Goodbye Bafana by Bille August
At Berlin's Cinema for Peace charity event attended by Richard Gere, Catherine Deneuve, Christopher Lee, and Bob Geldorf this past Monday, a one-minute segment from a short video by Sergiu Matei was shown. Matei's film depicts a Sept. 30, 2006, incident in which Chinese border police opened fire on Tibetan refugees attempting to flee the country.
Gere, a relentless Tibet advocate, stated that as this year's head of the (do-nothing) G8, Germany has the "responsibility to encourage China to become part of the modern world [where] these kinds of actions and policies can not be tolerated." (Considering the atrocities perpetrated in and/or by the "modern world," I'm assuming that Gere must have been joking.)
Cinema for Peace award winners for 2006 were best director Bille August for Goodbye Bafana, best actor Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland, and the "most valuable movies of the year," Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.
On a lighter note, Cate Blanchett is in Berlin promoting both her out-of-competition melodrama Notes on a Scandal and her in-competition melodrama The Good German. In some of the pictures, Blanchett is accompanied by Notes on a Scandal co-stars Judi Dench and Andrew Simpson.
Richard Gere quote: The Hollywood Reporter