A Sneak Peek Into Berlinale Encounters Jury

By Pickle  January 31, 2022

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A three-member jury will choose the winners for Best Film, Best Director and the Special Jury Award.

The Encounters programme of Berlinale 2022 features 15 films and Chiara Marañón (Spain), Ben Rivers (United Kingdom) and Silvan Zürcher (Switzerland) are the three-member Jury for it.

Spanish born Chiara Marañón is the Director of Content at MUBI. She holds a BA in Cinema Studies and two MAs from the International Film & TV School in Cuba and the University of Westminster. Marañón has served as a jury member at international film festivals including Mar del Plata or Jeonju, and curated programmes for FICCI in Cartagena and Tabakalera Centre for Contemporary Art in San Sebastián. As a filmmaker, she directed The Girl in The Lemon Factory (2013), working together with Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami on the screenplay.

Ben Rivers is a British artist and filmmaker. He won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2011 for his first feature film Two Years at Sea. In 2014 he was awarded his second Tiger Award for Short Film for Things at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and in 2015 he was nominated for the Golden Leopard at Locarno for The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers. Rivers’ short film The Hunchback, which he co-directed with Gabriel Abrantes and which won three awards, also premiered at Locarno.

Silvan Zürcher is a Swiss producer, screenwriter and director. He studied philosophy, film and German studies in Bern and Zurich, then film production at the DFFB in Berlin. His first feature film Das merkwürdige Kätzchen (The Strange Little Cat, director: Ramon Zürcher) premiered in 2013 at the Forum of the Berlinale and was subsequently celebrated at numerous international festivals and won many awards. In 2017, he founded the production company Zürcher Film together with his brother Ramon Zürcher. In 2021, their second feature film Das Mädchen und die Spinne (The Girl and the Spider, co-directed with Ramon Zürcher) celebrated its world premiere in the Berlinale’s international competition Encounters and was awarded the prize for Best Director and the FIPRESCI Prize.