Kirsten Stewart looked confident, and downright snazzy, as she strode to the platform for her first press conference as jury president of the 2023 Berlin International Festival.
But, stylishly-attired in a tweed Chanel pantsuit with wide trousers and jacket and no shirt underneath, the Twilight and Spencer star confessed that she was nervous of the task ahead.
“Full transparency, I’m kind of shaking,” she said. “I feel, not buckling under [the weight], but I can’t wait who we all ahead at the end of this experience. I’m just ready to be changed by all the films and by all the people around us.”
Stewart said it wasn’t her decision to come to Berlin. “I was shocked they called me,” she said. “[But] it is an enormous opportunity to highlight beautiful things at time when that is hard to hold.”
Fellow Berlinale juror, actress Golshifteh Farahani, said, so much political upheaval in the world, including mass demonstrations in her home country of Iran, she felt particularly privileged to be able to attend the festival this year.
“With Ukraine, Iran, with the earthquake [in Turkey and Syria], it feels like the whole world is disintegrating,” she said. “We are all in a moment of transition, especially now with Iran. And in a country, like Iran, that is a dictatorship, art is not only an intellectual or philosophical thing, it’s essential. It’s like oxygen…With everything that is happening in Iran again, to back in Berlin I’m happy that we can gather together and and celebrate cinema, celebrate freedom, even though there is the world seems to be collapsing from everywhere.”
Stewart, Farahani and the other Berlinale jurors, who include Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, Spanish director Carla Simón, Hong Kong director Johnnie To, German director Valeska Grisebach, and U.S. casting director and producer Francine Maisler will judge the 20 films in Berlin’s official competition section and, on Feb. 25, hand out the coveted Gold and Silver Bear trophies to the winners.
Asked about what she was looking for in a potential prize winner, Stewart said she was looking for something that “in a positive way is confrontational and political. I think it’s very important for us to deprogram and be fully open to newness,” she said. “I think that the diversity and the breadth of perspectives [among this year’s competition films] is is going to is going to provide us with some some new material that might be challenging and strange to adapt to [but] if we all if we all can’t agree [on a film] that’s probably because it’s pretty good.”
There are no obvious frontrunners going into the 73rd Berlinale. The 19 films selected by the team led by artistic director Carlo Chatrian are heavy on arthouse and international cinema, with a strong focus on movies with a strong politically message.
The home crowd can cheer for five local talents, with cinema veteran Margarethe von Trotta screening her artist biopic Ingeborg Bachmann — Journey Into the Desert, starring Vicky Krieps as the late Austrian poet and author; Christian Petzold (Undine, Transit) returning to Berlin with his new drama Afire; Angela Schanelec presenting Music, a modern-day drama inspired by the Oedipus myth; Christoph Hochhäusler in the running with Till the End of the Night; and Emily Atef with her 1990s-set romantic drama Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything.
Other titles with Bear potential include the French documentary On the Adamant by Nicolas Philibert (To Be and to Have), Matt Johnson’s Canadian comedy BlackBerry, about the rise and fall of the titular smartphone makers; and The Survival of Kindness, the new feature from Australian arthouse legend Rolf De Heer (Ten Canoes, Charlie’s Country).
While Stewart and the other Berlinale jurors praised the enduring power of cinema, Radu Jude dryly noted that the movie industry is the business of “stupid and expensive [but] the films here do not make as much money and maybe are a little less stupid.”
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