The Berlin Film Fest’s 2023 line­up includes Chris­t­ian Pet­zold, Hong Sang-soo

With the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val cur­rent­ly in full swing, the cin­e­ma world is ori­ent­ed around Park City, Utah, for the moment. But with the next major date on the cal­en­dar fast approach­ing, the Berlin Film Fes­ti­val has stolen a bit of the spot­light this morn­ing as the pro­gram­ming com­mit­tee has unveiled their Com­pe­ti­tion picks for this year’s festivities.

Pres­i­dent Kris­ten Stew­art and her to-be-announced pan­el of jurors will pass judge­ment on a line­up well-stocked with esteemed fix­tures of the inter­na­tion­al art­house, a hand­ful of high-pro­file key gets chal­leng­ing the per­cep­tion of the Berli­nale as a less-glossy cousin of Cannes and Venice. The most eye-catch­ing among them may be the Ger­man cinema’s lat­est pride and joy Angela Schan­elec, return­ing to the fes­ti­val with the inces­tu­ous fam­i­ly dra­ma Music after her glow­ing­ly reviewed I Was At Home, But… net­ted her a Sil­ver Bear award for Best Direc­tor in 2019. Also rep­re­sent­ing Deutschland’s inter­ests in Com­pe­ti­tion will be fem­i­nist trail­blaz­er Mar­garethe von Trot­ta, the impro­lif­ic Christoph Hochhäusler, and the great Chris­t­ian Pet­zold, his new thriller Afire (for­mer­ly The Red Sky) turn­ing up the ten­sion dur­ing a heat­wave at a sum­mer hol­i­day home.

They’re joined by a glob­al col­lec­tion of well-regard­ed artists includ­ing French liv­ing leg­end Philippe Gar­rel, whose dra­ma The Plough fol­lows a nomadic fam­i­ly tour­ing with their long-run­ning pup­pet show act, and Portugal’s João Cani­jo, back at last with a fol­low-up to 2011’s Blood of My Blood. Those keep­ing track of Eng­lish-lan­guage cuts will be inter­est­ed in Black­Ber­ry (Cana­di­an Matt Johnson’s account of the proto-smartphone’s mete­oric rise, fea­tur­ing Jay Baruchel, Glenn How­er­ton, and Cary Elwes), and the return of South Africa’s John Tren­gove with Man­odrome (an of-the-moment satire that sees an Uber dri­ver played by Jesse Eisen­berg join­ing a lib­er­tar­i­an mas­culin­i­ty cult in the woods led by Adrien Brody).

Though Celine Song’s debut Past Lives will have already played at Sun­dance by the time it comes to Berlin, the ear­ly pos­i­tive reviews (in par­tic­u­lar for per­for­mances by Gre­ta Lee and John Mag­a­ro) have put it on atten­dees’ radar. And in a first for the Berli­nale, an ani­mé fea­ture has cracked the Com­pe­ti­tion slate, Your Name and Weath­er­ing With You direc­tor Mako­to Shinkai back with Suzume, in which prob­lems arise once a hunky boy is trans­mo­gri­fied into a chair.

And that’s not to men­tion the eye-grab­bers tucked away in the side­bar cat­e­gories, such as Dustin Guy Defa’s indie The Adults; The Echo from Tatiana Hue­zo, direc­tor of Prayers for the Stolen; In Water, the lat­est trans­mis­sion from the Hong Sang-soo-niverse; Gol­da, Guy Nattiv’s sur­pris­ing­ly Helen Mir­ren-led biopic of Gol­da Meir; and the for­mal exper­i­ment Real­i­ty, in which Syd­ney Sweeney enacts the tran­script of NSA whistle­blow­er Real­i­ty Winner’s inter­ro­ga­tion by the FBI.

Screen Dai­ly has the com­plete list of selec­tions for what’s sure to be a crack­er­jack Berli­nale, though Lit­tle White Lies will soon start run­ning our on-the-ground cov­er­age con­firm­ing that much. Until then, all we can do is wait and hope that all will emerge unscathed from the even­tu­al pre­mière of Sean Penn​‘s new doc­u­men­tary about the war in Ukraine.

The 73^rd Berlin Film Fes­ti­val will take place from 16 to 26 February.