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#Berlinale, Berlin International Film Festival, Berlinale Talents, Carlo Chatrian

Isabelle Huppert, recipient of this year’s Honorary Golden Bear unable to attend the Berlin International Film Festival in person

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Posted by Larry Gleeson

Isabelle Huppert

The Homage of the Berlinale 2022 is dedicated to French film and stage actor Isabelle Huppert, who is also the recipient of the Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement.

Unfortunately, today Isabelle Huppert has been tested positive for the coronavirus in Paris and therefore she will not be able to attend the Berlin International Film Festival.

While informing the festival, she emphasized that she feels very dedicated to the Berlinale and wants to participate in any possible way also to support her latest film À Propos de Joan.

 

“Considering that Isabelle Huppert is not feeling sick and she is willing to support the festival we have decided to go on with the award ceremony. As she cannot come, we will send our love and admiration to her home in Paris. We look forward to having her in Berlin another time”, say Berlinale directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian.

 

The award ceremony of the Honorary Golden Bear will take place on February 15, 2022, at 9.45 pm at the Berlinale Palast as planned. Isabelle Huppert will tune in live from Paris to assist the ceremony and to speak to her audience.

The film À propos de Joan (About Joan, dir: Laurent Larivière), in which she is playing the leading role, will be screened as a Berlinale Special Gala afterward.

Unfortunately, the event Berlinale Homage: In Conversation with Isabelle Huppert planned with her at Berlinale Talents has been canceled.

(Press release provided by Berlinale press office)

#Berlinale, #BIFF, Berlin Film Festival

HELPING FILMS GET MADE AT THE BERLINALE CO-PRODUCTION MARKET

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Posted by Larry Gleeson.

THREE PRIZES AND 1,200 MEETINGS

Three monetary prizes were awarded to selected narrative film projects at the Berlinale Co-Production Market (February 12 to 15).

On Sunday evening, the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award, with an endowment of 20,000 euros, was awarded to The Wife of the Pilot (director: Anne Zohra Berrached), which Razor Film Produktion from Germany presented here. The prize money is intended as a development grant from the European film fund Eurimages.

The three members of this year’s jury were renowned industry professionals Pablo Pérez de Lema (Spain), Leontine Petit (The Netherlands) and Manfred Schmidt (Germany).

Two additional prestige prizes were also awarded. The VFF – Verwertungsgesellschaft der Film und Fernsehproduzenten from Munich awarded its VFF Talent Highlight Award, with an endowment of 10,000 euros, to the project The Bus to Amerika, presented at the market by producer Nefes Polat from Turkey and director Derya Durmaz. Since 2004, the VFF has each year honoured a promising project by up-and-coming filmmakers from the “Talent Project Market”, organised by the Berlinale Co-Production Market in cooperation with Berlinale Talents. Nominated for the VFF Talent Highlight Award this year in addition to Nefes Polat were Cuban producer Maria Carla del Rio, with her project Shock Labor, and producer Jeremy Chua from Singapore, with Tomorrow is a Long Time. Each project received a recognition of 1,000 euros as well as the opportunity to pitch their projects to participants of the Berlinale Co-Production Market.

This year, the renowned ARTE International Prize, which has been presented since 2011, was awarded to the project Lost Country by Serbian director Vladimir Perišić, which is represented by KinoElektron (France), MPM Film (France) and Trilema Films (Serbia). ARTE bestows the 6,000 euro prize on an artistically outstanding project drawn from the entire Berlinale Co-Production Market.

The 14th Berlinale Co-Production Market, which runs until February 15, is a place where the producers of the 36 selected narrative film projects can also meet with potential co-producers and funding partners. Over the four days, some 600 participants take a total of more than 1,200 individual meetings. In the coming days, this Berlinale partner hub will also focus on “Books at the Berlinale”, the presentation of books that could be adapted into films, and “CoPro Series” for TV series. The platform received more than 2,000 requests for meetings this year. More than 240 films that came to the market looking for partners have since become completed films, and seven of those are screening this year alone in the film festival programme.

The main partners of the Berlinale Co-Production Market are MDM – Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung and the European Union Creative Europe MEDIA programme.
Another partner, and also the market venue, is Berlin’s House of Representatives (Abgeordnetenhaus).

The Berlinale Co-Production Market is part of the European Film Market.

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(Source: Berlinale Press Office Release)

#Berlinale, #BIFF, Berlin Film Festival

The Berlinale Festival profile

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Posted by Larry Gleeson

Berlin: an exciting, cosmopolitan cultural hub that never ceases to attract artists from around the world. A diverse cultural scene, a critical public and an audience of film-lovers characterize the city. In the middle of it all, the Berlinale: a great cultural event and one of the most important dates for the international film industry. More than 335,000 sold tickets, more than 20,000 professional visitors from 122 countries, including more than 3,800 journalists: art, glamour, parties and business are all inseparably linked at the Berlinale.

