Kirsten Stewart looked confident as she attended her first press conference as jury president of the 2023 Berlin International Festival.

However, the ‘Spencer’ star confessed that she was nervous of the task ahead, reported Hollywood Reporter.

She said, "Full transparency, I'm kind of shaking. I feel, not buckling under [the weight], but I can't wait who we all ahead at the end of this experience. I'm just ready to be changed by all the films and by all the people around us."

Stewart said it wasn't her decision to come to Berlin. "I was shocked they called me," she said. "[But] it is an enormous opportunity to highlight beautiful things at time when that is hard to hold."

Fellow Berlinale juror, actress Golshifteh Farahani, said, so much political upheaval in the world, including mass demonstrations in her home country of Iran, she felt particularly privileged to be able to attend the festival this year.

“With Ukraine, Iran, with the earthquake [in Turkey and Syria], it feels like the whole world is disintegrating,” she said. “We are all in a moment of transition, especially now with Iran. And in a country, like Iran, which is a dictatorship, art is not only an intellectual or philosophical thing, it’s essential. It’s like oxygen...With everything that is happening in Iran again, to back in Berlin I’m happy that we can gather together and celebrate cinema, celebrate freedom, even though there is the world seems to be collapsing from everywhere.”

Stewart, Farahani and the other Berlinale jurors including Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, Spanish director Carla Simon, Hong Kong director Johnnie To, German director Valeska Grisebach, and U.S. casting director and producer Francine Maisler will judge the 20 films in Berlin's official competition section and, on February 25, hand out the coveted Gold and Silver Bear trophies to the winners.

Asked about what she was looking for in a potential prize winner, Stewart said she was looking for something that "in a positive way is confrontational and political. I think it's very important for us to deprogram and be fully open to newness," she said. "I think that the diversity and the breadth of perspectives [among this year's competition films] is going to is going to provide us with some new material that might be challenging and strange to adapt to [but] if we all if we all can't agree [on a film] that's probably because it's pretty good."

There are no obvious frontrunners going into the 73rd Berlinale. The 19 films selected by the team led by artistic director Carlo Chatrian are heavy on arthouse and international cinema, with a strong focus on movies with a strong, political message.

Source: The Hindu 

BDST: 1100 HRS, FEB 19, 2023
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