Berlin Film Festival favours new talent and political heft over Hollywood glitz

BERLIN: The Berlin Film Festival, traditionally a more political showcase than its peers in Venice and Cannes, has a line-up this year that will take audiences further than usual from mainstream Hollywood fare, industry watchers say.

Of the 22 films in competition, only about a third feature names familiar to general audiences. These include Channing Tatum in the crime drama “Josephine”, the second feature from rising director Beth de Araujo, and Juliette Binoche in “Queen at Sea”, a family drama about dementia.

“It looks like a really hardcore art house line-up with a lot of politically important films, but not a lot of sort of big Hollywood stars,” Scott Roxborough, European bureau chief for The Hollywood Reporter, said.

Many titles, particularly in competition, are aimed at cinephiles rather than at wider audiences, he added.

Still a scattering of stars

The festival has some big names.

Popstar Charli xcx’s Sundance mockumentary “The Moment” has divided critics but will appeal to fans of “Brat summer”, an unapologetic lifestyle inspired by her 2024 album “Brat”.

“Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson, meanwhile, will promote Karim Ainouz’s film “Rosebush Pruning”, together with a new generation of actors including Riley Keough, Elle Fanning and Callum Turner.

For the festival’s organisers, the wealth of lesser-known voices and emerging talent is central to the Berlinale’s identity.

Its adventurous choices this year include “Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars”, a film set in Chad about a mystical teenager, Mexican film-maker Fernando Eimbcke’s “Flies” and Leyla Bouzid’s “In a Whisper,” starring Palestinian actor Hiam Abbass.

Opening film sends a message

The serious, political tone is established at the outset with this year’s opening film: a romance set in Kabul in 2021 during the pullout of U.S. troops entitled “No Good Men”.

“It feels correct,” thirty-something director Shahrbanoo Sadat said of her film being selected to launch the festival on February 12.

She says it provides a chance to address the situation of women in Afghanistan right now, even if just briefly.

“I really would love people to forget everything that they know from Afghanistan and to just sit down, just watch,” she told Reuters.

Film industry’s first major gathering of the year

In Berlin, February tends to be a grey and unglamorous month, but the timing is an advantage. Its citizens are in the mood for cinema, and last year the general public bought a record 336,000 tickets, the festival said.

This year, six-euro ($7) tickets for 18-to-25 year-olds could attract even more film-goers.

The festival also has inclusivity initiatives to bring in participants from countries that typically are underrepresented in cinema, in an effort to showcase a plurality of voices, cultures and social realities.

From the film industry, around 12,000 participants from more than 140 countries annually attend the film festival and the accompanying European Film Market, where distribution deals are signed. The timing early in the year makes the event a valued gauge.

“This is where everyone sort of takes the measure of the independent film industry to see who has money, who’s willing to spend money, what films are selling,” said Roxborough.

The Berlinale’s accessibility to the general public allows buyers to test reactions to films directly, said Tanja Meissner, head of the European Film Market.

“Cinematic storytelling is an extremely important factor of European identity, and this kind of soft power of cinema shouldn’t be underestimated, especially at the moment,” she said.