2023-12-12 17:50:23
As of the 2025 edition – the upcoming one will be headed by Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek – the Berlinale will have a woman as artistic director for the first time. The American Tricia Tuttle takes over as director, responsible for both the content and the business side of the most important German cultural event.
Tuttle, born in 1970, comes from North Carolina, went to Millbrook High School in Raleigh and to the local art cinema and moved to London in 1997 – which also had something to do with the enthusiasm for a Mike Leigh film, for “Life is “Sweet”. In England she has now accumulated 25 years of experience as a festival programmer, editor and journalist. Most recently, she directed the London Film Festival (LFF) for five years – and at the same time the “BFI Flare”, a festival for queer films. During her performance in Berlin, she managed to pronounce the abbreviation “LGBTQIA+” fluently and accurately twice.
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The LFF in October has a good reputation, but is not an A-festival like the Berlinale, but sees itself as the “best of” of the film year, plus new productions from Great Britain. This understanding of the festival as a domestic showcase is important for the Berlinale, as two of its directors (Moritz de Hadeln and Carlo Chatrian) were strangers to German film production. “When I moved from America to England, I heard English people complaining about their own cinema,” Tuttle once said in an interview. “That was surprising to me.”
Tuttle’s introductory press conference was held in English because the new boss doesn’t speak German. “Next year I will learn German so well that you will be able to make fun of my accent,” Tuttle promised. The American Ellen Harrington (director of the German Film Museum in Frankfurt) and the Italian Carlo Chatrian had also promised this at the beginning, but both of them were never able to do anything more than clumsy introductory sentences.
Claudia Roth (l) and the new Berlinale boss Tricia Tuttle
Source: dpa
But German skills are particularly important for a Berlinale director, because she is a public figure and constantly has to deal with Berlin politics (which is not famous for her knowledge of English). That being said, neither Cannes nor Venice would even think of hiring a director who doesn’t speak the local language.
This brings us to a special problem in the German film scene: that there is no candidate far and wide who would be able to meet the requirements of a top position in Berlin. Even the names that were previously discussed – Matthijs Wouter Knol, Dutchman and managing director of the European Film Academy, and Christian Jungs, head of the Zurich Film Festival – were not German.
Your absolute priority
Tuttle wisely avoided any commitment to her upcoming task; The festival next February will be entirely that of Chatrian and Rissenbeek, their term of office begins on April 1st. However, one can look at the five years of their work at the LFF, from 2018 to 2022. The London festival had to cope with reduced funding from the National Lottery and increased operating costs.
At Tuttle’s presentation, Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth pointed out that the Berlinale subsidy should increase to 12.6 million euros (subject to budget turbulence), and the Berlin government also announced an increase in the city’s subsidies of 25,000 euros (yes, that was more The Berlinale is not worth it to the Senate so far!) to two million euros. The Berlinale has to cover the rest of the 25 million budget itself with ticket sales and sponsorship money; The latter will be one of Tuttle’s main tasks.
What is interesting about Tuttle’s London term is the expansion of the digital offering, which was initially a forced effect during the pandemic, but then leveled off at 80 percent in-person and 20 percent digital performances; Nothing can be seen digitally at the Berlinale so far. However, Tuttle emphasized that her absolute priority was to get people back to the cinema. When asked whether she wanted to show films from streamers, she remained vague; Cannes consistently does not show Netflix in the competition, Venice does.
The new jury president
Now, at the beginning of the week, Tuttle had to share the spotlight with another major Berlinale acquisition, another woman. The film festival has always had high-profile jury presidents – Tilda Swinton, Werner Herzog, Wong Kar-Wai, Meryl Streep, Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, to name a few – but Lupita Nyong’o is a coup even within that list.
Her commitment can probably be traced back to the work of Jacqueline Lyanga, who was hired by the Berlinale a year and a half ago as the festival’s “ambassador” on the American West Coast. The daughter of a Tanzanian college professor, Lyanga was born in Dar es Salaam, her family moved from England to Canada to New York, and Lyanga went on to a career in film, including eight years as director of the American Film Institute Festival.
Lupita Nyong’o, new Berlinale jury president
Quelle: Getty Images for MTV
Nyong’o shares with her this biography of the child of a Western-oriented African elite. She was born in Mexico, where her family had fled because of repression in their homeland, returned to Kenya when the political situation improved, learned Spanish for seven months in Mexico as a teenager (her first name is a diminutive of “Guadalupe”) and went to study in Massachusetts, where she completed a general humanities degree. She graduated with a degree in film and theater studies because she already knew what she wanted to be: she had seen Whoopi Goldberg in Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple”.
Oscar winner and fashion icon
After returning home again – appearing in a television series about AIDS prevention, directing a film about discrimination against albinos – she began studying at the Yale School of Drama and graduated with a prize for “acting students with outstanding abilities”. There she saw scouts for the film “12 Years a Slave” – and her role as a slave on a cotton plantation earned her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
What she wore on the Oscar stage – a blue Prada dress with a train – launched another career as a fashion icon. “Harper’s Bazaar” included her in its list of best-dressed people, magazines like “People” and “Vanity Fair” and “Vogue” put her on the cover (“Vogue” already six times) and luxury brands like Lancôme and Calvin Klein use her face and your name.
With advertising came social commitment: against the shooting of elephants, for safe births in Uganda, against hunger in Africa, for feminism in the film industry; She wants to play primarily for female directors and for “feminist male directors who have not abused their power.” She, too, wrote in a piece for the New York Times, was harassed by Harvey Weinstein and then turned down the lead role in his production Southpaw. Meanwhile, her film career continued unhindered, she got roles in two cinema series, in the “Star Wars” sequel trilogy and in both “Black Panther” films, as well as in “Us” by Jordan Peele, the hottest director in Hollywood.
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Lupita Nyong’o is likely to be the first Berlinale jury president to appear in a Beyoncé song. “Brown Skin Girl,” a celebration of brown skin color, first mentions former model Naomi Campbell: “Pose like a trophy when Naomis walk in / She needs an Oscar for that pretty dark skin / Pretty like Lupita when the cameras close in.”
Jay-Z raps the lines “I’m on my Lupita Nyong’o / Stuntin’ on stage, after 12 years a slave / This Ace of Spades look like an Oscar” in “We Made It”, a song that reflects the African-American Expresses pride in what black people have accomplished in the United States. The list of Nyong’o’s mentions in black pop culture goes on and on, including the Christian rapper Lecrae, the rapper Nicki Minaj, and the Nigerian-born rapper Wale.
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