Berlinale Diary: There's more to this film fest than 50 Shades of Grey's world premiere

The penance of temperatures hovering between zero and minus five, with a snowstorm predicted as a bonus, only make the pleasures of my annual pilgrimage to the Berlin International Film Festival more hard won. Indeed, the 65th festival, which run from runs here from 5th to 15th February has a very exciting line-up.

As far as public anticipation goes, the world premiere of Fifty Shades of Grey, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, starring newcomers Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, is hot stuff. An adaptation of EL James’s eponymous best-selling novel, it explores a sado-masochistic affair between a literature student and a billionaire.

For more demanding and artistically-inclined pilgrims, a rich feast awaits. This includes Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, a study of disillusion and decadence in Los Angeles, starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman. Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has actually directed three features despite being banned from film-making by Iran’s authorities, has made Taxi, in which Panahi himself drives a cab around Tehran, talking to the people he picks up. Kenneth Branagh’s lavish, live-action Cinderella, starring Lily James as Cinderella and Cate Blanchett as the Wicked Stepmother, will also be screened in Berlin. The festival’s opening film is Nobody Wants the Night by Spanish director Isabel Coixet, starring Juliette Binoche, Rinko Kikuchi and Gabriel Byrne. It’s the story of the courageous wife of an Arctic explorer, and an Inuit woman who supports her. “Isabel Coixet has created an impressive and perceptive portrait of two women in extreme circumstances,” says Dieter Kosslick, director of the Berlinale.

This year, German cinema has put up an impressive range. There’s Wim Wenders’s Every Thing Will Be Fine, starring James Franco as a man in a car who knocks down a child. Veteran director Werner Herzog cast Nicole Kidman and James Franco in Queen of the Desert, an epic on Gertrude Bell, the diplomat who mediated between the British Empire and the Orient in the 1920s, as a “female Lawrence of Arabia.” Margarethe von Trotta brings us The Misplaced World, on a man obsessed with a woman who resembles his dead wife. Oliver Hirschbiegel offers Elser (aka 13 Minutes), on Georg Elser’s plot to assassinate Hitler in 1939.

French director Benoit Jacquot offers Diary of a Chambermaid – also earlier directed by Jean Renoir and Luis Bunuel—a sharp attack on the sexual inclinations of the bourgeoisie, starring Lea Seydoux. Three British directors offer intriguing works. Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato examines Soviet master filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s life-altering trip to Mexico, where he goes to direct Que viva México in 1931.Andrew Haigh directs 45 Years, about a long-standing marriage with explosive secrets, starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling. Simon Curtis directs Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren, on a Holocaust survivor fighting to reclaim a Gustav Klimt painting after it was stolen by the Nazis. Mark Dornford-May’s Breathe Umphefumlo sets Puccini’s opera La Bohème in South Africa.

And finally, from the Orient, Gone with the Bullets, the sequel to Let the Bullets Fly, is a lavish Chinese masala film directed by and starring Jiang Wen, on the lethal consequences of a beauty contest organized by a gangster in the 1920s. Bollywood, sun rahe ho na?

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Consultant to the Berlin Film Festival, award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist. Her email is meenakshishedde@gmail.com