The Berlin International Film Festival unveiled the competition lineup for its 2023 edition on Monday morning, naming the 18 films that will compete for the coveted gold and silver bears at the 73rd Berlinale.

Berlinale Executive Director Mariette Rissenbeek and Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian presented a very international and a rich arthouse programming, with a strong emphasis on politically charged cinema.

In a late addition, Superpower, Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman’s documentary about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Russian invasion of the country and the ongoing war, will have its world premiere in Berlin’s out-of-competition Berlinale Special section. The doc, produced for Vice Studios, Aldamisa Entertainment and Fifth Season, is sold internationally by Fifth Season.

Berlin 2023, which will take place one year after the February 24 Russian invasion, will focus on Ukraine. Even the official festival pin will be in the colors of Ukraine, blue and yellow.

In competition, the German author Christian Petzold will take part in his sixth participation in the Berlinale competition with Fire (Roter Himmel).

Petzold’s latest feature film, Undinewon the FIPRESCI Critics Award at the 2020 Berlinale, and he won the Silver Bear for Best Director in 2012 for Barbaric. His last team Petzold with his Undine and Transit Paula Beer in an intimate drama about four young people vacationing together at a vacation home on the Baltic Sea. But all around them the wildfires are raging, closing in closer and closer as the emotions inside the house threaten to erupt as well. Enno Trebs, Thomas Schubert, Jonas Dassler and Langston Uibel co-star.

Pioneering German director Margarethe von Trotta (Hannah Arendt, Rosenstrasse), brings another of his portraits of extraordinary women to this year’s festival. Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey to the Deserta look at the famous Austrian poet (played by Vicky Krieps) and her relationship with Homo Farber the writer Max Frisch (Ronald Zehrfeld), will premiere at the Berlinale competition.

Another German veteran, director Christoph Hochhäusler, will bring his latest, film noir Until the end of the night, at the Berlin competition. Another established filmmaker, French director Philippe Garrel (Liberté, la nuit), will world premiere his new family-focused feature, The Plow, in the Berlin competition.

by Celine Song Past liveswhich premiered at Sundance, will have its international premiere at a competition in Berlin.

Canadian director John Trengove will make his competition debut at the Berlinale with manodrome with Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody. Matt Johnson biopic comedy Blackberry, about the Canadian smartphone company featuring Jay Baruchel, Glenn Howerton and Cary Elwes; the drama disco boy by director Giacomo Abbruzzese; Angela Schaneliec Music; and Ivan Sen Limbo with Australian star Simon Baker (The Mentalist) also made the selection for the Berlinale competition.

Dutch Australian director Rolf de Heer (ten canoes, Charlie’s Country), will bow his last, Kindness Survival, in a competition slot in Berlin. The drama, which premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival last October, follows BlackWoman (Mwajemi Hussein), an Aboriginal woman left in a cage in the middle of the desert to die who escapes and travels across the desert. to town.

From Japan, your name director Makoto Shinkai will bring his new feature film, susume, in Berlin, where it will make its international premiere in competition. The feature, which Crunchyroll is distributing outside of Asia in partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment, Wild Bunch International and Eurozoom, will mark the first Anime to screen in competition at the Berlinale since Hayao Miyazaki. Taken away as if by magic won the Golden Bear here in 2001.

Chinese director Zhang Lu returns to competition in Berlin with his latest, The Shadowless Tower. Zhang last appeared at the Berlin contest with desert dream in 2007, but screened the 2019 drama Hukuoka in the Berlin Forum sidebar, and its functionality Dooman River won Best Film in the Generation section in Berlin in 2010.

Spanish director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren and Mexican director Lila Avilés (The maid) are both making their competition debuts at the Berlinale with 20,000 species of bees and Totemrespectively.

Chatrian also unveiled the films in its Encounters section on Monday, a competition lineup for more avant-garde and experimental films. Among the highlights: that of Dustin Guy Defa The adults with Michael Cera, Abbi Jacobson and Tavi Gevinson; the hungarian function White plastic sky, from directors Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó, an animated drama set in post-apocalyptic Budapest in the year 2121; and echoa new documentary by South American filmmaker Tatiana Huezo, whose Prayers for the Stolen won a special mention in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in 2021 and was chosen as Mexico’s top international nominee for last year’s Oscar race.

family timethe first feature film by Finnish director Tia Kouvo, also selected for the Encounters 2023 program, and prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, who won back-to-back Silver Bears with The novelist’s film (grand jury prize 2022) and Introduction (best screenplay 2021), returns to Berlin with his latest, In wateralso in Dating.

The 73rd Berlinale, which will take place from February 16 to 26, will open with the world premiere, out of competition, of She came to mea romantic comedy from director and screenwriter Rebecca Miller (Maggie’s Plan) with Peter Dinklage as a composer with Writer’s Block and Anne Hathaway as his wife and former therapist. Marisa Tomei, Joanna Kulig and Brian d’Arcy James co-star in the Protagonist Pictures production.

After triumphant returns from the Cannes and Venice festivals last year, all eyes will be on Berlin to see if the German festival can successfully rebound from COVID-era restrictions.

The performance of the festival and its accompanying industry event, the European Film Market (EFM), will be seen as a barometer of the overall health of the independent industry. Even more than Cannes or Venice, Berlin is an arthouse-focused festival with a program celebrating films that often lack support from major studios and depend on the patchwork of independent distributors around the world for their success.

“Almost all movies need the platform of a film festival to have a life,” Chatrian noted. “Independent films without a festival are in danger of disappearing.”