BERLIN: Hollywood star Matt Damon produced, scripted and plays the lead role in Promised Land and was originally planning to direct Promised Land.  But a busy schedule led Damon to call Gus Van Sant to direct this film about small town America and American identity in the face of the greed of big business.

BERLIN: American indie director David Gordon Green returns to form and to his roots after a stint directing mainstream American comedies with Prince Avalanche.  Set in the summer of 1988 in a remote, Texas fire-damaged forest the film charts the relationship between Alvin and Lance who spend the summer doing monotonous work on country roads.

BERLIN:Boris Khlebnikov the other half of the Koktebel team, the 2003 international festival hit that he co-directed with Alexei Popogrebski, is less likely to see the same international exposure with A Long and Happy Life although the film does have some strong points, especially its star Alexander Yatsenko and the portrayal of nature as a protagonist as lensed by DoP Pavel Kostomarov.

BERLIN: Oscar winning Bosnian director Danis Tanovic has returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina to shoot his most successful film since No Man’s Land which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign language film in 2001. An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker was shot in a few weeks by Tanovic after the director read about a Roma family where the wife nearly died because she was refused medical care because she had no medical insurance.

BERLIN: Polish writer and director Malgoska Szumowska’s In The Name Of…brings us a visually powerful film that looks at the issue of homosexuality in the Catholic church from a balanced view that rejects easy answers to a complex question.  Coming from a Poland where the Catholic church still occupies a central place in the country’s identity that goes beyond mere religion this film has an especially powerful impact

BERLIN: Georgian director Zaza Rusadze’s A Fold in My Blanket opened the Panorama section of the Berlinale with one of the new crop of interesting films now coming out of Georgia.

BERLIN: Romanian director Calin Peter Netzer never puts a foot wrong in this story of a mother so obsessed by unconditional love for her son that she is willing to anything to save him.

BERLIN: The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman is a light-hearted fairy tale that it is difficult to decide whether or not to take to your bosom but hard to totally dislike mainly due to the likable performances of its main characters Shia LaBeouf and Evan Rachel Wood.

BERLIN: In Bloom, a debut by Georgian scriptwriter and director Nana Ekvtimishvili and co-directed by German Simon Gross, is another Georgian flower that has bloomed from the carefully nurtured garden planted by the Georgian National Film Centre over the past few years. A first time director, Ekvtimishvili has come up with a winning combination that continues the traditions of Georgian films while at the same time being very much part of contemporary European art-house cinema.