An action thriller about Danish resistance fighters and the true story of a loggerhead turtle two dramatically different films will open and close the 12th Bermuda International Film Festival.

'Flame & Citron' (Flammen & Citronen) kicks off this year's event with a screening at 7.30 p.m. at Southside Cinema on March 20.

'Turtle: The Incredible Journey', will close out the festival. It screens at 9.15 p.m. at the Liberty Theatre on March 28. "We are thrilled to be able to show two very different and excellent films for our opening and closing nights," said Festival director Aideen Ratteray-Pryse. "We think they will appeal to a wide audience and 'Turtle', especially, should strike a chord with local audiences and their love of the marine world around us.

"We will be joined by producer, Samantha Taylor, on closing night.

"'Flame & Citron' is a superb film that proves once again that Hollywood isn't the only place that can produce exciting, action-packed films. We believe both films will have an impact throughout the film world in 2009 and we're proud that people will be able to say they saw them first in Bermuda."

Set in Copenhagen in 1944 during the Nazi occupation, 'Flame & Citron' outsold Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Batman when it screened in Denmark last year an estimated one in seven Danes over 15 saw the film.

Said a BIFF spokesperson: "Resistance fighters Flame (Thure Lindhardt) and Citron (Mads Mikkelsen, who played Le Chiffre in the Bond movie Casino Royale) so named because of the former's distinctive red hair and the latter's fondness for a particular brand of French car are members of the Holger Danske group, specialising in acts of sabotage and liquidating Danish informers.

But Flame, the younger of the two, wants to take direct action against the Germans, while Citron, a middle-aged man whose family is torn apart by his activities, gets drawn ever deeper into the tangled politics of the resistance movement."

'Turtle: The Incredible Journey' was produced in conjunction with the Save Our Seas Foundation. Narrated by British actress Miranda Richardson, it is the true story of FeeBee, a little loggerhead turtle, released off the Florida coast in 2008 as part of a project led by one of the world's leading turtle biologists and the film's key science consultant, Jeanette Wyneken of Florida Atlantic University.

The film "recreates the epic distances and dangers faced by a female loggerhead turtle from the time it hatches until it returns to lay eggs on the beach of its birth 20 or so years later", the spokesperson explained.

Tickets for BIFF films and the UnWrapped! launch party on March 20 are on sale now www.biff.bm and the BIFF Box Office at 53 Front Street, Hamilton (next to MAC) from 10 a.m. each day.