Van Sant, Hong lead line-up for 63rd Berlin film fest

The Berlin film festival on Thursday unveiled its preliminary line-up for the February event including new releases from US director Gus Van Sant, South Korea's Hong Sang-soo and Ulrich Seidl of Austria. Van Sant will present "Promised Land", an ecological drama about fracking starring Matt Damon, Frances McDormand and John Krasinski at the 63rd Berlinale, taking place February 7 to 17. Organisers of the first major European film festival of the year said Hong Sang-soo, a critics' favourite, would premiere "Nobody's Daughter Haewon", the follow-up to his Cannes entry "In Another Country" starring French actress Isabelle Huppert. Seidl, one of Europe's most controversial film-makers known for his frank takes on sex and exploitation, will enter the running with "Paradise: Hope", the final picture in a trilogy, about a girl who falls in love with a man four decades her senior. US animators Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders will premiere the 3-D movie "The Croods" featuring the voices of Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone and Ryan Reynolds. It will appear in the main showcase but out of competition. Also slated to screen are Romanian director Calin Peter Netzer's drama "Child's Pose" and Chilean-Spanish production "Gloria" by Sebastian Lelio. The Berlinale Special sidebar section will present the documentary "Redemption Impossible" by Christian Rost and Claus Strigel about a rehabilitation project in Austria for chimps used in pharmaceutical testing. Award-winning Chinese director Wong Kar Wai will lead the jury handing out the Golden and Silver Bear top prizes on February 16. And French film-maker and producer Claude Lanzmann, famous for his 1985 documentary "Shoah", will be honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the event. Italy's veteran film-makers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani won the Golden Bear this year for "Caesar Must Die", a docu-drama about inmates at a high-security prison staging Shakespeare.