Berlinale Talents, a key event of the Berlin International Film Festival, will take place this year between March 1-5, in the first part of the festival dedicated to industry events.

Berlinale Talents brings together emerging filmmakers (directors, screenwriters, producers, agents, distributors, actors, directors, editors, sound designers, set designers, composers, critics), seeking to offer them a platform where they have the opportunity to meet other people in the field and make new connections, but also a place where they will participate in intensive workshops featuring top-class guests. Also, participants have the opportunity to discover the most interesting technical innovations, styles and new ways of translating their stories into images.

The theme of this year’s edition is Dreams and refers to the “opportunity to begin building and sharing a global vision for the cinema of the future. The initiative draws not only on the utopian potential of dreams – crucial to so many of us these days – but also brings into sight the many fascinating parallels between the nocturnal film sets we visit in our sleep and the dream-machine that is cinema.” (source: Berlinale)

The entire event will take place online. The invited Talents will attend the intensive 5-day program that will include talks and panels with prominent international filmmakers, and some of these will also be available to the general public, cost-free, on the Berlinale Talents platform. One of this year’s guests is Adina Pintilie, winner of the Golden Bear in 2018 for Touch Me Not and a member of the 2021 International Jury. She will participate in the round table Dream On: Golden Bear Jury, along with the other jurors.

Among the 205 participants selected to take part in this year’s Berlinale Talents are:

Marina Palii, who plays the lead role in Malmkrog (dir. Cristi Puiu) and stars as Sonia in the TV adaptation of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky;

Boróka Bíró, winner of the Young Hope Award at the Gopo Awards in 2015, together with Alexandra Carastoian, for the cinematography of It Takes Two to Fence (dir. Andrei Gheorghe);

Anda Ionescu, producer of Holy Father (documentary by Andrei Dascalescu), winner of the Special Jury Award at Sarajevo Film Festival in 2020, and The Projectionist (short film by Norbert Fodor), Best Short Film at the UCIN Awards in 2017.

All the World at Home – Talents to be present virtually in the Berlinale space

Production designer Uli Hanisch (The Queen’s Gambit, Babylon Berlin) will convert HAU Hebbel Theater am Ufer into a digital stage, making it possible for the participants to meet in augmented reality, as if in a dream where the physical distances between them fade away.

Berlinale Talents will take place between March 1-5, 2021. For more details and the full program, go to the Berlinale Talents website.

Melissa Antonescu

Writer, photographer and videographer. For Films in Frame she writes news about the latest happenings in the film world and brings to the readers' attention the productions that can be seen at the cinema. When she's not writing articles, she's photographing people in a small studio or searching for new cake recipes.