The 65th Berlin International Film Festival opens on Thursday, featuring new films by Werner Herzog, Peter Greenaway, Terrence Malick, Jafar Panahi and Wim Wenders, who will also receive the 2015 honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement.
The festival begins with a gala screening of “Nobody Wants the Night,” a study in survival by the Spanish director Isabel Coixet. It stars Juliette Binoche as the wife of the Arctic explorer Richard Peary and focuses on her search for him as he travels to the North Pole. Along the way, she befriends an Inuit woman, Allaka, played by Rinko Kikuchi.
Ms. Coixet is one of three women presenting feature films this year among the 23 in competition. Laura Bispuri of Italy has brought “Sworn Virgin,” about a woman who takes on the role of a man under Albanian tribal law in an effort to secure her freedom. Malgorzata Szumowska of Poland is showing “Body,” about a coroner and his daughter. More than 400 films will be screened at the festival, which runs through Feb. 15.
Continuing with the theme of tough women in harsh climates is Mr. Herzog’s “Queen of the Desert,” which stars Nicole Kidman as Gertrude Bell, the British traveler, historian and spy who helped set the borders of modern Iraq at the end of World War I, earning comparisons with T.E. Lawrence. It is the director’s first feature film since the war drama “Rescue Dawn” (2006).
The film co-stars the ubiquitous James Franco as the diplomat Henry Cadogan, Ms. Bell’s sometime love interest. The actor also heads the cast in Mr. Wenders’s new 3-D feature, “Everything Will Be Fine,” in which he plays a novelist who spirals into depression after killing a boy in a winter car accident. The film co-stars Rachel McAdams and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
One of the most eagerly awaited films at this year’s Berlinale is the seventh film by Mr. Malick, who won the festiva’s top prize, the Golden Bear, for “The Thin Red Line” in 1999 and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival for “Tree of Life” in 2011. “Knight of Cups,” his first feature since “Tree of Life,” stars Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman. According to the film’s media material, Mr. Bale plays Rick, “a slave to the Hollywood system. He is addicted to success but simultaneously despairs at the emptiness of his life” and “needs outside stimulation.”
Mr. Panahi, the Iranian director, will premiere his latest film, “Taxi,” in which he defied the Iranian government’s ban on him making films by putting a camera on the dashboard of a yellow cab that he drives through Tehran, interviewing his passengers.
More avant-garde works are included in the festival’s Forum program, while international and art-house works fill the Panorama section. This year the festival’s Retrospective program will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of Technicolor.
For the first time, the festival will feature television dramas from Europe and the United States along with films, as part of its European Film Market and its Berlinale Co-Production Market.
The television programs being shown include “1992,” an Italian series set during the “Clean Hands” corruption investigations in Italy in the early 1990s; “Follow the Money,” a new series about finance by the creators of the Danish hit series “Borgen”; “False Flag,” an Israeli drama by the producers whose “Prisoners of War” was adapted into “Homeland” in the United States; and a German production, “Deutschland 83,” which follows an inexperienced East German spy on a mission to the West in the early 1980s.
The American director Darren Aronofsky is the president of this year’s International Jury, which will award the Golden Bear to the top film in competition and Silver Bears for the best actor, actress, director and script; the Grand Jury prize; and the Alfred Bauer prize, for a feature film “that opens new perspectives.”
Other jurors are the German actor Daniel Brühl (“Goodbye Lenin!,” “Inglourious Basterds”); the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (“Snowpiercer”); the American producer Martha De Laurentiis; the Peruvian director Claudia Llosa; the French actress Audrey Tautou (“Amélie”); and Matthew Weiner, the creator of the American television series “Mad Men.”
Unlike the Cannes and Venice festivals, the Berlinale is open to the public, and thousands of people line up each year in the cold to buy tickets.
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