Berlin - The 15th Jewish Film Festival has been given a powerful send off with the German premiere of director Mark Herman's movie, The Boy In Striped Pyjamas, at the city's Delphi Film Palast cinema.

The award winning British-American 2008 film, now being released for German audiences, tells the fictional story of an 8-year-old boy, the son of a high-ranking Nazi officer, who mistakes a nearby concentration camp for a "farm" and wonders why its inhabitants are always wearing striped pyjamas.

The movie, which is based on a book of the same name by Irish novelist John Byrne, ends with the youngster perishing in the gas chambers along with a Jewish boy the same age he had earlier befriended on the "other side of the camp fence."

The packed Berlin audience stayed in stunned silence in their seats for two minutes after the first showing of the movie Sunday evening, shocked by its savage ending.

Earlier, there had been a special screening of Jochen Alexander Freydank's movie Toyland, which won an Oscar in January for the year's best short film. Nicola Galliner, the Festival's veteran organizer, personally congratulating its director on the award.

Like Herman's movie, Toyland had a Jewish war-time theme.

Galliner told the audience that of the 23 films from Britain, France, Norway, Belgium, Kazakhstan and Germany in the official programme, 13 would be receiving their German premieres in Berlin.

Addressing the audience, she praised Berlin movie expert Ullrich Gregor (for years the head of the Berlin Film Festival's forum of avant garde films) and his wife for their loyal support for the event from its start 15 years ago.

A special focus this year is on France, which is represented at the festival by four feature films, three of them shown for the first time in Germany, including the 2008 movie, Hello Goodbye, starring Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant.

Lala Suesskind, Berlin's Jewish community president, present at the launch event along with Charlotte Knobloch, chairman of Germany's Central Council of Jews, heaped praise on the internationally acclaimed Boy in Striped Pyjamas.

She described it as taking "an empathetic look at the question of whether so many people could have been murdered in front of the eyes of the world without anyone knowing about it.

"And it shows how a child can do what's right in spite of all the evil around him," she said.

For the eighth time in its 15-year history, a festival prize dedicated to the memory of the late Gerhard Klein, founder of the art film theatre Capitol in Berlin, is to be awarded.

Klein, born in Berlin in 1920 and raised in the city's Scheunenviertel, performed in front of the camera and on stage as a child actor before the Nazis ended his career in 1933. He fled to Palestine in 1939, returning to Berlin in 1952.

Special money prizes at the 2009 event will be awarded to the best Israeli film at the Festival.

A cash award for the best German documentary on a Jewish theme at the festival goes this year to German director Michael Verhoeven for his 2008 film Menschliches Versagen (Human Failure).

Verhoeven will receive the prize worth 2,000 euros at an award ceremony at the city's Arsenal cinema on May 14.

The Jewish Festival runs from May 4 to 14. (dpa)