Berlinale: Day 3 and 4

German film goes international: Highlights and flops from the opening weekend.

Marinca. Ever heard that name before? No, it's not a Hungarian opera, nor is it a hotel in Corsica. It's actually the surname of a young Romanian actress who takes the lead in the highlight of Day 3 at the Berlinale, Storm, the story of a young Bosnian woman who is called before the war crimes tribunal in the Hague to testify what she witnessed in the Yugoslav wars. In fact, German director Hans-Christian Schmid's enthralling and touching thriller is the best film of the competition so far, largely thanks to an extraordinary performance from Anamaria Marinca. Anamaria's character lives in Berlin, and at the press conference for Storm, she confessed that she was terrified of having to speak in German. But she needn't have worried because she mastered the language incredibly well. So commit the name to memory and in the meantime you can check her out in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won multiple awards at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

Storm isn't the only film with an international cast and crew at this year's festival. Indeed, German cinema seems to become more and more international every year. We've already had Tom Tykwer’s aptly named opening film The International - a German production shot in Belgium with an English, Australian, Swedish and Romanian cast - and Day 3 continued the trend. There was the German-American-Israeli produced Holocaust drama Adam Resurrected, starring Jeff Goldblum, Moritz Bleibtreu and Veronica Ferres. And we also saw Oscar winning director Florian Gallenberger present his new film John Rabe, the moving story of a German business man who saved 200,000 Chinese lives during the Nanking massacre of 1937.

Saturday evening was premiere night at the Friedrichstadtpalast. On stage were Ulrich Tukur, Daniel Brühl and Steve Buscemi. Tukur, the star of John Rabe, was unquestionably the star of the evening, with Woody Harrelson and Til Schweiger both coming up to him and expressing their congratulations at the after party in the hip Bar Tausend.

As you might expect given Berlin's reputation as a party capital, there was a lot of partying going on over the first weekend of the Berlinale. But Berlin is also famous for sending stars home with a disappointed look on their face if their film isn't up to scratch, and this the case with Deep South thriller In the Electric Mist featuring Tommy Lee Jones. Co-star John Goodman tried to raise Jones's spirits on the red carpet afterwards, but it didn't appear to be doing any good. Also disappointing was the Swedish film Mammoth despite featuring critics' favourite Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams. Michelle Pfeiffer and Demi Moore are expected the next days. Let’s see if they'll be in a mood for partying after their films are shown.

Click here to read the rest of our Belinale 2009 reports.