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Joseph Fiennes found the Berlin Film Festival unwelcoming last year. PHOTO: AP

South Korea's movie industry ground to a halt on Wednesday, as dozens of stars and hundreds of film workers protested against a government move to cut protection for the industry to smooth free trade talks with the US.

Last month, South Korea said it would halve a quota requiring cinemas to show local films for 146 days of the year to 73 days. Washington had advocated the cut, saying the quota was a barrier to a free trade agreement.

Following the move, the two countries announced last week plans to start talks on a bilateral free trade agreement.

South Korea's government has promised financial aid for the film sector, but the local industry has vowed to fight what it regards as an attack by Hollywood on South Korean culture.

"We are taking a stand against America," Yang Ki-hwan, a spokesman for the Screen Quota Alliance, told a rally of movie workers on the icy streets of downtown Seoul.

Behind Yang a crane with spotlights hoisted banners reading: "Save the screen quota. Keep our cultural rights."

Sigourney Weaver's new film opened the Berlin Film Festival. PHOTO: AFP

Hollywood actor Steve Buscemi will star in a comedy by The Full Monty director Peter Cattaneo, Variety magazine said Tuesday.

In We Are the Millers, Buscemi will play the part of a drug pusher on his final job trying to smuggle nearly a tonne of marijuana across the Mexican border by passing his team off as a family, the Millers.

Buscemi, 48, has played in nearly 100 films, including Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Fargo (1996) and as a character voice in Monsters Inc (2001).

The Millers was written by the same team which crafted the 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers.

A fatal road accident provided a fitting start on Thursday to what critics say is a strong yet morbid Berlin Film Festival line-up featuring brutal murder, drug addiction, political corruption, exorcism and rape.

With grim reality comes plenty of glamour, though, with Oscar hopefuls George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Heath Ledger expected to attend an annual festival that sometimes lacks the star power of Venice or Cannes.

At least five films about soccer will give audiences a foretaste of Germany's hosting of the World Cup in four months' time, including Offside, an Iranian picture about women's obsession with the game.

"On paper it looks strong. It's a balancing act to get the mix right. They also need a bit of glamour," said Verena Luecken, film critic at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver stared at Thursday's gala opening of Snow Cake. Rickman's car is struck by a juggernaut, killing a young female hitchhiker he had just picked up. Weaver plays the woman's autistic mother.

Festival director Dieter Kosslick is aware of criticism of openers; the stars of Cold Mountain failed to show up in 2004, and last year Kristin Scott Thomas and Joseph Fiennes joined Kosslick on the red carpet, but their film was poorly received.

The Chinese film director Zhang Lu was awarded the top prize at the Vesoul Asian film festival in eastern France for Mang Zhong (Grain in Ear), the organizers said Wednesday.

The 2005 film is about a Korean woman living in China, bringing up a child as a single mother and selling the Korean snack known as kimchi from her bicycle.

The jury led by Indian director Buddhadeb Dasgupta said it was a "vivid portrait of the daily life of the Korean minority in China."

More than 70 films were shown at the 12th edition of the festival, which drew 20,000 spectators.

British actor Ralph Fiennes and his partner Francesca Annis are to split after 11 years together, lawyers working for the actress said.

"Ms. Annis confirms today that she and Ralph Fiennes are to separate," they said in a brief statement.

The break-up follows recent reports in a number of British newspapers that 43-year-old Fiennes, star of The English Patient, Schindler's List and The Constant Gardener, had an affair with a young singer.

Annis, 61, also said she had begun legal proceedings for defamation and invasion of privacy against the Daily Mail over a story which claimed she had forgiven him over the alleged affair.

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