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The entire world of film

The public program of the Berlin International Film Festival shows about 400 films per year, mostly international or European premieres. Films of every genre, length and format find their place in the various sections: great international cinema in the Competition, independent and art house in Panorama, films for young audiences in Generation, new discoveries and promising talents from the German film scene in Perspektive Deutsches Kino, avant garde, experimental and unfamiliar cinematography in the Forum and Forum Expanded, and an exploration of cinematic possibilities in Berlinale Shorts. The Berlinale Special, including Berlinale Special Gala, is showing new and extraordinary productions and honours great cinema personalities. Berlinale Special Series, which began in 2015, presents selected international series. The program is rounded out by a Retrospective as well as an Homage, which focuses on the œuvre of a great personality of cinema, curated by the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen. Beginning in 2013, the Retrospective expanded to include presentations of Berlinale Classics. They show current restorations of film classics as well as rediscovered films.

Furthermore the Berlinale has regularly organized a program of special presentations that open up new perspectives, provide insight into key themes, make new connections and explore realms where film intersects with other creative disciplines. Food, pleasure and the environment – these are the topics that lie at the centre of the Culinary Cinema. Berlinale Goes Kiez is traveling from arthouse cinema to arthouse cinema within the city to present selected films from the Berlinale program and NATIVe – A Journey into Indigenous Cinema is devoted to the cinematic story-telling of Indigenous peoples worldwide.

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The film industry at the Berlinale

The Berlin International Film Festival is a source of inspiration in the global film community: film programs, workshops, panel discussions, joint projects with other social and cultural actors – the forms of cooperation and the possibilities for creative interaction are countless.

The most important meeting point is the European Film Market (EFM). Around 550 companies and more than 9,000 professionals from 110 countries build and foster contacts here, strengthen their position in the industry or negotiate film rights.

The Berlinale Co-Production Market, affiliated to the EFM, offers fertile ground for international co-productions.

Berlinale Talents brings high profile professionals attending the Berlinale to workshops and discussions with 250 promising young film talents from all over the world. Both sides benefit. The talents profit from the experience of the professionals, who in turn gain fresh ideas from taking part.

The World Cinema Fund (WCF) provides financial support to film projects in countries with weak film infrastructure thereby helping strengthen the regions’ position on the international film market.

The Berlinale Residency program offers international directors a grant to come to Berlin for several months. Working in close contact with individually selected mentors and market experts, the directors can take a decisive step toward placing their next film project on the way to a successful theatrical release.

The close connection between the festival and market is a unique characteristic of the Berlinale and always results in exceptional synergies.

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(Source: Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin)

#Berlinale, #BIFF, Berlin Film Festival

Berlinale Shorts 2017: Reframing the Image

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Posted by Larry Gleeson

23 films from 19 countries will be competing for the Golden and the Silver Bear as well as the Audi Short Film Award, worth € 20,000, and a nomination for the European Film Awards at the 2017 edition of Berlinale Shorts. The Algerian film Monangambeee, produced in 1969 and directed by Sarah Maldoror, will also be screened out of competition.

The International Short Film Jury 2017 will be composed of Christian Jankowski, artist and professor at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, curator and social media manager of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Kimberly Drew and the artistic director of SANFIC Santiago International Film Festival Carlos Núñez (see press release from December 13, 2016).

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The Berlinale Shorts competition will feature works from a wide range of filmmakers including Gabriel Abrantes, Salomé Lamas, Jonathan Vinel, Victor Lindgren, Lukas Marxt and Marcel Odenbach, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, David OReilly and Rainer Kohlberger.

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Curator Miake Mia Hohne (Photo via Berlinale Media Archive)

“A preconceived image, a clichéd notion of something or someone, can only alter its form if my own view of things expands to include a new perspective. All of the films selected for Berlinale Shorts 2017 have in common the fact that they invite one to recalibrate one’s own perception,” commented curator Maike Mia Höhne in reference to this year’s programme.

In his new film keep that dream burning, Berlin-based director Rainer Kohlberger visualizes an intimation for everything new that comes into being: a promise of the greatest possible indeterminacy.
The Boy from H2 on the other hand, produced by the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, takes us right out on the street so that we may be able to experience what it means to live as a 12-year-old in the divided city of Hebron, opposite ever-present security forces.

