More than half of the feature films showing in the competition of Germany's 17th Fribourg International Film Festival (March 16-23) come from Latin America.

Brazil is represented by two films - Jorge Furtado's Two Summers and Eliane Caffe's The Story Tellers - while Argentina has four pictures: Luis Ortega's Black Box, Carlos Sorin's Minimal Stories, Adolfo Aristarain's Common Ground and Cesar Luis D'Angiolillo's Potestad - competing for the festival's main prize, the Regard d'Or, and the Special Jury Award.

The other five films competing are:

Women's Prison by Manijeh Hekmat (Iran)
Shadow Kill by Adoor Gopalakrishnan (India)
Dolls Of Clay by Nouri Bouzid (Tunisia)
I Love You by Zhang Yuan (China)
Drop Me A Cat by Wu Mi-sen (Taiwan).

A separate competitive section for documentaries has selected such films as Mario Handler's Aside (Uruguay), Jean-Marie Teno's Alex's Wedding (Cameroon), Rithy Panh's S21, The Khmere Rouge Killing Machine (Cambodia), and Mohammed Bakri's controversial Jenin'Jenin (Palestine) which has been banned in Israel..

Screening a total of 87 films from 40 countries, this year's festival will be opened by Mauretanian director Abderrahmane Sissako's Waiting For Happiness and closed by Flora Gomes' My Voice.

An innovation this year is the sidebar Crossroad Perspectives which gives two filmmakers from the North and South - Swiss filmmaker Patricia Plattner and India's Shaji N. Karun - to enter into a unique dialogue through films directed by others. Among the films they have selected are Tareque Masud's The Clay House (Bangladesh), Gerardo Tort's Streeters (Mexico) and Andrew Cheng's Shanghai Panic (China).