The Berlinale Forum, the Berlin Film Festival’s avant-garde sidebar, has announced the first 8 films confirmed for its 2024 line-up.
The 8 films come from 8 different countries, reflecting the Forum’s global reach and a broader push towards greater diversity in it’s line-up. New Forum head Barbara Wurm, who took over running the Forum section in October, highlighted how her program selection team was “diverse with respect to age, ethnicity and cinematic focus.”
One focus of the selection is on cinema coming from regions outside the centers of the Western film industry. “We are looking for worldly films beyond self-referentiality – but those that get involved,” says Wurm. “By being open and resolute in dealing with cinematic forms, we want to bridge the gap between the real worlds we live in and a cinema aware of its public impact.”
The announced titles include the Indian drama The Adamant Girl from director Vinothraj PS, which follows Meena, a woman who refuses to speak who falls in love with a man from a lower caste.
Maria’s Silence by director Dāvis Sīmanis is a Latvian/Lithuanian period drama set in the Moscow art scene of 1937, and follows Latvian artist Maria Leiko, who believes she is untouchable and can stay about the politics of her day.
Sleeping with a Tiger from Austrian director Anja Salomonowitz stars Birgit Minichmayr (Everyone Else, Downfall) as the avant-garde painter Maria Lassnig in an unconventional biopic.
Another biopic, Abdenour Zahzah’s Algerian/French feature with the exhaustive title True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, when Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956, does what it says on the tin, following the film of renowned politician and decolonialisation activist Frantz Fanon during his time as a psychiatrist in Algeria from 1953 to 1956.
Among the documentaries selected include Reas from Argentine filmmaker Lola Arias, which looks at long-term inmates of a women’s prison in Buenos Aires. Jin Jiang’s Republic, from Singapore and China, follows a man who turned his tiny Beijing apartment into a private micro-club. Lana Gogoberidze’s Mother and Daughter, from Georgia, is a tribute to the director’s mother Nutsa, Georgia’s first female filmmaker. And Macu Machín’s Spanish documentary The Undergrowth follows the everyday, lyrical lives of three sisters on the Canary Islands.
The remaining Forum titles will be announced in the coming weeks. The 2024 Berlinale runs Feb. 15-25, 2024.
