London-set revenge thriller Femme, starring George MacKay and Candyman actor Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, has been selected for the Berlinale’s Panorama strand.
It was among a raft of fresh additions to the festival’s Panorama, Generation and Berlinale Special strands announced on Wednesday.
The picture is co-directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping and is based on their 2021 BAFTA-nominated short film of the same name.
Stewart-Jarrett plays a drag queen whose life is destroyed by a homophobic attack and then plots revenge on one of the perpetrators (MacKay) when he spots him in a gay sauna.
The 14 new Panorama titles also include France-based Austrian director Patric Chiha’s The Beast In The Jungle.
A contemporary adaptation of Henry James’s 1903 novella of the same name, the drama follows a man and woman who frequent a huge nightclub for 25 years in anticipation of a mysterious event.
The cast features Anaïs Demoustier, Tom Mercier and Béatrice Dalle.
The Berlinale’s 37-year-old Panorama prides itself on adventurous selection championing “explicitly queer, explicitly feminist, explicitly political feminist” cinema.
Further additions include D. Smith’s Kokomo City, Anthony Lapia’s After, Hannes Hirsch’s Drifter, Sreemoyee Singh’s And, Towards Happy Alleys and Frauke Finsterwalder’s Sisi & Ich.
The Berlinale’s 37-year-old Panorama prides itself on adventurous selection championing “explicitly queer, explicitly feminist, explicitly political feminist” cinema.
The strand is popular with local audiences, who vote for its main prize, the Panorama Audience Award. The section also oversees the Teddy Award, which is open to all films with queer subject matter across all the sections.
The new titles join 14 previously-announced selections including Tina Satter’s debut Reality, Jennifer Reeder’s Perpetrator, Ira Sach’s Passages, Sacha Polak’s Silver Haze and Sepideh Farsi’s The Siren.
In a fresh addition to the Berlinale Special section, the festival announced it would be screening the documentary Kiss the Future, following aid worker Bill Carter’s quest to enlist rock band U2, to help shine a light on the struggle of the Bosnian people during the Siege of Sarajevo.
