Berlin Film Festival Makes Awards Acting Categories

The Berlin Film Festival has renamed its appearing prizes to make them gender-neutral for the 2021 version of the competition. Rather than a Best Actor or Actress prize, actors and actresses will compete in opposition to each other for the Silver Bear for a Leading Performance or a Supporting Performance.

They’ll be competing in what’s deliberate to be an in-person, bodily competition for the Berlinale’s 71st version

“We believe that not separating the awards in the acting field according to gender comprises a signal for a more gender-sensitive awareness in the film industry,” the director duo of the Berlinale Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian mentioned in an announcement Wednesday.

That’s not the one change made to the awards. One of the competition’s high prizes has been renamed to the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize after it was reported again in February that the award’s namesake, Alfred Bauer, the competition’s first director, was discovered to have Nazi ties. The competition provides that an analysis on Bauer from an exterior, historic specialist will likely be out there in late summer season after which printed.

Moving ahead, the Berlinale’s worldwide jury will award the next eight prizes:

• Golden Bear for Best Film (awarded to the movie’s producers)
• Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize
• Silver Bear for Best Director
• Silver Bear Jury Prize
• Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance
• Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance
• Silver Bear for Best Screenplay
• Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution

Though the competition intends to be in-person for 2021, which runs between February 11-21, the European Film Market will nonetheless be a hybrid bodily and digital occasion.

“Festivals and markets are places of encounter and communication. This applies to the public as well as to the industry. We see an important and unique feature of festivals in their lively relationship with the audience. In times of the corona pandemic, it has become even clearer that we still require analogue experience spaces in the cultural realm”, Rissenbeek and Chatrian mentioned in an announcement. “We are pleased that festivals with physically present audiences are slowly taking place again around the world, and we wish our colleagues much success.”

The market will likely be performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and rules from the native authorities, and extra changes to the competition construction may also happen. The programming and the entire variety of invited movies will likely be outlined by administration throughout the coming weeks. And one of many competition’s sections, the 2021 “Generation” part, will solely present movies with a operating time of not less than 60 minutes, with no brief movies.