74th Berlinale: Tributes, Classics and Series

The 74th Berlin International Film Festival will award American director, producer and screenwriter Martin Scorsese the Honorary Golden Bear for his entire career at a ceremony to be held at the Berlinale Palast on February 20, 2024. The tribute will be accompanied by a digital restoration of After Hours (1985), made by the Criterion Collection and Warner Bros. in collaboration with Park Circus, using original 35mm footage from the director’s collection. Scorsese worked with editor Thelma Schoonmaker on the color correction for the restoration.

Since 1986, the Berlinale has been awarding the Berlinale Camera to honor personalities and institutions that have made a special contribution to film and with which the festival feels closely connected. At the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, German director and writer Edgar Reitz will be presented with the Berlinale Camera on Thursday, February 22 at 3 p.m. in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. The world premiere of Edgar Reitz’s latest work, Filmstunde_23, will be screened after the awards ceremony as part of Berlinale Special.

For the Berlinale Classics section of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, Rainer Rother and his team have brought together a spectrum of film genres with impressive visual and sound effects. The selection of 10 films ranges from early sound film experiments to sober, distanced black-and-white drama to colorful, artistic exploitation. All the restorations will be world premieres, from Ishirō Honda‘s Godzilla (Gojira) (on its 70th anniversary) to Andrei Tarkovsky‘s The Sacrifice (Offret, 1986) or Deprisa, deprisa (Carlos Saura, 1981). The selection includes two pearls by Ernst Lubitsch: the silent film Kohlhiesel’s Daughters (Kohlhiesels Töchter) with music specially composed by Leopold Hurt to be performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, and his first spoken, pre-code The Love Parade.

Berlinale Series Market, a joint initiative of the European Film Market, Berlinale Co-Production Market and Berlinale Talents, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. This year, 15 series have been selected for presentation under the Berlinale Series Market Selects label, ranging from historical biopics or political activists to comedies, mystery novels and explosive thrillers. The series come from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Spain —Show Yourself (Álvaro Carmona) and Tramps (Aritz Moreno, Ana Vázquez) produced by Atresmedia TV and Morena Films— France, Latvia, Portugal, United Kingdom, Czech Republic and South Africa. Two German-language productions have also been selected: the drama series Disko 76, with Jannick Schümann and Luise Aschenbrenner, and Kafka, with Joel Basman, Liv Lisa Fries and David Kross.