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BERLINALE 2020

The Berlinale announces juries across its competitions

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- The line-ups of six juries have been revealed and a controversial 1970 film added to the programme just as the Nazi past of former Berlinale director Alfred Bauer has been uncovered by Die Zeit

The Berlinale announces juries across its competitions
Jeremy Irons, Bérénice Bejo, Bettina Brokemper, Annemarie Jacir, Kenneth Lonergan, Luca Marinelli and Kleber Mendonça Filho (© Berlinale)

The Berlinale, running for the 70th time this year, from 20 February-1 March, has revealed the names of the jurors in all of its competition strands.

The International Jury, which, it was announced earlier, will be presided by Jeremy Irons, will include French-Argentinian actress Bérénice Bejo, German producer Bettina Brokemper, Italian actor Luca Marinelli, and directors Annemarie Jacir (Palestine), Kenneth Lonergan (USA) and Kleber Mendonça Filho (Brazil).

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The panel will decide on all of the traditional awards, minus the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize, which has just been suspended, after the German newspaper Die Zeit revealed that the revered former Berlinale director was a high-ranking Nazi working closely with Goebbels.

The jury of the newly established Encounters competition, which will choose the winners of the Best Film and Best Director gongs as well as a Special Jury Award, comprises Japanese producer Shôzô Ichiyama, Cuban director Dominga Sotomayor and German filmmaker Eva Trobisch.

The Generation Jury will also have three members in each of the two subsections. Filmmakers Abbas Amini (Iran), Jenna Bass (South Africa) and Rima Das (India) will sit on the 14plus panel, while the Kplus strand will be judged by French cinematographer-director Marine Atlan, Mexican filmmaker María Novaro and German director Erik Schmitt.

The Berlinale Documentary Award, which was first introduced in 2017 and is now endowed with €40,000 from public broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, will go to one of the 21 documentaries from the Competition, Berlinale Special, Encounters, Panorama, Forum, Generation and Perspektive Deutsches Kino sections (read more here). The jury consists of filmmakers Gerd Kroske (Germany), Marie Losier (France/USA) and Alanis Obomsawin (Canada).

Similarly, the Best First Feature Award, worth €50,000 and provided by the film and television rights society GWFF, will be given to one of the 21 debut features from Encounters, Panorama, Forum, Generation and Perspektive Deutsches Kino (read more here). Serbian director Ognjen Glavonić, Egyptian filmmaker Hala Lofty and Spanish film programmer and scholar Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria will serve on the jury.

Finally, the Short Film Jury comprises Hungarian animation filmmaker Réka Bucsi, Turkish curator Fatma Çolakoğlu and helmer Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, from Lesotho.

The Berlinale has also announced that it has added Michael Verhoeven's 1970 title O.K. to the Forum Anniversary Programme. When it was selected for the Berlinale Competition that year, the majority of the jury under president George Stevens found it "anti-American" and demanded it be pulled, while jury member Dušan Makavejev stood up for it, and eventually the awards were cancelled. More details can be found in this Berlinale Yearbook article. The inclusion of the film in this year's programme coincides with the Alfred Bauer discovery, once again highlighting the heated political dimension of the Berlinale. Perhaps it is not unimaginable that the timing of the publishing of Die Zeit's article might not be so coincidental.

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