The Berlin Movie Pageant has appointed Tricia Tuttle, the previous head of the BFI London Movie Pageant, to change into the brand new director of the worldwide movie occasion beginning in 2024.
Tuttle will succeed Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek, who’ve co-led the Berlinale as inventive and govt administrators since 2020 and will step down after this yr’s version when their respective mandates finish.
The Berlin Movie Pageant is the world’s second greatest worldwide movie pageant after Cannes. It additionally hosts the European Movie Market, an important trade gathering the place impartial movies are pitched and offered.
Tuttle was the director of the BFI London Movie Pageant throughout a fast-growing five-year period by which audiences practically doubled earlier than she stepped down after the 2022 version. She labored because the pageant’s deputy for 5 years earlier than that to her predecessor Clare Stewart. She helped the pageant broaden exterior of London with venues arrange throughout the U.Ok. About one third of the pageant screenings had been exterior London in 2021. Tuttle additionally labored for 5 years at BAFTA as movie program supervisor.
Talking at a press convention alongside Claudia Roth, Germany’s tradition commissioner, in Berlin Tuesday, Tuttle began by apologizing for not talking German. She added: “I’ll in a yr have been attending the Berlinale for greater than a decade. I’ve at all times cherished that Berlin is glamorous, political and provocative. It’s a massively necessary assembly place for the world’s movie trade.”
Roth mentioned: “In her interviews, [Tuttle] impressed us along with her clear concepts to create a contemporary and team-orientated pageant and well timed sponsoring mannequin. She’s the very best alternative to steer the Berlinale. She brings 25 years of expertise. The BFI London Movie Pageant not solely had an unlimited progress in viewers but additionally significance. She made the pageant extra colourful and extra various and opened it as much as a wider viewers.”
Tuttle added, “The Berlinale is a pacesetter amongst A-list movie festivals — welcoming and inclusive, and brimming with a breath-taking range of movies. It’s a pageant that exhibits cinema as a most vibrant, usually magical artform, one which may rework how we see the world and the way we perceive one another. What an immense thrill and privilege it’s to have this chance to steer this necessary pageant. I look ahead to a really profitable Berlinale in 2024, and to becoming a member of the group afterwards.”
Tuttle was appointed by a six-member committee which included Oscar-winning director Edward Berger (“All Quiet on the Western Entrance”); producer Roman Paul (“Paradise Now”); Anne Leppin, the German Movie Academy’s now sole managing director; actress and producer Sara Fazilat; State Secretary Florian Graf, head of the Berlin Senate Chancellery; and Roth.
Whereas Rissenbeek determined to step down following the 2024 version, Chatrian was not given the chance to serve a second mandate by the governing physique of the Berlinale, the Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes.
Explaining the choice to set a brand new management, Roth she mentioned wished to see the pageant be led and represented by one particular person as a substitute of getting a twin management.
Greater than 400 filmmakers and skills, amongst them Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Béla Tarr, Olivier Assayas, Kirsten Stewart and Margarethe von Trotta, signed a petition to protest in opposition to the tradition commissioner’s resolution and demand a prolongation of Chatrian’s contract.
As introduced on Monday, this yr’s Berlin Movie Pageant jury will likely be presided over by Lupita Nyong’o, the Oscar-winning Kenyan-Mexican actor and filmmaker. The 74th version will run Feb. 15-25.
