Kristen Stewart “Sort of Shaking” Forward of Jury President Duties – The Hollywood Reporter

Kirsten Stewart appeared assured, and downright snazzy, as she strode to the platform for her first press convention as jury president of the 2023 Berlin Worldwide Pageant.

However, stylishly-attired in a tweed Chanel pantsuit with extensive trousers and jacket and no shirt beneath, the Twilight and Spencer star confessed that she was nervous of the duty forward.

“Full transparency, I’m sort of shaking,” she mentioned. “I really feel, not buckling beneath [the weight], however I can’t wait who all of us forward on the finish of this expertise. I’m simply able to be modified by all of the movies and by all of the individuals round us.”

Stewart mentioned it wasn’t her resolution to come back to Berlin. “I used to be shocked they referred to as me,” she mentioned. “[But] it is a gigantic alternative to focus on lovely issues at time when that’s exhausting to carry.”

Fellow Berlinale juror, actress Golshifteh Farahani, mentioned, a lot political upheaval on the planet, together with mass demonstrations in her dwelling nation of Iran, she felt notably privileged to have the ability to attend the pageant this 12 months.

“With Ukraine, Iran, with the earthquake [in Turkey and Syria], it looks like the entire world is disintegrating,” she mentioned. “We’re all in a second of transition, particularly now with Iran. And in a rustic, like Iran, that could be a dictatorship, artwork is just not solely an mental or philosophical factor, it’s important. It’s like oxygen…With the whole lot that’s taking place in Iran once more, to again in Berlin I’m joyful that we will collect collectively and and rejoice cinema, rejoice freedom, despite the fact that there’s the world appears to be collapsing from in all places.”

Stewart, Farahani and the opposite Berlinale jurors, who embody Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, Spanish director Carla Simón, Hong Kong director Johnnie To, German director Valeska Grisebach, and U.S. casting director and producer Francine Maisler will decide the 20 movies in Berlin’s official competitors part and, on Feb. 25, hand out the coveted Gold and Silver Bear trophies to the winners.

Requested about what she was searching for in a possible prize winner, Stewart mentioned she was searching for one thing that “in a optimistic approach is confrontational and political. I believe it’s essential for us to deprogram and be totally open to newness,” she mentioned. “I believe that the range and the breadth of views [among this year’s competition films] is goes to goes to supply us with some some new materials that may be difficult and unusual to adapt to [but] if all of us if all of us can’t agree [on a film] that’s in all probability as a result of it’s fairly good.”

There are not any apparent frontrunners going into the 73rd Berlinale. The 19 movies chosen by the staff led by inventive director Carlo Chatrian are heavy on arthouse and worldwide cinema, with a powerful concentrate on films with a powerful politically message.

The house crowd can cheer for 5 native skills, with cinema veteran Margarethe von Trotta screening her artist biopic Ingeborg Bachmann — Journey Into the Desert, starring Vicky Krieps because the late Austrian poet and creator; Christian Petzold (Undine, Transit) returning to Berlin along with his new drama Afire; Angela Schanelec presenting Music, a modern-day drama impressed by the Oedipus delusion; Christoph Hochhäusler within the working with Until the Finish of the Night time; and Emily Atef along with her Nineties-set romantic drama Sometime We’ll Inform Every Different Every thing.

Different titles with Bear potential embody the French documentary On the Adamant by Nicolas Philibert (To Be and to Have), Matt Johnson’s Canadian comedy BlackBerry, concerning the rise and fall of the titular smartphone makers; and The Survival of Kindness, the brand new function from Australian arthouse legend Rolf De Heer (Ten Canoes, Charlie’s Nation).

Whereas Stewart and the opposite Berlinale jurors praised the enduring energy of cinema, Radu Jude dryly famous that the film trade is the enterprise of “silly and costly [but] the movies right here don’t make as a lot cash and perhaps are rather less silly.”