Peau d’ane); from Germany, a newly restored printed of the long-missing film Das Boot ist voll (The Boat is Full), for which director Markus Imhoof won a Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 1981 (the film was nominated for an Oscar the following year); and Peter Schamoni’s Fruhlingssinfonie (Spring Symphony), featuring Nastassja Kinski, Rolf Hoppe and Herbert Gronemeyer, from 1984, which will be screened on the occasion of the director’s 70th birthday.

3) two productions examining the political past: Egidio Eronico’s Papa — Rua Alguem 5555 (My Father, 2002), featuring Charlton Heston (as Joseph Mengele!), F. Murray Abraham and Thomas Kretschmann, in which a son confronts his father about his role conducting human experiments while he was a doctor at the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz; and Pour l’amour du peuple (I Love You All) by Eyal Sivan and Audrey Maurion, based on a former Stasi major’s authentic eye-witness reports, which provide a kaleidoscopic portrait of a society (the GDR) under constant surveillance;

4) and three films related to the Festival’s special focus on music: Rhythm Is It!, an unconventional German music film by Thomas Grube and Enrique Sanchez Lansch, which shows the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and their chief conductor Sir Simon Rattle during their first season together at their rehearsals for Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps; a silent film by German director Oliver Herrmann — who died last autumn — that sets Stravinsky’s ballet Le sacre du printemps in the world of Cuban Santeria, which will be accompanied by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Sir Simon Rattle on February 15; and CS Leigh’s Process, featuring Beatrice Dalle, Guillaume Depardieu and Daniel Duval, which will be presented as a live event with a score performed by John Cale.