An ongoing series of mini profiles on the blog German Film @ Canada on the movers and shakers that make the Berlinale one of the most important events in the international film calendar: the filmmakers, programmers, curators, industry promoters and fans, from rookies to veterans.
Name & role: Cristina Nord, head of Berlinale Forum. Between 2002 and 2015, film editor for the German “taz. die tageszeitung” newspaper. At the same time, she taught film criticism at the Freie Universität Berlin, wrote numerous essays, including for catalogues, as well as the book “True Blood”. From 2015 until 2019, she worked at the Goethe-Institut as head of programming for south-west Europe in Brussels.
This is my 1st Berlinale as head of the Berlinale Forum. From the late 90s onwards, I covered the festival as a film critic.
What & when was your first encounter with the Berlinale?
I have very vivid memories of a screening of Romuald Karmakar’s “Warheads” in the early nineties.
Back then, I was very much influenced by the pacifist movements of the eighties, and a film dealing with mercenaries and members of the Foreign Legion was initially hard to stomach. I was young after all and a little bit naïve and had a peace-loving mindset. However, I realized pretty soon that the documentary gave me a fantastic opportunity to step away –albeit temporarily– from my own beliefs and
weltanschauung. It helped me open myself up to perspectives I’d not been able to perceive previously. You might call it a process of decentralization or overcoming the limitations of identity. One of the reasons why I love cinema is because it creates a space which allows this process to happen.
This 70th Berlinale is the festival of old & new: your Forum is celebrating its 50th birthday; and then there is a new, second competition called Encounters that will feature “independent, innovative filmmakers". What are the programmatic and aesthetic differences or the complementary connectivity between those two programming strands?
The entire festival is undergoing changes. Part of that is the necessity to redefine and hone each section’s identity. For the Forum, we did this by focusing on films that are very free in their narration and aesthetics. There are a lot of hybrid films in our program, films that move between documentary and fiction, films that defy classical notions of plot, storytelling and character. There are essay films like “Anunciaron tormenta” by Javier Fernández Vázquez, films that satisfy an intellectual curiosity and films that reflect upon the medium of film itself. One example of the latter is “The Viewing Booth” by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz. By presenting the anniversary program, we are also taking a look back at what was at stake in our societies in the late sixties and early seventies in order to ask ourselves to what extent this legacy is of relevance today. We’re also providing space for active discourse by hosting a panel day full of discussions around these themes.
For 2020, you decided to bring back the 21 programs shown in 1971, the Forum’s inaugural year. Which film can’t you wait to see again in that special retrospective and why?
That’s a tough question because they are all very dear to me. If I had to pick one, it would be “Soleil Ô” by Med Hondo. It’s a film that breathes the openness and aesthetic radicalism we associate with the Nouvelle Vague. At the same time, it’s an aggressive take on the remnants of colonialism and racism in French society, seen through the eyes of a young man from a francophone country in West Africa. If you watch it today, something contradictory occurs: on the one hand, the film describes a moment clearly set in the past, which feels far away as such; on the other, if you think about the presence of racism in today’s society, it’s maybe not so very far away at all. When we show the films from 1971, people are frequently going to enter into this contradictory feeling of simultaneous distance and closeness, which I think is a very productive form of confusion.
What does 5050x2020 mean to you as a lead programmer of an international festival?
It’s very important to embrace the work of female filmmakers and to create a situation where their presence doesn’t feel unusual. Not only because we are no longer living in the fifties, but also because this might help to create richer, more layered imaginary spaces by augmenting them with different subjectivities, modes of perception and sensitivities. One thing I’d like to add here is that it usually irritates me when directors of prestigious festivals all respond in unison when confronted with the fact that there are two female filmmakers in a competition of 20 titles: “It’s about quality, not about gender”. As if there’s never been a bad film by a male director in a competition of an international festival! Or as if female filmmakers want to gain access to such arenas by making films that aren’t good! And there is something else here: If quality is something you can only see in the things that mirror exactly your own idea of quality, you are most certainly limiting your potential and your experiences.
One thing I took away from my work at the Goethe-Institut that comes in handy at the Berlinale:
The ability to keep calm when things get heated.
It will have been a great Berlinale (re)start for me if…
… both the audience as well as professional festival attendees find inspiration, intellectual stimulation and aesthetic pleasure in the Berlinale Forum’s program.
Next week: Meet Kerry Swanson of Canada's Indigenous Screen Office
interview by
Jutta Brendemühl
image courtesy of C. Nord/Berlinale photo Anja Weber 
