* The 48th Berlinale begins in earnest with tonight's Zoo Palast screening of Jim Sheridan's The Boxer. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as an ex-IRA man turned professional fighter. The role provides a stark contrast to his first film with Sheridan, My Left Foot, for which Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his performance as cerebral palsy victim Christy Brown. Day-Lewis took his training for the fight sequences in The Boxer very seriously, reportedly fighting 350 rounds with former World Featherweight champ, Barry McGuigan. Day-Lewis will not be in Berlin. He is suffering from severe back problems and his doctor has advised him not to travel.

* Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors, originally to have closed this year's Berlinale, is to be replaced by Francis Ford Coppola's The Rainmaker. Coppola will introduce the screening in person. The late change took everyone by surprise, not least Sliding Doors' German distributor Jugendfilm, which was eager to see Howitt's film in the festival. GM

IN TOWN
Serge Losique, Susanne Reinker, Curt Siodmak, Henrietta Siodmak, Leslie Cheung, Jochen D. Girsch, Brian Baxter, Anne Bennett, Beat Glur, Jan Erik Holst, Steve Klain, Dieter Kosslick, Klaus Lackschewitz, Claude Leclercq, Francisco Leon, Ashley Luke, San Fu Maltha, Marie-Do de la Patellière, Dr. Günter Rohrbach, Martin Schweighofer, Jim Sheridan, Hy Smith, Marie Vine, Theo Hinz, Jürgen Schau, Michael Williams-Jones, Annette Insdorf, Ben Kingsley, Senta Berger, Brigitte Rouan, Helmut Dietl, Maurizio Nichetti, Dr. Michael Verhoeven, Willmar Andersson, Kirsi Tykkyläinen, Rudi Barnet, Maja Turowskaja, Rita Goegebeur

STOP PRESS
The second part of the symposium on Sergei Eisenstein, originally scheduled for 13 February, will now take place on the 19 February at the Akademie Der Kunste.

KEEP IN TOUCH WITH www.berlinale.de
Part of any festival or market is the contacts you can make and one of the most important and best informed contacts in Berlin is the festival's own web site which can be found at www.berlinale.de.
Offering web aficionados everything they ever needed to know about the Berlin Film International Festival and then some, the web site has been developed for the festival by MediaCube, one of Germany's leading web site designers. According to Harry Baer, head of MediaCube, the site was receiving 50,000 hits a day. And that was before the festival even started!
Another internet site of interest is Moving Pictures' own film festival site at www.filmfestivals.com. This site has full coverage of this year's Berlin Film Festival as well as all the other major international festivals and markets which take place during the year.
Visitors to Berlin having trouble connecting to their internet server may find it easier to connect using their standard modem lead plus an adaptor plug (known locally as a 'Zusatzgerateadapter' and costing around DM9). Plugging in the lead direct from a local phone seems to cause problems with some modem connections.
Of the major internet providers, the local Berlin access number for America Online is 827 93900 and for CompuServe, 691000. Americans should remember that unlike the US, where local calls are virtually free, it is not a cheap option to leave a computer logged on-line for any length of time in Berlin.
Finally an appeal to good sense. Would all mobile phone users please turn them off during screenings, press conferences and debates. Not only is this good manners but there is also a practical purpose: Cellular phones play havoc with the simultaneous translation service.