Edward Berger, the Oscar-winning director of All Quiet On The Western Front, has been named by Claudia Roth, Germany’s state minister of Culture and Media, as one of the members of a six-person selection committee to appoint a successor to the Berlinale’s management team of executive director Mariette Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian.
The committee will be chaired by Roth and will also include Anne Leppin, co-managing director of the German Film Academy, the Iranian-born actress-producer-screenwriter Sara Fazilat whose multi-award-winning graduation film Nico from Berlin’s DFFB film school premiered at the Max Ophüls Preis Film Festival in 2021, veteran Berlin-based producer Roman Paul of Razor Film whose credits include Wadjda, Waltz With Bashir and Quo Vadis Aida?, and Florian Graf, head of Berlin’s Senate Chancellery.
Leppin and Graf are also members of the 12-person supervisory board of Kulturveranstaltungen des Bundes in Berlin (KBB) which oversees the management of the Berlinale. The KBB greenlit Roth’s decision to abandon the model of an executive and artistic director in favour of a single person to be at the helm of the German festival after March 2024. Chatrian announced he would be stepping down shortly after.
The appointment of the selection committee comes less than a week after an open letter by the film community from around the globe called for the retention of Chatrian as the Berlinale’s artistic director and lambasting Roth for “harmful, unprofessional and immoral” behaviour.
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