U.S. director, screenwriter and producer Todd Haynes will be the president of the international jury of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival early next year.
“Todd Haynes is a dazzlingly gifted writer and director with an impressive range; his body of work is at once stylistically versatile but also unmistakably his,” said Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle on Thursday. “Ever since his debut feature Poison won the Teddy Award in 1991, the Berlinale has followed and loved his filmmaking.”
Over nearly 40 years, Haynes has been “one of the most bold and distinctive filmmaking voices in U.S.-American cinema, beloved for his great sensitivity in exploring the interior worlds of outsiders and women, and his fascinating investigations into gender and identity,” Berlinale organizers said. “His skill at creating complex characters has attracted many of the world’s finest actors. Stars such as Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kate Winslet, Anne Hathaway, Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo, Christian Bale and Ewan McGregor have played the multi-layered characters in his films.”
Berlin highlighted that Haynes emerged and reached international prominence in the early 1990s “as part of a thrilling new generation of U.S. American directors (dubbed ‘New Queer Cinema’ by critic B. Ruby Rich),” adding: “By the time of his four-time Oscar-nominated film Far from Heaven (2002), Haynes was fully established as a major force in U.S. filmmaking.”
His feature debut Poison was honored with Berlin’s Teddy, its queer film prize, and also won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
The filmmaker’s other key works highlighted on Thursday by the Berlinale include Safe (1995), Velvet Goldmine (1998), the fictional Bob Dylan biopic I‘m Not There (2007), which won the Grand Jury Prize in Venice, the mini-series Mildred Pierce (2011), Carol (2015), Wonderstruck (2017), Dark Waters (2019), The Velvet Underground (2021) and May December (2023).
