Two-Time Oscar Winner Asghar Farhadi Lines Up New Film ‘A Hero’, Memento To Launch Must-Have Arthouse Pic At EFM

BERLIN (Reuters) - A drama film shot in secret to evade government censorship that highlights the moral dilemmas faced by those caught in the web of Iran’s capital punishment machine won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear award on Saturday.

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.

BERLIN (Reuters) - A drama film shot in secret to evade government censorship that highlights the moral dilemmas faced by those caught in the web of Iran’s capital punishment machine won the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear award on Saturday.

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.

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.

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.

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s drama “There Is No Evil” took home the top Golden Bear prize at the 2020  Berlin Film Festival.

Banned from filmmaking in Iran but still active, screenwriter and director Mohammad Rasoulof returns to the great moral themes that underlie all his work in There Is No Evil(Sheytan vojud nadarad), a German/Czech/Iranian co-prod competing at the Berlin Film Festival.

In Iran, executions are often carried out by conscripted soldiers, which puts an enormous burden on the shoulders of ordinary citizens. And what are we to make of the condemned, for whom guilt can sometimes be a capricious thing, dictated by a severe and oppressive Islamic regime — the same one that accused Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof of “endangering national security” and “spreading propaganda” against the government?

Constantin Film, Germany's leading indie production company, unveiled its new slate of high-end series Monday as part of the Berlin Film Festival's Berlinale Series section on small-screen productions. The big new show announced was Der Palast (The Palast) from famed director Uli Edel (The Baader Meinhof Complex), a period drama set at famed eastern Berlin theater the Friedrichstadt-Palast.

British screen star Riz Ahmed draws on his side career as a rapper and musician in Mogul Mowgli, a semi-autobiographical drama that he co-wrote with New York-based director Bassam Tariq. Backed by multiple sources, including the BBC and Vice Studios, this Berlinale world premiere is thoughtfully crafted and thematically rich, even if it feels a little too opaquely personal in places.

Imagine the vicious crime family at the heart of David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom as seen through the eyes of a shy and scrawny 17-year-old girl, and you’ll get an idea of the setup in Wildland (Kød & Blod), a brooding Danish thriller that opened this year’s Panorama sidebar in Berlin.

Best Berlin nightmare story?I was at U-Bahn Schönhauser Allee. A guy stopped me and sold me an apparently unused daily ticket for the metro.

Best Berlin nightmare story?I was at U-Bahn Schönhauser Allee. A guy stopped me and sold me an apparently unused daily ticket for the metro.

It was just four years ago that Berlin hosted the world premiere of Barakah Meets Barakah, the debut feature from Saudi director Mahmoud Sabbagh.

By Tom Grater

A young secretary and aspiring writer's coming of age in the New York literary world of the 1990s is the subject of My Salinger Year, based on the successful 2014 memoir by Joanna Rakoff.French-Canadian writer-director Philippe Falardeau, whose Monsieur Lazhar was nominated for an Oscar and who also directed the Reese Witherspoon vehicle The Good Lie, tackles the material with more enthusiasm than efficiency, as his protagonist has to figure out what she wants out of life on both the