News from Cannes, Sundance, and Berlin

Sundance’s fortieth edition (January 18 through 28) will be the first under the direction of Eugene Hernandez, while the Berlinale’s seventy-fourth edition (February 15 through 25) will be the last to be overseen by artistic director Carlo Chatrian and executive director Mariette Rissenbeek. Both festivals rolled out big announcements this week.

On Tuesday, Sundance unveiled a lineup of fifty-three short films and announced that Jay and Mark Duplass will host an evening of short films that premiered at past editions. Hernandez, in the meantime, has begun looking back on four decades of Sundance history in a series of posts on Instagram. The festival will celebrate its anniversary edition with a special series of screenings and events, including a conversation with filmmakers Miguel Arteta (Chuck & Buck), Richard Linklater (Hit Man), and Dawn Porter (Gideon’s Army) and the fearless and tireless producer Christine Vachon, who this year alone has shepherded five films into theaters, including Todd Haynes’s May December and Celine Song’s Past Lives.

By the time DIG! premiered at Sundance in 2004, director Ondi Timoner had spent seven years documenting the struggles and triumphs of dueling alt-rock bands the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. “If universities ever start graduate programs in rock stardom,” wrote Dana Stevens in the NYT, “DIG! will surely be a cornerstone of the curriculum, for it works as both an instruction manual and a cautionary tale.” Timoner and her producer and brother, David Timoner, will present DIG! XX, a fresh cut with new narration from the Massacre’s Joel Gion and thirty-five minutes of never-before-seen footage.

Revival presentations at Sundance 2024 will also include new and recent restorations of Rob Epstein’s Special Jury Prize–winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), Mira Nair’s interracial love story Mississippi Masala (1991), Rose Troche’s landmark lesbian drama Go Fish (1994), and Jared and Jerusha Hess’s breakout teen comedy Napoleon Dynamite (2014) as well as screenings of two debut features, Jennifer Kent’s instant cult favorite The Babadook (2014) and Dee Rees’s Pariah (2011). As Cassie da Costa points out, Pariah was “an immediate critical hit, swiftly cementing a place in the queer film canon as an ambitious and lyrical debut that added nuance and specificity to lesbian and Black narratives while establishing Rees as an important new voice in independent film.”

We’ll be marking the festival’s anniversary, too, with a program of twenty-nine Sundance Favorites that launches on the Criterion Channel on January 1. It’s a wide-ranging mix of milestone debuts such as Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple (1984) and Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1985) and touchstone documentaries such as Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) and Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings (1996).

Talking to Deadline’s Zac Ntim back in August, Mariette Rissenbeek, who had already announced that she was stepping down from her position as executive director of the Berlinale, spoke candidly about the tight spot the festival was in financially. The federal government was already dialing back its support before it tumbled into a budget crisis last month, and the Berlinale was forced to slash sections from its program. The city of Berlin itself has stepped up to help cover some of the losses, but operating costs are still on the rise.

Carlo Chatrian had hoped to stay on, but Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, insisted on ditching the dual directorship model and having just one person oversee both the programming and the business. Further complicating matters, as Scott Roxborough notes in the Hollywood Reporter, Chatrian “said he quit the artistic director job because the culture minister demanded to have veto power over the Berlinale film selection.”

Early in September, Chatrian announced that he would not be renewing his contract, and more than four hundred filmmakers and industry heavyweights, including Martin Scorsese, Radu Jude, and Claire Denis, signed an open letter calling for the festival to refuse to let him go. Neither the Berlinale nor Chatrian heeded the call.

On Tuesday, Tricia Tuttle, who headed up the London Film Festival from 2018 through 2022, was named the new—and sole—director of the Berlinale. The gist of the commentaries in the German newspapers over the past couple of days: Give her a chance. She has twenty-five years’ worth of experience in the industry and she’s clearly hit it off well with just about everyone she’s worked with.

Chatrian and Rissenbeek, in the meantime, have been laying the groundwork for the festival’s 2024 edition. A first round of eight titles has been announced for the Forum program overseen by Barbara Wurm, who took over from Cristina Nord last August. Among the eleven titles now lined up for the Panorama section is The Outrun, directed by Nora Fingscheidt (System Crasher) and starring Saoirse Ronan as a recovering alcoholic who returns to her home on Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

The full program of the 2024 Retrospective, An Alternate Cinema: From the Deutsche Kinemathek Archives, is now set. The selection of twenty-one features and two short films made between 1960 and 2000 includes Thomas Brasch’s Angels of Iron (1981), which tells a true story of organized crime in Berlin in the chaotic years immediately following the end of the Second World War. The cast features Katharina Thalbach, Hanns Zischler, and Kurt Raab.

Like Cannes, the Berlinale, too, will have a woman presiding over the jury: Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for her performance in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) and has since starred in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022).