The Berlin Film Festival is launching a new €50,000 competitive section for international fiction feature debuts called Perspectives, and is discontinuing its Encounters strand.
Perspectives will include up to 14 fiction debuts from all over the world, with a jury of three deciding on the best first feature award.
The award is endowed with €50,000, funded by GWFF (Gesellschaft zur Wahrnehmung von Film- und Fernsehrechten), a society dedicated to safeguarding film and television rights. The prize money is to be split between the producers and the directors of the winning film.
Perspectives emerges from the best first feature award at the Berlinale, run in partnership with GWFF since 2006. Previously nominations were embedded across all of the festival’s sections.
At the same time, Berlin is discontinuing the Encounters strand, which was launched in 2020 as a platform for “aesthetically and structurally daring works from independent, innovative filmmakers.”
The Berlinale said it will still seek to profile such works from across different sections of the festival.
The Perspectives strand will “shine a brighter spotlight on new filmmakers within the festival”, said the festival,
New Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle said: “Perspectives will offer a more visible platform for exceptional emerging filmmakers from around the world. We are looking for features representing a genuinely international range of voices which have a bold and fluent cinematic language and offer arresting perspectives and new ways of seeing the world.”
Films selected to participate in the Perspectives competition will be curated by Tuttle together with the new co-directors of film programming Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stutz as well as the section heads of Panorama, Forum and Generation. World premieres will be given preference, but films that have already premiered in their country of origin can also be considered.
The Berlinale said its various festival sections will also continue to present feature film debuts.
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