(Berlin) “In full transparency, I’m shaking! We would not have guessed it. Kristen Stewart showed up at the traditional 73 jury press conference on Thursdaye Berlinale, of which she is the president, and answered questions with poise, eloquence and a hint of defiance.
Photographers snatched him up, with his Frodo-style boyish haircut from Lord of the Rings, without a blouse under a Chanel trouser suit in neo-hippie style orange tweed. I didn’t dare look at his jacket too long, for fear of hallucinating a hidden message like in steganography.
The actress of spencer and of Sils Maria was not shivering because she was cold, unlike her colleague on the jury, Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To, a regular at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal, who wore a winter coat. It’s true that in Berlin in February, he “fa fred”, as they say in Barcelona.
Kristen Stewart trembled before the task incumbent on her and her jury: to choose, among the 20 films of the competition selected by the Italian artistic director Carlo Chatrian and his team, those who will deserve a Golden or Silver Bear .
There are titles by well-known filmmakers – the Germans Margarethe Von Trotta and Christian Petzold, the French Philippe Garrel and Nicolas Philibert or the Australian Rolf de Heer – and lesser known, including the young Canadian Matt Johnson (The Dirties), who made BlackBerryon the ups and downs of the creators of the phone of the same name.
“I can’t wait to see how this experience will change us,” said Kristen Stewart, who was a juror at Cannes in 2018 and who is known as much to moviegoers for films by Olivier Assayas and Pablo Larrain as to the general public for the role of Bella in the series Twilightwho revealed it 15 years ago.
“Opening up to something new is the reason why festivals exist, believes the (soon to be) 32-year-old filmmaker. Not judging what is best, which is a fleeting concept. I have a preference for what is difficult, what is disturbing. The Berlinale is a festival which, historically, confronts and is political. »
Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, who has lived in France since the magnificent About Elly by Asghar Farhadi, Silver Bear in Berlin in 2009, believes for his part that cinema can provide comfort in times of political turmoil. “With what is happening in Iran, in Ukraine, with the earthquake (in Turkey and Syria), it can feel like the world is disintegrating,” she said. Art and culture are like a fire. We can gather around to warm up. »
The one we saw in Paterson by Jim Jarmusch and more recently in A couch in Tunis of Manele Labidi intends to fight for freedom, she says, in Iran and in the world. “In a dictatorship like Iran, art isn’t just intellectual or philosophical, it’s essential like oxygen. »
A breath of fresh air in an otherwise consensual press conference, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging or Looney PornGolden Bear 2021) made fun of a few questions from journalists and even seemed to respond indirectly to American producer Francine Maisler, also from the jury, who was pleased that Top Gun: Maverick has “saved” cinema in the past year.
Jude quoted Isidore Isou, a Romanian avant-garde poet who, in his film Treaty of drool and eternity (1951), said that “the cinema is the industry of money and stupidity”. “He wasn’t wrong,” he said. Even though we’re here to see movies that won’t make money and are maybe less stupid. »
Kristen Stewart, who said in the process that the film industry could indeed be “stupid and embarrassing”, said she hoped that the jury she chairs would vote for a film that does not have unanimous support. “I hope we will choose the one that stands out. If we don’t all agree, it’s probably because it’s good! ” It promises.