Former Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick is returning to the festival scene with a new event called Green Visions Potsdam, which kicks off on May 30 and runs until June 2.
Kosslick, whose 18-year tenure at the Berlinale spanned 2001 to 2019, is festival director of Green Visions Potsdam and has put together a line-up of 18 films addressing issues such as climate protection, sustainability, fast fashion, agriculture and nutrition.
The programme, which Kosslick has selected in collaboration with curator Karen Arikian, opens with the German premieres of French documentary filmmaker Jean-Albert Lièvre’s Whale Nation and UK director Mahalia Belo’s survival thriller The End We Start From, starring Jodie Comer and Benedict Cumberbatch.
Universal Pictures International will also be releasing Belo’s film in German cinemas parallel to its presentation at Green Visions.
The following days will also see the German premiere of Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo’s documentary Food, Inc. 2, with the film’s producer Eric Schlosser attending the screening and participating in a discussion with actor/documentary filmmaker Hannes Jaenicke, farmer Karsten Dudziak, and Katharina Helming from the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research.
The festival’s line-up includes Canadian filmmaker Blake McWilliam’s Send Kelp! about “seaweed nerd” and adventurer Frances Ward; UK-based director Becky Hutner’s portrait of fashion designer Amy Powney in Fashion Reimagined; as well as screenings of Franco Garcia Becerra’s Peruvian-Chilean drama Through Rocks And Clouds and Mascha Halberstad’s animated feature Fox And Hare Save The Forest, screened in cooperation with Filmfest München which has selected the film for its CineKindl competition. The festival also plays Felix Maria Bühler’s graduation film from Film University Babelsberg, Bis Hierhin Und Wie Weiter?, which saw him following five young climate activists over the course of a year.
Introducing the programme of documentaries, feature films, TV series and VR, Arikian pointed out that a number of the films featured in the line-up have German theatrical distributors. As well as Universal’s release of The End We Start From, these include W-Film Distribution (Bis Hierhin Und Wie Weiter?), Rise and Shine Cinema (Send Kelp!), Neue Visionen (Fox And Hare Save The Forest) and Real Fiction (Das Kombinat).
The festival will also bring the world of cinema and science together by inviting researchers and scientists to contribute to discussions held after the screenings of the films.
Kosslick described the festival as a “a showcase for entertainment and a forum for knowledge”, adding that one of its aims is to ”create an open and lively exchange of knowledge and ideas about climate change between artists, scientists and the public”.
“I have always been committed to activities related to climate because it’s important that people become aware [of what is happening],” Kosslick explained. “What is at stake here is nothing less than the survival of mankind.”
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