Choc-full of the top talent

Hundreds of people mill around Potsdamer Platz like distressed ants. Above them, the impossibly angular buildings of steel and glass glint in the winter sun. It could be a scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, filmed at the Babelsberg film studios just outside Berlin in 1926.

Potsdamer Platz was once the busiest intersection in Europe until war and the Berlin Wall left the area a desolate no-man's land. The re-development took years and the end result is an unmistakably bold architectural experiment, if not to everyone's taste. But with more than 30 cinema screens in one square kilometre, it has become the home of the Berlinale, the Berlin Film Festival.

Now in its 51st year, the festival ranks just below Cannes and alongside Venice in prestige on the European film festival circuit. For a week, the central plaza, Marlene Dietrich Platz, has been covered in red carpet and thronged with visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of visiting stars.

Some 23 films are competing for the Golden and Silver Bears, the main awards at the 11-day festival, to be presented this weekend by a nine-strong jury led by US director Bill Mechanic.

Films in competition from Ireland and the UK include Lasse Hallstrom's Chocolat, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, Michael Winterbottom's romantic western, The Claim and John Boorman's espionage comedy The Tailor of Panama, starring Pierce Brosnan and based on the John Le Carre novel.

The festival also hosts a "Panoroma" showcase for 50 films from more than 32 countries, including the world premiere of Kirsten Sheridan's Disco Pigs (see panel).

Special events this year include a series of films from one of Germany's most famous directors, Fritz Lang. The festival has also paid tribute to the late Stanley Kubrick with a three-part documentary on his life by Jan Harlan and a showing of a re-mastered 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick's Spartacus star, Hollywood veteran Kirk Douglas, is in town to collect a lifetime achievement award.

The festival opened last week with Enemy at the Gates, telling the story of the bloody Battle of Stalingrad. The film, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes, was shot entirely in the Babelsberg film studios outside Berlin. Its budget of $90 million makes it the most expensive film ever produced in Europe, but the film was almost unanimously savaged by critics as tawdry and gimmicky.

One of the strongest female performances at the festival came from Emma Thompson in the Mike Nichols film, Wit, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. Thompson plays a John Donne scholar who discovers that having an intellectual mastery of Donne's metaphysical meditations on death has not emotionally prepared her to face her own imminent death from cancer. "People wept when she was dying. When she was supposed to be dead, she was dead. She is a very good actress," said director Mike Nichols at a news conference after the premiere on Friday.

Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin in 1931, but the film's premiere was the first time he had returned to the city of his birth since his family fled for New York in 1938.

Another strong female performance came from Juliette Binoche in Chocolat, an English-language film by Swedish director, Lasse Hallstom. Binoche plays a single mother who scandalises a puritan 1950s French town when she arrives and opens a chocolate shop during Lent, attracting the attention of Johnny Depp along the way.

Binoche described the film as a "fairy tale" at a post-premiere press conference and said she enjoyed the challenge of the role, the latest of several English-language films she has tackled.

"One has to work outside of France and Europe. I had to learn English because I don't like language barriers," said Binoche, who won a Silver Bear and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1997 for her role in The English Patient.

Chocolat had only a modest run in the US, but Juliette Binoche and Dame Judi Dench both received Oscar nominations for their roles. Dench gives a customary superb turn as a grandmother reunited with her estranged grandson thanks to Binoche's chocolate.

Dench's James Bond co-star Pierce Brosnan also got an outing at the festival in the black farce, The Tailor of Panama, based on a novel by John Le Carre.

Brosnan gets a chance to parody the James Bond role that has brought him worldwide fame. Here he plays an English cad who gets involved with a tailor, played by Geoffrey Rush, and is caught up in an accidental American invasion of Panama.

A little-known film starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio, which the US film star has prevented from being screened in America, received its worldwide premiere at the festival on Saturday. The 1995 black-andwhite Don's Plum features a preTitanic DiCaprio playing a foulmouthed teenager alongside an equally youthful Tobey Maguire.

The film's director R.D. Robb refused to explain what had upset DiCaprio so much that he went to court to prevent the film being shown in the US. "We have agreed to turn the page . . . we can't talk about it," said Robb of the film which he said involved "85-90 per cent improvisation".

The most controversial film to be shown this year was Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, which was premiered out of competition on Sunday evening.

Director Ridley Scott has been criticised for abandoning the psychological gameplay of the film's predecessor, instead going to explicit lengths to shock audiences. Reprising his role as cannibal Hannibal Lecter, British actor Sir Anthony Hopkins defended the film against charges of gratuitous violence at a press conference on Sunday.

"Why play it safe?" he asked, saying the film was powerful and brave and that he would be ready to do one more sequel, maybe next year.