Don 2 - Most popular film at Berlinale!!

There are a lot of worthy films premiering at the Berlin film festival over the coming 10 days. A three-and-a-half-hour epic tracing China's history, three documentaries about the Fukushima disaster, Werner Herzog's look at Death Row and Angelina Jolie's take on the Bosnian war.

But which film proved more popular than almost anything else the day the tickets went on sale? A Finnish sci-fi comedy about Nazis living on the dark side of the moon.

Iron Sky tells the story of how Hitler's top scientists moved to a lunar military base known as the Black Sun shortly after the second world war ended in 1945. For more than 70 years boffins beavered away on a fleet of spaceships that would one day return to Earth and finish what the Nazis started. In 2018 the invasion begins.

The Finnish-German-Australian co-production proved the second most popular film the day the box office opened at the festival, also called the Berlinale, according to Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper. It was beaten to the top spot by Don – The King is Back, the latest film from Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan. Fans of the Indian heartthrob camped out in a Berlin shopping centre for three days and nights in order to get tickets for the film, which sold out in minutes.

But elsewhere it was business as usual at the traditionally rather serious festival. This year's event, the 62nd, focuses on social upheaval and political awakening, screening documentaries and fictional works from Arab film-makers, which trace the turbulent progress of the 2011 mass uprisings across the region and explore political and philosophical questions left in the wake of the often bloody demonstrations.

The Egyptian film Reporting a Revolution, directed by Bassam Mortada, follows six journalists on the frontline during 18 days of anti-regime protests in 2011. In the Shadow of a Man, directed by Hanan Abdalla, has four women talking about how a new society should look.

The film festival is well known for engaging in political debate. Last year, it became a platform to protest against the arrest of the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. Accused of inciting opposition protests in 2009 and making a film without permission, Panahi was banned from travelling outside Iran and was consequently unable to take up the seat he had been offered on the Berlinale jury.

This year the festival will continue the debate about the position of the artist in society with the international premiere of a documentary about the dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Berlinale organisers have coaxed some of Hollywood's biggest names to sprinkle a little stardust over the icy German capital. Jolie will be hawking The Land of Blood and Honey, her directorial debut about the Yugoslavian civil war, while Javier Bardem will screen the documentary he produced, Sons of the Clouds: the Last Colony, about a forgotten colonial war in the western Sahara and its abandoned victims. Meryl Streep will sweep into town to accept an honorary Golden Bear – Berlin's answer to the Palme d'or – as a recognition of her 30-plus-year reign at the top of Hollywood's tree.

The biggest screams on the red carpet are likely to be reserved for Robert Pattinson, the British dreamboat who stars in the wildly popular vampire movie series, Twilight. The teen idol is expected to show up to promote his new film, an adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's novel Bel Ami, in which he plays a scoundrel who rises through the ranks of 19th-century Parisian society by manipulating and seducing women.

This year, the organisers have gathered together a surprisingly starry jury to award the prizes. Jake Gyllenhaal and Charlotte Gainsbourg join the Dutch photographer and film-maker Anton Corbijn (who had a hit with the Joy Division film Control) on the international jury, which is chaired by the veteran British director Mike Leigh.

One film vying for the award, Les Adieux la Reine (Farewell My Queen), starring Diane Kruger as Marie Antoinette, will launch the festival on Thursday with its world premiere.

The Berlinale, which runs until 19 February, is ranked as one of the world's top film festivals alongside Cannes, Toronto, Sundance and Venice.