THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 90 FEBRUA RY 12, 2020
RISSENBEEK: ALEXANDER JANETZKO/BERLINALE. BAUER: ULLSTEIN BILD/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES. 2019 ATMOSPHERE: JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES.MINAMATA: COURTESY OFBERLIN FILM FESTIVAL.SHIRLEY: THATCHER KEATS/BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL.ONWARD: DISNEY/PIXAR.Berlin is caught somewhere in
between. Arriving after awards
season, in late February, means
that it’s a lousy place to launch an
Oscar contender. Wes Anderson’s
The Grand Budapest Hotel, which
opened the festival in 2014 and
went on to garner nine nomina-
tions and four Oscars, was the last
big title to turn a Berlin launch
into a major awards campaign.WHERE DOES THE BERLIN FILM FEST
Berlin Film Festival
Arriving at the end of awards season and just after Sundance, the Berlinale has
always struggled for relevance, but new leadership looks to hit the reset button
with a date change, an expanded lineup and a (hopefully) recharged marketBerlinale executive director
Mariette Rissenbeek and artistic
director Carlo Chatrian.“The first quarter of the year
is not awards season,” admits
Chatrian. “We are not in the fall
season, where all the studio films
are being released.”
Berlin also suffers from the
perception, right or wrong, that
the festival is a bad spot to launch
a commercial film. Whatever you
think of Nadav Lapid’s allegorical
drama Synonyms (Golden Bear
winner in 2019), Adina Pintilie’s
sexually experimental Touch Me
Not (2018) or Ildikó Enyedi’s On
Body and Soul (2017), a roman-
tic comedy set in a Hungarian
slaughterhouse, none of them is
anyone’s idea of a breakout com-
mercial hit.
There is little in Berlin’s 2020
lineup that screams big box
office. The bulk of the program is
decidedly art house and any star
power is embedded mainly in
experimental, not mainstream,films. See Javier Bardem, Elle
Fanning and Salma Hayek in
Sally Potter’s The Roads Not
Ta k e n, Willem Dafoe in Abel
Ferrara’s Siberia or Johnny Depp
as a photographer uncover-
ing environmental devastation
in postwar Japan in Andrew
Levitas’ Minamata. The excep-
tion this year is Onward, Pixar’s
new animated feature with voice
actors Tom Holland and Chris
Pratt, which will have its world
premiere out of competition in
Berlin. It is the sole studio pro-
duction in the lineup.
“It was very important to
me to have a studio film in
Berlin,” Chatrian says. “It’s aT
he Berlin International Film
Festival, which runs Feb. 20
to March 1, turns 70 this
year and, as with any septua-
genarian, the anniversary
has triggered some existential
reflection. Just what is Berlin for?
It’s a question sure to be on
the minds of the festival’s new
bosses. Artistic director Carlo
Chatrian — who picks the films
— and executive director Mariette
Rissenbeek, who’s running the
business side of the fest, take over
this year from Dieter Kosslick,
who ran Berlin for nearly 20
years. Kosslick, a flamboyant
personality whose showmanship
often masked a shrewd political
and business sense, grew Berlin
from an august, if sleepy, insti-
tution into the world’s biggest
public film festival and, with the
European Film Market, one of
the key spots for international
independent players to buy and
sell movies.
But as Berlin enters its seventh
decade, the festival faces major
challenges if it wants to maintain
its spot as one of the “Big Five”
fests alongside Cannes, Venice,
Toronto and Sundance. The other
four have each found their indus-
try niche. Cannes is where you
discover the next big thing in art
house cinema — Parasite debuted
there last May — and where
critically acclaimed directors bow
their latest efforts, best seen last
year with Quentin Tarantino’s
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Venice, where Joker and Marriage
Story premiered, and Toronto
(Ford v Ferrari, Jojo Rabbit, Harriet)
kick off awards season. And
Sundance, as seen with the flurry
of dealmaking at Park City this
January, is where high-end indies
are bought and sold.Above, from left: Minami
and Johnny Depp in
Minamata, Pixar’s Onward,
Elisabeth Moss in Shirley.