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Berlin Film Festival announces line-up

Films featuring Rooney Mara, Gael Garcia Bernal and Cillian Murphy in competition

by Amber Wilkinson

Cillian Murphy In Small Things Like These Photo: Courtesy of Berlinale

Films featuring Stephen Fry, Rooney Mara, Cillian Murphy and Gael Garcia Bernal are in the line-up for this year’s Berlin Film Festival, which was announced today.

The festival will open on February 15 with the world premiere of Small Things Like These, based on the historical bestseller by Irish author Clare Keegan and adapted by Enda Walsh. Directed by Belgian Tim Mielants, it stars Murphy as a coal merchant who makes shocking discoveries about the Magdalene Laundries. A Cop Movie director Alonso Ruizpalacious returns with La Cocina, which sees Mara playing a waitress at a restaurant who is in a romantic entanglement with Garcia Bernal’s cook Pedro, who becomes the chief suspect in a theft from the till. It will compete for the Golden Bear. From the US, A Different Man will compete after it's premiere at Sundance this week.

Fry, meanwhile, stars out of competition alongside Lena Dunham in Julia von Heinz’s tragicomedy Treasure. He plays Holocaust survivor father Edek, who travels with his music writer daughter (Dunham) to Poland. Isabelle Huppert is also among the big names attending, and will receive the honorary Golden Bear she was given in absentia in 2022. She stars in prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo’s latest film A Traveller’s Needs.

Olivier Assayas will compete with his pandemic lockdown comedy Suspended Time, while fellow Frenchman Bruno Dumont turns his hand to science-fiction with L’Empire. It’s a good year for Francophone cinema in competition as Abderrahmane Sissako also brings his romance Black Tea about a woman from the Ivory Coast embarking on a new life in China, while Mati Diop brings colonisation documentary Dahomey. This year’s event will be the last edition for artistic director Carlo Chatrian and executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeek as former London film festival director Tricia Tuttle takes up the post next year.

Gael Garcia Bernal in La Cocina Photo: Indigo Film

Beginning the press conference with a statement on the current crisis in the Middle East, they said: “Festivals provide a space for artistic expression and enable peaceful dialogue. They are places of encounter and exchange and contribute to international understanding. We believe that through the power of films and open discussions, we can help foster empathy, awareness, understanding, even and especially in painful times like these.

“Our sympathy goes out to all the victims of the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East and elsewhere. We want everyone’s suffering to be recognized, and for our program to be open to discussing different perspectives on the complexity of the world. We are also concerned to see that antisemitism, anti-Muslim resentment and hate speech are spreading in Germany and around the world. As a cultural institution, we take a firm stand against all forms of discrimination and are committed to intercultural understanding.”

The full competition line-up is below: