Berlin film festival opens with Chinese premiere
By Geir Moulson
BERLIN (AP) --The Berlin film festival opened Thursday with a premiere from Chinese director Wang Quan’an that follows the bittersweet reunion of a couple divided for decades across the Taiwan Strait.
“Apart Together” marked Wang’s return to Berlin after winning the festival’s top Golden Bear award with “Tuya’s Marriage” in 2007. It is the first of 20 movies competing for honors at the event’s 60th edition — the first of the year’s major European film festivals.
In keeping with Berlin’s traditional mix of star power with a global perspective, this year’s competitors range from Wang’s film to entries from Bosnia and Iran and even to Roman Polanski’s new movie, “The Ghost Writer.”
Set in fast-changing Shanghai, “Apart Together” tells the story of a man who returns to Shanghai a half-century after leaving mainland China during the civil war that divided Taiwan from China.
The former anti-communist Kuomintang soldier hopes to find his first love, whom he had to leave behind with their unborn son, but finds that she later set up a new family with a communist corporal. The movie explores the turbulence caused by their reunion.
The movie, starring 83-year-old Chinese actress Lisa Lu alongside Taiwanese singer Ling Feng, focuses on “people who are caught up in the flow of history,” Wang said.
“Reunification is something people in China really yearn for,” he added. “It’s tragic that our country is divided.”
The two sides split during a civil war in 1949, and Beijing sees self-governing Taiwan as a renegade province.
Festival director Dieter Kosslick says Wang’s film has symbolic value for the Berlin event — once a showcase of capitalist West Berlin — in a year that sees the 20th anniversary of German reunification.
The winners at this year’s Berlin festival will be chosen by a seven-member jury under German-born filmmaker Werner Herzog that includes actress Renee Zellweger.
Recent years have produced several surprise winners, with the top award going to relatively unheralded productions such as Wang’s “Tuya’s Marriage” and last year “The Milk of Sorrow” from young Peruvian director Claudia Llosa.
“I think it’s very important for young filmmakers to find a platform here,” said Herzog, who first appeared at the Berlin festival more than 40 years ago. “It was important for me back then.”
Zellweger said it would be “wonderful to get back to roots of watching the films and exploring, remembering what it is that makes you love this medium in the first place.”
The winners of the Golden Bear and other awards will be announced Feb. 20, and the festival ends on Feb. 21.
Festival site: http://www.berlinale.de/en/HomePage.html
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More