Bear awakens
Disney, Depp, feast of films highlight Berlin festival
As the 70th Berlin International Film Festival opens Thursday through March 1, it’s a new team guiding one of the world’s largest film festivals.
The Berlinale, as it is known, is a citywide celebration of cinema that attracts thousands of Berliners alongside filmmakers, film buyers and press from everywhere.
How the coronavirus, with travel restrictions, quarantine and understandable fear, will impact the festival is anyone’s guess.
Newly installed: Mariette Rissenbeek as executive director and Carlo Chatrian, artistic director, for a festival that has monitored its gender ratio of film directors every year since 2004.
The retrospective, dedicated to Federico Fellini, is highlighted by two late ’40s films — from Poland and Czechoslovakia — that were among the first to tackle the Holocaust.
Eighteen films are competing for the festival’s highest prize, the Golden Bear — 16 are world premieres — awarded by a jury headed by Britain’s Jeremy Irons that includes America’s Oscarwinning writer-director Kenneth Lonergan (“Manchester by the Sea”) and France’s Bérénice Bejo (“The Artist”).
The competing films — from Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Italy, France, Cambodia, Taiwan, Germany, Brazil, Iran and the UK — are complemented by special galas like the international premiere of the Disney-Pixar “Onward.”
“My Salinger Year,” a world premiere starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley (“Once Upon a Time … in America”), kicks off this edition. Also a non-competing special gala, it’s about a college grad temping for Weaver’s literary agent who is assigned to answer fan mail for the agency’s most prestigious client, J.D. Salinger, the reclusive bestselling author of “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Among the many stars alighting in the German capital:
Johnny Depp in “Minimata,” a stark, true story about American war photographer W. Eugene
Smith who documented postwar Japan’s environmental mercury poisoning of coastal villagers;
Helen Mirren who is receiving a career achievement Golden Bear;
Cate Blanchett is touting “Stateless,” which she also executive produced, a six-part Aussie TV series about immigration;
Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning and Salma Hayek with “The Roads Not Taken,” a psychological portrait from writer-director Sally Potter (“Orlando”);
Germany’s leading ladies Nina Hoss (Astrid on “Homeland”) and Sandra Hüller (the Oscarnominated “Toni Erdmann”) will each premiere new films and Willem Dafoe reteams with Abel Ferrara (“Pasolini”) for “Siberia,” a world premiere that “explores the world of dreams.”