Abuse of power, state oppression and the struggle faced by those who seek to challenge it in countries from Russia and Brazil to the United States are key themes in 2019 Berlin Film Festival, for which the final line-up was announced on Tuesday.
In 2019 edition of the festival, which has never been shy of broaching sensitive political themes, highlighted Brazilian films in the program that had anticipated the country’s hard swing right in last year’s presidential election.
“Sometimes art has to be political,” said director Dieter Kosslick, who bows out this year after his 18th Berlinale.
“In the case of Brazil we see how films took a seismographic reading of the mood of the country before the current president was elected,” he added.
Brazilian director Wagner Moura’s “Marighella”, screened out of competition, tells the story of writer Carlos Marighella’s resistance to and 1969 death at the hands of a military dictatorship that toppled a democratic government, in a story that uncomfortably echoes President Jair Bolsonaro’s rise”
French director Juliette Binoche, herself a Silver Bear winner, chairs the main competition jury in the festival, which owes its political sensibility to its 1951 birth in a divided city that straddled the front lines of the Cold War.
