BERLIN: The Berlin Film Festival, Europe’s first major cinema showcase of the year, opens on Thursday with the most star-studded lineup since Ukraine’s fight for independence and the pandemic.
The 73rd Berlinale, traditionally the most politically minded of the three major European festivals, will mark the first anniversary of the start of the Russian invasion.
The event will feature nine new films, mainly documentaries, about Ukrainian life during the war, including Sean Penn’s “Superpowers,” which the two-time Oscar winner shot in Kiev last February. .
Artistic director Carlo Chatrian said the 11-day festival “stands shoulder to shoulder with people who fight to express their ideas”.
He promised films that “tell the story of the world in all its trauma as well as its heartbreaking beauty”.
– Spielberg, Mirren, Krepps –
French-Iranian actor Golshafat Farhani (“Patterson”) will serve on the jury for the top prizes of the Golden and Silver Bears, headed by Hollywood star Kristen Stewart, who at 32 is the youngest president in the festival’s history.
Nineteen films from around the world will compete for the main awards, including “Manodrome,” starring Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody, billed as a thriller about masculinity in crisis.
Berlinale is back with “big star power” and a “gala red carpet bonanza” after several editions following the coronavirus outbreak, Hollywood Reporter’s European bureau chief Scott Roxborough told AFP.
Three-time Academy Award winner Steven Spielberg is to collect an honorary Golden Bear for his life’s work in the German capital, featured in a retrospective.
British actress Helen Mirren will premiere the much-anticipated film in which she stars as Israel’s only female prime minister, Golda Meir.
and Vicky Kripps, the Luxembourg-born actor who made his breakthrough opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in “Phantom Thread,” as legendary Austrian writer Ingeberg Bachmann in a biopic by veteran German director Margaret von Tratta. will unveil their turn.
Roxborough said that after acclaimed plays about icons such as philosopher Hannah Arendt and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, von Tratta “will add to her list of extraordinary feminist figures of the last two centuries.”
– ‘The Manga Explosion’ –
Berlinale has a stronger track record than Cannes or Venice with female directors, who make up about 40 percent of this year’s Berlinale attendees.
The opening night film will be Rebecca Miller’s “She Came to Me,” a romantic comedy about a musician battling writer’s block, starring “Game of Thrones'” Peter Dinklage, Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei. .
John Malkovich will present “Seneca — On the Creation of Earthquakes,” a fictional portrait of the tyrant Nero’s patron in ancient Rome.
And “Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker” — a look at the German tennis champion’s travails by award-winning American documentarian Alex Gibney — will make its debut.
Roxborough notes that Berlinale has a reputation for “discovering new voices” and launching up-and-coming talent.
He said that Berlin is “a place of discovery because the selection committees are quite good at finding stuff that other festivals overlook”.
Roxborough said he’s looking forward to new films by Brandon Cronenberg — son of horror king David — and Korean-Canadian director Celine Song, who premiered her semi-autobiographical drama “Past Lives” at last month’s Sundance Film Festival. Sensation spread. “
And he predicted that Makoto Shinkai’s animated fantasy feature “Suzume” — already a blockbuster in Japan — could be “the biggest film to come out of Berlin this year” amid a global boom in Japanese anime. .