Berlin Film Festival opening film sends message that migrants welcome, says star Lars Eidinger

Berlin: The Berlin Film Festival's opening feature, dysfunctional family drama The Light, sends the unequivocal message that migrants are welcome, said star Lars Eidinger, ahead of German elections characterised by debate over tougher migration rules.

The film shows "that someone coming from the outside can also help and we can benefit from them and they don't want to take anything away from us," he told Reuters in an interview.

"It's in fact the opposite, they can contribute," said Eidinger, who plays the film's sellout father, Tim Engels.

Migration is a top concern for German voters ahead of national elections on February 23, the last day of the festival, with the far-right, anti-Islam and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party polling second in most surveys.

Politics threaten to overshadow this year's festival, despite organisers' hopes that conversation centres on cinema.

Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer's nearly three-hour opus follows the Engels family, who are so preoccupied with their own lives, whether video games, work or clubbing, that they barely notice when the housekeeper dies at their smart Berlin apartment.

Tykwer, one of the creators of hit historical series Babylon Berlin, told Reuters that while he sees shades of the Weimar Republic interwar period that saw the rise of the Nazis in the present day, people today are also notably different.

"We're really not the same crowd that lived 90 years ago. Like, we're not like our grandparents, so who are we?" he said, adding he wanted to look at what "we are doing with this world that's in such turmoil."

The family begins to bridge their disconnect after Farrah, a Syrian refugee played by Tala Al Deen, enters their lives as the new housekeeper, along with her unique light therapy device.

In contrast to the Engels family, Farrah lives in a small block apartment with several other women, without her family.

Nicolette Krebitz, who plays the mother, Milena Engels, said it was difficult to portray a character whose privilege and hypocrisy undergo such unflinching scrutiny in the film.

"You don't want to see yourself being a white privileged person, being unhappy about things compared to what the other leading lady in the film (Farrah) is experiencing," Krebitz told Reuters.