FESTIVALS

Steven Soderbergh’s “Side Effects,” starring Rooney Mara and Channing Tatum, and Fredrik Bond’s “The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman,” with Shia LaBeouf and Evan Rachel Wood, are among the latest pics selected for the Berlin Film Festival’s competition section.

They are among nine titles announced Friday that will vie for the Golden Bear. Also in competition will be Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s “Closed Curtain.”

Panahi, who was sentenced to six years in prison and banned from filmmaking for 20 years, has been invited to the Berlinale the past two years, but was barred from attending the festival. The selection of “Closed Curtain” is a clear sign that fest director Dieter Kosslick is keeping the filmmaker’s plight in the spotlight.

The latest selections include one German film, Thomas Arslan’s “Gold,” starring Nina Hoss (“Barbara”), and three French titles, Bruno Dumont’s “Camille Claudel 1915,” starring Juliette Binoche; Emmanuelle Bercot’s “On My Way,” with Catherine Deneuve; and Guillaume Nicloux’s “The Nun,” a French-German-Belgian co-production starring Pauline Etienne and Isabelle Huppert.

Also unspooling are South African director Pia Marais’ “Layla Fourie,” about a young single mother in South Africa who lands a new job as a polygraphist, but soon becomes a suspect herself; and “An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker,” by Bosnian helmer Danis Tanovic (“No Man’s Land”).