Berlinale – checks the blood

“If you have visions, you should go to the doctor. I say: If you have visions, you should make a cinema, Jan-Eike Michaelis, cinema officer of the Medienboard Brandenburg, said last Wednesday at the “Cinevision 2030” innovation conference in the Delphi film palace in front of 300 specialist visitors. Christian Bräuer, initiator of the conference and chairman of the AG Kino-Gilde, praised the cinema as a place of inspiration, transformation and internationality.

The journalist and Pulitzer award winner Walt Hickey explained the influence of cinema and films: Scientists analyzed the blood of the audience before and after a horror film. The blood? Horror films do not literally freeze the blood in your veins, but whoever sees a horror film, whose body puts himself in the role of the victim and prepares to be hurt – and to bleed. Another example: After Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” (2000) theatrical release, the number of children with the name “Maximus” rose from 34 to 9 916. Further results can be found in Hickey’s book «You are what you watch: How movies and TV Affect Everything »(2023) read.

Berlinale boss Tricia Tuttle was also invited to talk about “Festival and Cinema as an alliance for the success of films”. Tuttle headed the BFI London Film Festival from 2018 to 2022 and increased its number of visitors by 76 percent. 324,000 tickets were sold at the Berlinale last year. To increase the number, Tuttle has created new capacities. This was also urgently needed after the Berlinale lost the Cinestar and Arsenal cinemas at Potsdamer Platz. This year the Stage Bluemax Theater is new to the Marlene-Dietrich-Platz with 500 seats, and the HUB75 as a new meeting place. Tuttle wants to give the Berlinale a heart again, as she said. Above all, cinema should be affordable and accessible to the young audience.

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For the first time, the Berlinale is therefore cooperating with Letterboxd, a worldwide platform for film fans, the main target group of which is 18- to 34-year-olds- with around 18.4 million users who evaluate and exchange lists. David Larkin, Head of Business, explained how to highlight films. Depending on the user behavior, films that do not go well in the US cinemas, but are praised by the community, are supported by editorial contributions. There are 20 Berlinale films on the Letterboxd Instagram channel, which were most frequently placed on the watchlist.

Tuttle wants to get more attention to more attention with the new “Perspectives” section. They are often “more adventurous and unimpressed by expectations”. Thierry Frémaux, artistic director of the festival in Cannes, confirmed that programming are also strategic decisions. When Coralie Fargeeat submitted her film “The Substance” there last year, he and his team placed the body horror strip in competition. “It was clear to us: we had to put it on the forefront because it was important to us to show this cinematic moment in Cannes.”

Tuttle considers the prominence present this year such as Bong Joon-Ho (director of “Parasite”) and the actors Robert Pattinson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Marion Cotillard are important, because “probably nobody sits in the room here through Jean-Luc Godard came to the cinema, more through Star Wars or something ». The red carpet is simply part of it.