Berlin will be playing host to the world of film when the 67th Berlinale comes to town from 9 to 19 February 2017. On behalf of the Goethe-Institut, twelve bloggers and film journalists from around the world will be our BerlinaleBloggers, reporting on the international film festival from a multinational perspective.

What makes the Berlinale special for the Brazilian blogger, and how does her view differ from the Italian perspective? And what strikes the Australian blogger as interesting about the German submissions? Which trends in the film world make the Spanish journalist optimistic? And what does the blogger from the UK think about this? To what extent do the experts feel influenced by their own cultural background?
 
The 2017 BerlinaleBloggers are from Egypt, Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, Norway, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. A multinational team, they will be out and about in Berlin, searching for fascinating stories in the cinema theatres and behind the festival scenes. They will be jointly reflecting on their impressions against the backdrop of their own cultures.

Sarah Ward – Australia

is a freelance film critic, arts writer and film festival organizer. She is the Australia-based critic for Screen International, a film reviewer and feature writer for ArtsHub, the weekend editor and a senior writer for Concrete Playground, and a contributor to SBS, Metro Magazine and Screen Education. She is also the editor of Trespass Magazine and a film and TV critic for ABC radio Brisbane.

Camila Gonzatto – Brazil

writes and directs films for cinema and television. She took a master’s degree in creative writing at PUCRS University in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and is currently writing her PhD thesis in that field within the framework of an academic exchange with Freie Universität Berlin.

Jutta Brendemühl – Canada

is the Goethe-Institut Toronto’s Program Curator and year-round blogger at GermanFilm@Canada. Jutta is lucky enough to love what she does: arts and cultural programming across the genres and through a global lens. Over the past 15 years, she has worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Rauschenberg, Wim Wenders, Pina Bausch and other luminaries. She has an M.A. in English Literature.

Yun-hua Chen – China

studied in Taipei, France and Scotland. She obtained her PhD in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). Currently based in Berlin, she writes for a range of journals and regularly gives talks at international conferences and film seminars. In December 2016, Neofelis Verlag published her monograph “Mosaic Space and Mosaic Auteurs: On the Cinema of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Atom Egoyan, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Michael Haneke”.

Ahmed Shawky – Egypt

is a blogger and film critic. He studied pharmacology and media sciences, and since 2009 has been working primarily as an author in the areas of film and art, including as an independent critic at international and Arabic film festivals.

Philipp Bühler – Germany

is a freelance film critic who has been reporting on the Berlinale since 2000, among other things for Berliner Zeitung. Having majored in history and English language and culture at university, he works for Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education and the film classics programme of the German Film Academy in the area of cinema education. He has also co-authored and edited a range of popular book series on cinema.

Andrea D’Addio – Italy

has been writing about film since 2002, reporting from major international festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Marrakech for various Italian and German newspapers.

Shino Nagata – Japan

is an actress and translator. Having grown up in Germany and Austria, she studied German literature at the University of Tokyo until 2009, while at the same time training as an actress at the Bungakuza-Kenkyujo until 2010. She heads the “I.N.S.N.KIKAKU” group of actors she founded in 2012. She has also appeared in films such as Nacho Abad’s “El vuelo de la zarigüeya real” (2015) and Timo Behnke’s “Edamame”.

Julia Thurnau – Norway

is a German-French actor. She studied visual arts at the Einar Granum School of Fine Art in Norway, as well as at Berlin University of the Arts, where she attended philosophy seminars under Byung-Chul Han and courses in academic and artistic writing. In film she is particularly interested in gender-related themes.

Dorota Chrobak – Poland

is a film journalist and a graduate of the University of Warsaw, where she took an interdisciplinary individual degree in humanities and social sciences. She has been writing (“Film”, “Sukces”) and talking (Radio PiN, “Kultura do kwadratu” for Polsat News 2) about film and culture in the widest sense for over 15 years.

Pablo López Barbero – Spain

is a journalist from Madrid who lives in Berlin. He studied journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he worked in a number of editorial teams until deciding in 2012 to move to the German capital, where he has lived ever since. His passions are cinema and audio-visual media. He currently works for the Deutsche Welle news desk and produces articles for a variety of publications.

Nathanael Smith – United Kingdom

is a freelance film writer based in Edinburgh. He regularly reviews for BBC Radio Scotland, contributes to websites such as VODzilla and Think Theology and often writes for the Glasgow Film Theatre. His main passion is animation and he maintains that Hayao Miyazaki's canon is perfect.