David O’Reilly (Please Say Something, Golden Bear for Best Short Film 2009 & RGB XYZ, Berlinale Shorts 2008 ), who will also speak about his filmmaking philosophy at the 2017 edition of Berlinale Talents, will present his new computer game Everything. Everything is the complete opposite of how we commonly conceive of games – there are no levels to be reached, instead there is only the possibility to become anyone and everything. The insight acquired along the way represents a reframing.
Jonathan Vinel (Notre Héritage, Berlinale Shorts 2016 & Tant qu’il nous reste des fusils à pompe, Golden Bear for Best Short Film 2014, both created in collaboration with Caroline Poggi) rearranges sequences from the video game Grand Theft Auto V into a new narrative about losing one’s friends in his film Martin Pleure.

In Avant l’envol, the modern, futuristic architecture that sprang up in Ivory Coast in the wake of independence from France assumes the role of protagonist, an architecture that stands for the newly gained self-confidence of the period.

The film Monangambeee, which is part of the collection of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art e. V. and was only recently digitized, bears witness to a cinematic practice in opposition to colonial oppression.

The extraordinary diversity of Portuguese cinema is represented by no less than four productions at Berlinale Shorts, including among others the most recent work from filmmaker Salomé Lamas (Eldorado XXI, Forum 2016 & Terra de ninguém, Forum 2013), Coup de Grâce, in which a father and daughter explore a space marked by absence. João Salaviza’s new film Altas Cidades de Ossadas follows a Creole rapper on a deep dive into the darkness of night and the aggressive poetry of his lyrics. In 2012 Salaviza took home the Golden Bear for Best Short Film for Rafa, dedicating the award to the Portuguese government: “We are in a moment where we really don’t know what will happen,” Salaviza declared at the time, adding that the dedication was contingent on the administration taking a stand to improve conditions for the country’s filmmakers.

Included among the films to be screened at Berlinale Shorts 2017 are:

Altas Cidades de Ossadas (High Cities of Bone), João Salaviza, Portugal, 19’ (WP)
Avant l’envol, Laurence Bonvin, Switzerland, 20’ (IP)
The Boy from H2, Helen Yanovsky, Israel / Palestinian Territories, 21’ (WP)
Call of Cuteness, Brenda Lien, Germany, 4’ (WP)
Centauro (Centaur), Nicolás Suárez, Argentina, 14’ (IP)
Cidade Pequena (Small Town), Diogo Costa Amarante, Portugal, 19’ (IP)
Coup de Grâce, Salomé Lamas, Portugal, 26’ (WP)
The Crying Conch, Vincent Toi, Canada, 20’ (WP)
Ensueño en la Pradera (Reverie in the Meadow), Esteban Arrangoiz Julien, Mexiko, 17’ (WP)
Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things), Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca, Brazil, 18’ (IP)
Everything, David OReilly, USA / Ireland, 11’ (WP)
Le film de l’été (A Summer’s Film), Emmanuel Marre, France / Belgium, 30’ (WP)
Fishing Is Not Done On Tuesdays, Lukas Marxt & Marcel Odenbach, Germany / Austria, 15’ (WP)
Fuera de Temporada (Out of Season), Sabrina Campos, Argentina, 23’ (WP)
Hiwa, Jacqueline Lentzou, Greece, 11’ (WP)
Os Humores Artificiais (The Artificial Humors), Gabriel Abrantes, Portugal, 30’ (WP)
keep that dream burning, Rainer Kohlberger, Germany / Austria, 8’ (WP)
Kometen (The Comet), Victor Lindgren, Sweden, 11’ (IP)
Martin Pleure (Martin Cries), Jonathan Vinel, France, 16’ (WP)
Miss Holocaust, Michalina Musielak, Poland / Germany, 22’ (WP)
Monangambeee, Sarah Maldoror, Algeria, 15’ – Out of competition
Oh Brother Octopus, Florian Kunert, Germany, 27’ (WP)
The Rabbit Hunt, Patrick Bresnan, USA / Hungary, 12’ (IP)
Street of Death, Karam Ghossein, Libanon / Germany, 23’ (WP)

For further information regarding the Berlinale Shorts programme please contact:

Anika Väth

+ 49 170 671 72 91

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(Source: Berlinale Press Office)

#Berlinale, #BIFF, Berlin Film Festival, distribution

First Trailer for Aki Kaurismäki’s ‘The Other Side of Hope,’ Premiering at Berlinale 2017

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Posted by Larry Gleeson

By Jordan Raup

Finnish cinema is back in a major next year as Aki Kaurismäki will soon debut his first feature since 2001’s Le Havre. Set for a world premiere at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival in early February, we’ve been anticipating The Other Side of Hope for some time now and the first trailer has finally arrived today.

Starring Sakari Kuosmanen and Sherwan Haji, the story follows a poker-playing restauranteur and former traveling salesman who befriends a group of refugees newly arrived from Finland. While there’s no subtitles, a good amount of the dialogue is in English, which gives us a strong sense for what to expect for the film, hopefully picking up U.S. distribution soon.

