Print of Original 'Titanic' Surfaces at Berlin Film Festival

The Titanic resurfaced at the Berlin Film Festival this week with discovery of a long-lost print of what is believed to be the first-ever movie about the disaster.

Cranked out on a back lot in Berlin in June 1912 - only weeks after the disaster - silent movie director Mime Misu's "In Nacht Und Eis" (In Night and Ice) was thought to have vanished until an anonymous Berlin collector stumbled across it, according to a report in Wednesday's Der Tagesspiegel newspaper.

The only mention of this film until now had been a movie theater placard and a yellowed newspaper article written by a reporter for a Berlin paper who was on the set during the shooting of the half-hour silent picture, said the Der Tagesspiegel, which published stills from the movie.

The lost Titanic film is no slouch either, according to those who have viewed it. It has all the standard Titanic-film elements - a shipboard romance, smugly complacent bridge officers, a sassy Molly Brown, and much pandemonium as the ship goes down.

The interiors are surprisingly good, especially scenes showing "black gang" crewmen shoveling coal into giant boiler furnaces, which look amazingly like the real boilers installed at the Belfast shipyard where the Titanic was built.