BERLIN — On a recent morning, the Berlin Film Festival’s two new co-directors were arguing about accents — specifically, what kind of voice should introduce the filmmakers in live announcements at this year’s event.
“On this issue, I like an accent,” said Carlo Chatrian, its artistic director, adding that a non-native English speaker would best reflect Berlin’s cosmopolitan identity.
“But we already have so many accents,” protested Mariette Rissenbeek, its executive director.
When another team member floated the idea of a German person introducing the films in broken English, Rissenbeek winced. “No, no, no,” she said. “It cannot, under any circumstances, be embarrassing.” After erupting into laughter, the group agreed.
This year’s Berlinale, as the festival is often called, will be the first time the event has been overseen by not one, but two leaders — an arrangement that proponents say allows specialists to focus on areas of expertise rather than having a single all-powerful figure responsible for both creative and business decisions.
In an era when organizations are being scrutinized for gender disparities in leadership positions, it also allows a man and a woman to share the top role. In this case, Chatrian, 48, is responsible for programming decisions and Rissenbeek, 63, is handling logistics, staffing and finances for the event, which begins on Feb. 20 and runs through March 1.
“With #MeToo, this idea of having autocratic, solitary rulers running cultural institutions began to change,” Andrea Hausmann, a professor at the Institute of Arts Management in Ludwigsburg, said in a telephone interview.
The dual-director concept — known here as a “doppelspitze” — has existed in Europe and elsewhere for decades, and has become especially popular in Germany’s cultural sector in the last few years.
The arrangement requires a level of coordination that can prove challenging, even to seasoned chiefs.
Many hope it will help reinvigorate the Berlinale, which is considered one of Europe’s most important film festivals but has recently drawn accusations of lackluster curation. Chatrian, who was born in Italy, previously worked as the artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, and Rissenbeek, who is from the Netherlands, led a promotional agency focused on German film.
In a joint interview, Chatrian said the doppelspitze structure had allowed him to take a more hands-on curatorial approach than his predecessor, Dieter Kosslick, who oversaw the festival alone for 18 years. Under Kosslick’s leadership, the festival expanded significantly in size and scope.
“Everyone was aware that Dieter had a lot of things on his plate,” Rissenbeek said. “If the activities grow time after time, you need to change the structure so people can cope with the amount of work.”
In recent years, the Komische Oper opera company in Berlin, the Deutsches Museum in Munich and numerous state-funded theaters around the country have embraced the model. Tanztheater Wuppertal, the dance company founded by Pina Bausch, appointed joint leaders in 2018, with Bettina Wagner-Bergelt taking over the group’s artistic direction and Roger Christmann handling its business concerns.
Ms. Wagner-Bergelt said the arrangement was a savvy way of ensuring a more by-the-books approach to money in the theater world.
“For a long time there were gray zones where you could make agreements without contracts, for example,” she said in a telephone interview — whereas these days financial decisions need to be made with more attention to detail, ideally by people with a keen financial sense. “It’s like any other business now,” she said.
Elsewhere the structure has proved ill-fated.
In 2016, the Berlin State Ballet company announced the joint appointment of the contemporary choreographer Sasha Waltz and the more classically inclined Johannes Ohman as directors. The arrangement unraveled last month, after Ohman announced that he was leaving the company to take a job in Stockholm.
At a tense news conference last week, Waltz suggested that she might continue in the role with a new partner, adding that the collapse of the partnership with Ohman “does not mean the model of a doppelspitze has failed.”
Rissenbeek and Chatrian said their collaboration had, thus far, gone off without a hitch.
“But we still have some time,” she joked, noting that the festival doesn’t start for a few weeks. “If he had said he wanted the opening film to be, I don’t know, a small, Russian black-and-white film that’s five hours long, I would have said it’s a no-go,” she added. “But he didn’t suggest it.”
The Berlinale will instead kick off with “My Salinger Year,” a film by the Canadian director Philippe Falardeau. The film, starring Sigourney Weaver, focuses on a woman working for the writer J.D. Salinger’s literary agent.
Chatrian estimated that he had watched around 800 films as part of the selection process, and said he had closely overseen the curation of all festival programs. “That would not have been possible if I had 10 meetings a day like Mariette,” he said.
This year’s competition lineup will include a new film by the Berlinale favorite Christian Petzold, as well as works by noted art-house directors like Sally Potter, Kelly Reichardt and Philippe Garrel. “DAU. Natasha,” part of a notoriously long-gestating art project by the Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, will also be shown in competition. The British actor Jeremy Irons will head the jury.
Rissenbeek and Chatrian have made some structural changes to this year’s festival.
Two programs — Culinary Cinema, focusing on food-related movies, and NATIVe, a section dedicated to films made by members of indigenous communities — were cut because, Chatrian explained, he had struggled to find enough features that met his standards. They also created a new section, called Encounters, dedicated to “aesthetically and structurally daring works from independent, innovative filmmakers.”
The festival announced last week that it would suspend the Alfred Bauer Prize, an annual award named after the festival’s first director, which is typically given to a film that “opens new perspectives on cinematic art.” The prize’s suspension followed a report in the German newspaper Die Zeit revealing that Bauer had worked as a high-ranking functionary in the Nazi film bureaucracy.
Critics have reacted to this year’s lineup with cautious optimism. Katja Nicodemus, a longtime Berlinale observer who is a reporter and critic with Die Zeit, said in an email that this year’s program seemed “intriguing and persuasively curated,” but noted that, like Dieter Kosslick, the new doppelspitze had not been able to attract the top ranks of auteur filmmakers to Berlin.
“It seems largely reminiscent of Kosslick’s competition lineups,” Nicodemus said.
Chatrian said that he expected criticism but added that, like his predecessor, he was aware of the need to balance more auteur-driven work with audience-pleasing films.
“I think there is room for both,” he said. “In that respect, the identity of the Berlinale is not at stake.”
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