(Source:thefilmstage.com)

Venice International Film Festival

BERLINALE POSTER 2017 – BELOVED BEARS RETURN

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Posted by Larry Gleeson

To attract attention to the Festival these inquisitive animals are again making their rounds throughout town!

*All poster motifs of the 67th Berlinale

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Berlinale Director Dieter Kosslick

“Berlin is big and this year we’ll again follow the bear tracks to some typical spots in the capital,” remarks a delighted Berlinale Director Dieter Kosslick.

Once more the motifs have been designed by Velvet, a Swiss advertising agency.

The six posters in the series will be visible around town as of mid-January 2017. They will also be on sale at the Berlinale Online Shop starting January 16.

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(Source: Press Release provided by Berlinale Press Office)

Berlin Film Festival

Berlinale Launches Endowed Documentary Award

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For many years now, the Berlin International Film Festival has been committed to documentary film and diverse documentary forms.

Thanks to the support of Glashütte Original, watch manufacturer from Saxony, the Berlin International Film Festival is launching a new award, the Glashütte Original Documentary Award.

This prize for the best documentary film will be endowed with € 50,000, funded by Glashütte Original. A total of about 18 documentary entries from the current programmes of the Competition, Panorama, Forum, Generation, Berlinale Special and Perspektive Deutsches Kino sections as well as the Culinary Cinema special series will be nominated for the Glashütte Original Documentary Award. A three-member jury will pick the winner – the prize money will be split between the film’s director and producer.

Besides the prize money, Glashütte Original will also provide the trophy, which will be finely crafted in the Saxon manufactory and will be presented to the director of the winning film.

The prize will be awarded during the official Award Ceremony in the Berlinale Palast.

Here are the official documentary award guidelines: glashuette_original_documentary_award_guidelines

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(Source: http://www.berlinale.de)

*Featured photo courtesy of Berlinale Film Festival

#Berlinale, Berlin Film Festival

The Berlin International Short Film Jury 2017

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The Berlinale Shorts International Jury consists of three filmmakers and artists with a working relationship to the short form. At home in multiple artistic and cultural fields, they each bring with them their own perspective on the way they view and evaluate the competing films: talented international directors, young artists and actors as well as short film curators and film academy directors award works that tread new cinematographic territory.

Artist and professor at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design Christian Jankowski; curator and social media manager at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art Kimberly Drew; and the artistic director of SANFIC (Santiago International Film Festival) Carlos Núñez make up the 2017 International Short Film Jury. They will award the Golden and the Silver Bear, as well as the Audi Short Film Award. In addition, the Jury will nominate one film for Best Short Film at the European Film Awards.

Maike Mia Höhne, curator of Berlinale Shorts, comments on the 2017 Jury:

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Maike Mia Hohne, curator of Berlinale Shorts (Photo via AG Kurzfilm)

“The top-notch biographies of Jankowski, Drew and Núñez give us a jury for 2017 that combines three highly accomplished and very different points of view. I’m very pleased!”

 

Christian Jankowski (Photo credit: Jorg Reichardt)

Christian Jankowski (Germany)
Jankowski works in the area of concept and media arts using film, video, photography and performance, as well as painting, sculpture and installations. His special focus is on the performative interaction between the artist and an audience far removed from the professional art world. His works are exhibited in numerous museums and collections, and have been shown at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2013, among other events. In 2016, he curated the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in Zurich, “Manifesta 11”. Christian Jankowski also holds a professorship in sculpture at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design.

 

Kimberly Drew (Photo credit: Naima Green)

Kimberly Drew (USA)
Kimberly Drew is a curator, writer and the social media manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her blog “Black Contemporary Art”, founded in 2011, and her Instagram channel “museummammy” are among the most influential digital platforms for African and African-American art worldwide. She has been awarded the AIR Gallery Feminist Curator Award and the Gold Rush Award by the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation for her curatorial work. Kimberly Drew studied art history and African-American studies with an emphasis on museum studies at Smith College in Northampton, USA.

 

Carlos Nunez (Photo Credit: Nicolas Tello)

Carlos Núñez (Chile)
Festival programmer and film producer Carlos Núñez is the co-founder and artistic director of SANFIC, the Santiago International Film Festival, an important forum for Chilean and Latin American film. In addition, he is the director and co-founder of the production and distribution company Storyboard Media. Among other films, he has co-produced La Mujer de Barro by Sergio Castro San Martín, which screened in Forum at the 2015 Berlinale. Carlos Núñez is also a university lecturer and a member of Cinema23, a platform for the promotion of film culture in Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

 

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(Source: http://www.berlinale.de)