BERLINALE 2013: INTERNATIONAL JURY

7-2-2013 — /europawire.eu/ — With WONG Kar Wai serving as Jury President, the International Jury will decide who will receive the Golden Bear and Silver Bears of the 2013 Berlinale Competition.

The other members of the International Jury will be Susanne Bier, Andreas Dresen, Ellen Kuras, Shirin Neshat, Tim Robbins and Athina Rachel Tsangari.

WONG Kar Wai (Jury President)
Chinese director WONG Kar Wai has won many international awards and is one of the most important representatives of world cinema. His unique and extraordinary style has inspired countless filmmakers and made him a cult figure of contemporary auteur cinema. He made his directorial debut in 1988 with As Tears Go By. In 1994, he achieved his international breakthrough with Chungking Express, followed by Fallen Angels (1996, Berlinale Forum) and Happy Together (1997), for which he won the Award for Best Director in Cannes. He captivated still another generation of European moviegoers with the nostalgic love story In the Mood for Love (2000, César 2001), as well as with his next film, 2046 (European Film Award 2004). My Blueberry Nights (2007) was the first film that WONG Kar Wai shot in the USA and cast with Hollywood stars. His latest film, the epic martial arts drama The Grandmaster, will be the opening film of the 63rd Berlinale.

Danish director Susanne Bier studied art and architecture before surrendering completely to her love of film and attending the National Film School of Denmark. Her directorial debut De saliges ø (1987) won first prize of the Munich International Festival of Film Schools. In 1999 she celebrated her international breakthrough with The One and Only. She then ventured a radical change and turned to the Dogme 95 film movement, applying its principles for Open Hearts (2002) and the Sundance Film Festival award-winning Brothers (2004). Following a stint in Hollywood cinema with Things We Lost in the Fire (2007), she returned to her roots in 2010 with great success: In a Better World won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Love Is All You Need (2012), a romance starring Pierce Brosnan, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Susanne Bier is currently finishing the drama Serena featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper.

Andreas Dresen is one of Germany’s most outstanding directors. His films frequently move between improvisation and semi-documentary, but always get up close and personal with the landscape of the German soul. With equal parts comedy and tragedy, Andreas Dresen often stages mundane reality in its vulgar beauty and bitter truth. His international breakthrough came in 2002 with Grill Point, which won the Berlinale Silver Bear. In his career spanning over 20 years, he has won numerous awards, many of them for his most successful film to date, Stopped on Track (2011), including the Prize Un Certain Regard at the Cannes International Film Festival. Andreas Dresen has been a regular guest of the Berlinale since 1999. Following Night Shape, his films Grill Point, Herr Wichmann von der CDU,Willenbrock and Herr Wichmann aus der dritten Reihe were programme features.

With her remarkable style and daring choices in image format and composition, U.S. director and cinematographer Ellen Kuras has influenced contemporary cinema aesthetics like no other woman in her field. She is one of the few female cinematographers to regularly film large-scale Hollywood productions, having collaborated with Martin Scorsese, Michel Gondry, Spike Lee and Jonathan Demme. In addition to feature films, her work includes documentary and advertising work as well as music films. Ellen Kuras gained early recognition for Swoon (1992), for which she received the first of three best dramatic cinematography awards at the Sundance Film Festival. Her visual style has defined Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Blow (2001) and Summer of Sam (1999), and her directorial debut The Betrayal (2008) was nominated for an Oscar and won a primetime Emmy. Ellen Kuras is currently in development on a script to direct about the silent film star Wally Reid.

The works of artist and director Shirin Neshat swing back and forth between tradition and modernity. A theme central to her work is the complexity of the female experience within Islamic society. Shirin Neshat was born in Iran. She left the country at the start of the 1979 Revolution and studied in the US, where she began her artistic output in photography and later moved on to film and video art. Her short film installation Turbulent won the International Award of the Venice Biennale in 1999. Ten years later, her first dramatic feature film Women without Men was awarded the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival. Shirin Neshat is currently working on her second feature-length film, a portrait of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum.

Tim Robbins (USA) has acted in films including The Shawshank Redemption, Mystic River, The Player,Short Cuts, Bull Durham, Jacob’s Ladder, The Hudsucker Proxy and The Secret Life of Words. He has received the Academy Award, the Prix D’Interpretation Masculine at the Cannes Film Festival, the Humanitas Prize, the Bronze Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival for his debut film Bob Roberts, Best Director and Best Film at the Sitges Film Festival in Spain for Cradle Will Rock, and four awards at the Berlinale for Dead Man Walking. Most recently Mr. Robbins was honored to be named Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. For the past 32 years, Mr. Robbins has been the Artistic Director of the Actors’ Gang, which has traveled the world to five continents with its productions, and whose arts programs serve at-risk children and the incarcerated.

New Greek cinema would not exist without Greek director and producer Athina Rachel Tsangari. She migrated to the US to study performance studies at NYU, and film direction at the University of Texas, in Austin. Her directorial debut Fit (1994) was nominated for a Student Academy Award. Following her critically successful first feature The Slow Business of Going (2000) she returned to Greece, founded Haos Film with fellow filmmakers Matt Johnson and Maria Hatzakou, and began collaborating with director Yorgos Lanthimos. She produced Lanthimos’s Kinetta (2005), Academy Award nominatedDogtooth (as an associate producer, 2009) and Alps (2011). Her own second feature Attenberg (2010) received two awards at the Venice International Film Festival, and her art film The Capsule (2012) premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival. Athina Rachel Tsangari is currently working on the sci-fi comedy Duncharon.

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