Monica Bleibtreu

Monica Bleibtreu, a respected stage, film, and television actress, and mother of Moritz Bleibtreu, died yesterday, May 14, in Hamburg. She was 65. Bleibtreu had been battling cancer for a number of years.
Born into a theatrical family in Vienna on May 4, 1944, the dark, strong-featured Monica Bleibtreu had been working steadily on German-language television since the late 1960s. Among her TV credits are a presentation of Bertold Brecht’s play Mother (1971), the series Doctors in the mid-1990s, and the made-for-television movie Happy Hour oder Glück und Glas (2000), starring The Lives of Others‘ Martina Gedeck.
In 1975, she won a German Television Award for best actress for her performance in the made-for-TV movie Marias letzte [...]

2007 Swiss Film Award Winners

The 2007 Swiss Film Awards were announced yesterday at the 42nd Solothurn Film Festival.
Fredi M. Murer’s Vitus (right), which is one of the semi-finalists for this year’s best foreign-language film Academy Award, was selected as best Swiss film of 2006. Vitus, the story of a reluctant piano prodigy and his grandfather, stars Teo Gheorghiu and Bruno Ganz. It has sold nearly 200,000 tickets since its release in German-speaking Switzerland last year.
The best documentary winner was Heidi Specogna’s The Brief Life of José Antonio Gutierrez, about a Guatemalan street kid who, after immigrating to the United States, joined the U.S. marine corps hoping to gain U.S. citizenship but ended up as the first dead U.S. soldier in the Iraq [...]