The Berlinale’s impish festival director runs the world’s biggest public film event as if it were a kitchen party. The stars love him for his energy and comically mangled English.
Arno Burgi/NewscomThe Berlin Film Festival on Friday unveiled the first baker’s dozen of titles for its Generation Kplus and Generation 14plus sections, which target young audiences.
The films selected thus far for the Generation 14plus sidebar include In Your Dreams, from Czech director Petr Oukropec; New Zealand drama Born to Dance, from Tammy Davis; Girl Asleep, a film from Rosemary Myers set in Australia in the 1970s; the Chilean feature Plants, from Roberto Doveris; Nagraj Manjule’s Indian drama Wild; the political-tinged Russian feature Rag Union, from director Mikhail Mestetskiy; and a Chinese coming-of-age tale: What’s in the Darkness, from Yichun Wang.
For Generation Kplus, for films aimed at kids and tweens, Berlin picked two Turkish features: Young Wrestlers, from director Mete Gumurhan; Rauf, from directors Baris Kaya and Soner Caner; the German drama Ente Gut!, from Norbert Lechner; Molly Monster, from filmmakers Ted Sieger, Matthias Bruhn and Michael Ekbladh; Marta Minorowicz‘ Zud; and the Dutch-Swedish co-production Siv Sleeps Astray from directors Catti Edfeldt and Lena Hanno Clyne.
Organizers said the diverse films were unified by the theme of “young individuals whose inner lives are in turmoil. The protagonists’ often fragile states of mind find heightened expression in anxious spaces, dream worlds, landscapes of desire and surreal apparitions.”
The full program for Generation will be announced in mid-January.