Council agrees to spend £1.8m demolishing 'Berlin Wall' in Piccadilly Gardens

A man is to appear in court after a police officer was allegedly 'coughed at by someone claiming to have coronavirus' while responding to an incident in Piccadilly Gardens.

Police have tonight said that "it is not necessary" to close down Piccadilly Gardens - hours after the force's Chief Constable and the council said they would be shutting it off.

An X-rated performance of 'Bück Dich' was previously censored

BERLIN -- Locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic, the nightclubs in the German capital have decided to keep the beat going — at least online.

“Time to Hunt,” the Korean action thriller that had its world premiere last month as a gala screening at the Berlin Film Festival, has given up its theatrical release plans. Instead, it will be released by streaming giant Netflix in mid-April.

Burhan Qurbani's Berlin Alexanderplatz, a modern-day adaptation of the 1930s-set literary classic, is the front runner for this year's German Film Awards, the Lolas, having picked up 11 nominations, including for best film. Berlin Alexanderplatz premiered at this year's Berlin International Film Festival.

The new measure comes into force today

The German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), one of Germany’s most prestigious film schools, has sacked its British director, Ben Gibson, following an incident during the Berlin Film Festival in which he exposed his backside to a female student during a heated argument.

By Tom Grater

A Jewish prisoner pretends to be Iranian to escape being shot and is then forced to teach Farsi, a language he doesn’t speak, to a Nazi superior inPersian Lessons, the new film from Ukrainian-born, Canada-based director Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog).

An impoverished laborer returns home one day to find that social services have taken his children, after the family’s increasingly dire circumstances push his wife to commit a desperate act. With a corrupt local administrator blocking the way to a fair hearing to get them back, the man decides to cross the country on foot in order to plead his case to the government in Belgrade.

Mohammad Rasoulof, the Iranian director whose latest film, There Is No Evil, won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday, has been summoned to serve a one-year prison sentence in Tehran, according to reports. Nasser Zarafshan, a lawyer for Rasoulof, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that the Iranian authorities have ordered the director to turn himself in.

By Tom Grater

A small but splendid Indian tale inspired by poems written by Lalleshwari, a 14th century woman mystic from Kashmir, as well as a Rajasthan folk story, Pushpendra Singh’s The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs(Laila aur satt geet) takes the viewer deep into the heart of northwest India, where a young nomadic bride plays with her desires and toys with the lust of a young ranger.

Overshadowed by a grisly, racially motivated shooting in western Germany and the growing pains of new festival leadership, this year’s Berlinale served to illuminate the market dynamics and global issues set to impact the international film and television industry in the run-up to Cannes — provided coronavirus stays away from the Croisette.

Lois Patino consolidates his reputation as a leading European exponent of poetic moving images with his second feature length effort, Red Moon Tide (Lua vermella). A challenging work which punctuates taxing stretches of austere stasis with interludes of sublime beauty — including a ravishingly spectacular underwater finale — it uses a slight fable of a story as framework for some extravagant sensory stimulations.

Arriving between Pawel Pawlikowsi's Cold War and Limonov — the award garlanded second and eagerly anticipated third segments of the boxy-monochrome trilogy begun with Oscar winner Ida — Ivan Ostrochovsky's steely drama Servants somewhat bravely adopts a very similar approach in terms of style and editing.

Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof, whose sixth feature “There is no Evil” won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear on Saturday, is one of his country’s most prominent directors even though none of his films have screened in Iran where they are banned. In 2011, the year he won two prizes at Cannes with his censorship-themed “Goodbye,” Rasoulof was sentenced with fellow director Jafar Panahi to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking for alleged anti-regime propaganda.

Dissident Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof won the top prize at the Berlin film festival for There Is No Evil, a searingly critical work about the death penalty in Iran. Rasoulof, 48, is currently banned from leaving Iran and was unable to accept the Golden Bear in person.