Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian and executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeck unveiled the International Competition and Encounters line-ups on Monday for the festival’s 73rd edition, running February 16 to 26. “It’s quite an eclectic selection,” Chatrian told the press conference in Berlin on Monday morning. “You will see we tried to include as many genres and cinematic forms as possible.
The International Competition features 18 titles, 15 of them world premieres, involving 19 different territories. Encounters, the Berlinale’s equivalent of Un Certain Regard which was launched in 2020, will showcase 16 films.
Chatrian has stuck with his love of mixing established names, including Philippe Garrel (The Plough), Margarethe von Trotta (Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey Into The Desert) and Christian Petzold (Afire), with newcomers, such as Celine Song and Giacomo Abbruzzese with respective first features Past Lives and Disco Boy.
European productions dominate but Asia is represented by The Shadowless Tower by China’s Lu Zhang, a Berlinale regular last at the festival in 2019 with Fukuoka, and Japanese animation maestro Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume, which marks the first anime in Competition in two decades.
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