Berlin film festival announces eclectic lineup including Rooney Mara, Stephen Fry and Gael García Bernal

Colombian cocaine hippos, a Star Wars parody set in northern France and an unlikely father-daughter pairing of Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham all feature in an eclectic lineup at this year’s Berlin film festival, which was unveiled on Monday.

The 74th edition of the 10-day Berlinale will open on 15 February with the world premiere of Small Things Like These, based on Irish author Clare Keegan’s bestselling historical novel. Adapted to the big screen by Enda Walsh, the film sees Cillian Murphy reuniting with Belgian director Tim Mielants, who directed the third series of Peaky Blinders.

Berlinale leadership duo Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian, who are curating the festival for their fifth and last time, had notably eschewed glamour for more serious arthouse fare in previous years. But the duo’s swansong festival will feature several stars in intriguing team-ups with respected directors.

In the main competition, Mexican actor Gael García Bernal and Norwegian newcomer Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) star in Italian director Piero Messina’s dystopian sci-fi drama Another End, about a man whose wife dies and the woman renting out her body.

Rooney Mara features in innovative Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina, a love story set in the kitchen of a Manhattan restaurant, while Isabelle Huppert will attend the festival to pick up the honorary Golden Bear award she received in absentia in 2022, and as the star of South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s Yeohaengjaui Pilyo (A Traveller’s Needs).

French directors feature prominently, with Olivier Assayas’s “pandemic comedy” Hors du Temps (Suspended Time), and Bruno Dumont’s L’Empire, an absurdist Star Wars parody set in a fishing village on the Opal coast.

In German director Julia von Heinz’s tragicomedy Treasure, Dunham plays an American music journalist who travels to Poland with her Holocaust survivor father Edek (Fry). Formerly titled Iron Box, the film will see its world premiere at the festival but not run in the competition for the Golden Bear.

Also running outside competition is Dominican director Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias’s documentary Pepe, about a hippopotamus who lived in Colombian druglord Pablo Escobar’s private menagerie.

The Visitor, Canadian artist Bruce LaBruce’s London-set reimagination of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem – about a refugee who stays with a bourgeois family and has sex with every single one of them – will world premiere in Berlin’s Panorama section.

Rissenbeek and Chatrian, who will pass the directorship baton on to former London film festival director Tricia Tuttle, opened their programme presentation on Monday with a positioning statement on the Israel-Hamas war.

“Festivals provide a space for artistic expression and enable peaceful dialogue. They are places of encounter and exchange and contribute to international understanding. We believe that through the power of films and open discussions, we can help foster empathy, awareness, understanding, even and especially in painful times like these,” Chatrian said.

Earlier this month an anonymously organised petition had called for a boycott of German cultural institutions over the government’s alleged silencing of pro-Palestinian voices, and last week two film-makers announced they had withdrawn their films from the Berlinale.

Chatrian said he regretted their decision, but that there were no signs that any film-makers in the main programme were joining the boycott.