BERLIN, Jan 31, (Agencies): A new movie from Billy Bob Thornton and a turn as Marie Antoinette by Diane Kruger will rub shoulders with offerings from Asia to Africa at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. Organizers on Tuesday presented the program for the event, the first of the year’s major European film festivals, which runs Feb 9-19. Outside the main competition, highlights include Meryl Streep being honored for her lifetime achievement; Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut, the Bosnian war movie “In the Land of Blood and Honey”; and documentaries and discussions on the Arab world in the wake of the past year’s upheaval. “There are a lot of films in this festival about changes happening in the world,” festival director Dieter Kosslick said. The competition for the festival’s top Golden Bear award opens with French director Benoit Jacquot’s “Farewell My Queen,” a drama centering on the drama inside the queen’s palace as the French Revolution broke out, and starring Kruger as Marie Antoinette.

Entries
Thornton both directs and stars in “Jayne Mansfield’s Car,” a 1960s drama that also features John Hurt, Robert Duvall and Kevin Bacon.
Other entries range from Indonesian director Edwin’s “Postcards From The Zoo,” the story of a girl raised by a giraffe keeper, to “Caesar Must Die,” from Italian brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, following an effort to stage a Shakespeare play at a Rome prison.
Last year’s Golden Bear went to Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation,” which also swept the festival’s acting awards and has been nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-language category this year.
Farhadi is a member of the eight-member jury that will choose this year’s winners. Led by British director Mike Leigh, it also includes actor Jake Gyllenhaal; photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn; French director Francois Ozon; and actress Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Epic
A sweeping Chinese epic, “White Deer Plain”, will round out the list of 18 films vying for gold at the 62nd Berlin film festival, organisers said Tuesday.
Festival chief Dieter Kosslick told reporters the movie by 2007 Berlin Golden Bear winner Wang Quan’an would go up against competitors from the United States, Europe, Africa and the rest of Asia during the February 9-19 event.
“White Deer Plain” (Bai lu yuan), which will have its world premiere at the Berlinale, as the event is known, is based on “one of the most controversial novels in modern Chinese literature”, Kosslick said.
Chen Zhongshi’s prize-winning bestseller depicts the hard lives of several generations of families and the impact of the radical upheaval gripping the Chinese countryside over half a century before the rise of communism.
Other international productions in competition include Filipino art house star Brillante Mendoza’s “Captive” starring French screen icon Isabelle Huppert as an aid worker kidnapped by Islamist extremist group Abu Sayyaf.
Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Christina Ricci co-star in the picture, which will appear out of competition.
A list of the movies being shown in the official program at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, which runs Feb 9-19.

In competition:
“A moi seule” (“Coming Home”), director Frederic Videau.
“Aujourd’hui,” Alain Gomis.
“Bai lu yuan,” Wang Quan’an.
“Barbara,” Christian Petzold.
“Captive,” Brillante Mendoza.
“Cesare deve Morire” (“Caesar Must Die”), Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.
“Csak a szel” (“Just The Wind”), Bence Fliegauf.
“Dictado” (“Childish Games”), Antonio Chavarrias.
“En kongelig affaere” (“A Royal Affair”), Nikolaj Arcel.
“Gnade” (“Mercy”), Matthias Glasner.
“Jayne Mansfield’s Car,” Billy Bob Thornton.
“Kebun binatang” (“Postcards From The Zoo”), Edwin.
“L’enfant d’en haut” (“Sister”), Ursula Meier.
“Les Adieux a la Reine” (“Farewell My Queen”), Benoit Jacquot.
“Meteora,” Spiros Stathoulopoulos.
“Rebelle,” Kim Nguyen.
“Tabu,” Miguel Gomes.
“Was bleibt” (“Home For The Weekend”), Hans-Christian Schmid.
Out of competition:
“Bel Ami,” Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod.
“Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close,” Stephen Daldry.
“Flying Swords of Dragon Gate,” Tsui Hark.
“Jin ling Shi San Chai” (“The Flowers Of War”), Zhang Yimou.
“Shadow Dancer,” James Marsh.

Also:
WARSAW: Polish cinema had its best year ever in 2011 after hitting the doldrums the previous year, with a record 11.8 million people choosing to see home-grown films, industry sources said Tuesday.
Two locally-made romantic comedies topped the box office, trumping Hollywood blockbusters, as cinemas in Poland — an ex-communist EU state of 38 million people — drew an overall audience of 38.7 million.
“Polish comedies and historical films got the best reception ever recorded last year,” Paulina Bez of the state-run Polish Film Institute told AFP.


“Listy do M” (A Letter to Santa), a romantic Christmas comedy, took top spot, drawing 2.33 million viewers, followed by “Och Karol II”, a rom-com sequel about a philandering playboy, which drew 1.75 million viewers.
The latest sequel of Hollywood blockbuster series “Pirates of the Caribbean” took third spot with 1.38 million viewers, while fourth place went to Poland’s “Bitwa Warszawska 1920” (Battle of Warsaw).
The 3D drama focuses on the against-all-odds battle in which Polish independence fighters repelled Soviet Bolsheviks from the capital.
Poland’s once vibrant film industry — with directors including Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrzej Wajda and Agnieszka Holland — slipped into decline after the collapse of communism in 1989.
In 2010, Polish cinemas drew an audience of 37.5 million, but local productions attracted only 5.4 million viewers.
“We explain this by the period of public mourning following the April 2010 Smolensk catastrophe,” said Bez, referring to the plane crash in which Poland’s president Lech Kaczynski and 95 other senior figures died.
Flooding later in the year also dampened box office figures, she said.
Set up in 2006, the Polish Film Institute has played a key role in promoting local productions, offering film-makers up to 120 million zloty (28.3 million euro, $37.5 million) in annual subsidies.