Berlin - The Berlin Film Festival is to mark its 60th anniversary next February with a major retrospective of the key movies which have helped to establish it as one of the world's top movie showcase.

This includes Jean-Luc Godard's groundbreaking A bout desouffle (Breathless), which helped to forge the Paris-born director's international career. The 1960 film also set the stage of the arrival of the nouvelle vague the new wave in French cinema.

"A festival like the Berlinale demonstrates how the controversial films of yesterday have become the classics of today," said British film critic David Thomson who put together the festival's 40-film retrospective.

The films to be screened will also underscore how the Berlinale moved to screen films from the other side of the Iron Curtain as the Cold War descended on Europe.

More recently, with the fall of Berlin Wall, the Berlinale sought to establish itself as a platform for the new booming cinema emerging across Asia.

Among the movies from Asia to be screened in the retrospective are Zhang Yimou's Hong gaoliang (Red Sorghum) which won the festival's coveted Golden Bear in 1988. Hong gaoliang became the first film from China to win a major award at an international festival.

In addition the 10-day Berlin Film Festival, which opens on February 11, has moved in recent years to try to boost the international profile of German cinema.

Also included in retrospective are movies such as Italian director Curzio Malaparte's Il Cristo proibito (The Forbidden Christ) from 1950 and Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjoberg's Froken Julie (Miss Julie) also from 1950.

Legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's 1952 classic Ikiru (To Live) is also to be screened along with more recent films, such as Denmark's Niels Arden Oplev's Drommen (We Shall Overcome) and US director and Paul Thomas Anderson's gripping father-son story Magnolia, which won the Golden Bear in 2000.

"Exceptionally controversial were films that for political or aesthetic reasons upset the festival's routine, and have thus remained strongly imprinted on our minds," said Rainer Rother, head of the festival's retrospective section.

This includes Japan's Nagisa Oshima's Ai nocorrida (In the Realm of the Senses) from 1976.

After the film's first screening, authorities confiscated the print and filed charges of "disseminating pornography" against Ulrich Gregor, the director of the festival's international forum section which showcases young filmmakers.

In 1979, US director Michael Cimino's anti-war drama The Deer Hunter created an uproar.

The film was shown in the festival's main competition despite a protest from Moscow and several communist states withdrawing their films from the programme. (dpa)