How the festival’s film selections are setting the tone for the movie industry.

Scarcely has awards season begun before the next year’s festival circuit resumes. At the 69th Berlinale, which begins on Thursday 7 February, jury president Ms Juliette Binoche leads an illustrious panel that includes Oscar-winning Chilean director Mr Sebastián Lelio, Toni Erdmann actress Ms Sandra Hüller and Ms Rajendra Roy, chief curator of film at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The Berlin film festival’s chief Mr Dieter Kosslick, who retires this year after nearly two decades at the helm, has promised to sign a gender-parity pledge to which Cannes and Venice have already committed. In this spirit, seven out of the 17 competition titles at this year’s Berlinale have female directors – not quite equal, but a step in the right direction and an improvement on last year’s Cannes (three female directors) and Venice (one).

Previous winners of the Golden Bear, the festival’s highest honour, demonstrate the festival’s political rigour and bold taste. Last year’s Bear went to Ms Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not, an experimental docu-drama about sexual intimacy that divided the critics (The Guardian called it “embarrassingly awful”). In recent years, the festival has crowned state-of-the-world eye-openers (Mr Gianfranco Rosi’s migrant doc Fire At Sea), fact-fiction blurs in oppressive surroundings (the Taviani brothers’ Caesar Must Die, Mr Jafar Panahi’s Taxi) and contemporary fables (Hungarian slaughterhouse drama On Body And Soul, Mr Asghar Farhadi’s peerless divorce-as-mystery A Separation). It can also propel exciting new writer-directors to mass-market recognition (Mr Ang Lee for Sense And Sensibility, Mr Paul Thomas Anderson for Magnolia and Mr Paul Greengrass for Bloody Sunday all received Golden Bears at formative stages of their careers).

The 2019 line-up builds on these trends. In Ms Marie Kreutzer’s The Ground Beneath My Feet, an ambitious business executive starts to lose her grip on reality, a timely refraction of feminism through the nightmarish absurdism of modern life. One of Europe’s most versatile directors, Mr François Ozon’s Lyon-set By The Grace Of God depicts a real-life sexual abuse scandal about a Catholic priest, 10 years on from Ms Claudia Llosa’s Bear-winning Peruvian abuse exposé The Milk Of Sorrow. Mr Zhang Yimou, the Chinese visionary behind Raise The Red Lantern and House Of Flying Daggers, returns with One Second, a historical drama about a film fan’s relationship with a homeless vagabond in a remote farmland. Arthouse doyenne Ms Agnès Varda, who turned 90 last year, returns with another puckish doc Varda Par Agnes. From a strong selection, here are the five films that particularly caught our eye:

Directed by Ms Lone Scherfig

The Danish director of An Education opens the festival with a contemporary story of four people navigating the worst crises of their lives. Ms Zoe Kazan, Ms Andrea Riseborough, Mr Tahar Rahim and Mr Bill Nighy lead a high-pedigree cast.

Directed by Mr Yuval Adler

Adapted from Israeli bestseller The English Teacher, this spy thriller stars Ms Diane Kruger as a rogue Mossad agent and Mr Martin Freeman as the former handler summoned to track her down. Fans of The Little Drummer Girl know where to get their next fix.

Directed by Ms Agnieszka Holland

Ms Holland’s iconoclasm took her from Polish arthouse to directing episodes of The Wire, The Killing and Treme. Her latest is a Stalin-era punch-upwards in the mould of Bear-winner Bloody Sunday. Fearless Welsh journalist Mr Gareth Jones (Mr James Norton) breaks the news in the western media of the Holodomor, a manmade famine in 1930s Ukraine that killed millions. The Crown’s Ms Vanessa Kirby co-stars as a reporter for The New York Times.

Directed by Mr Chiwetel Ejiofor

Mr Ejiofor’s directorial debut, in which he also stars, adapts a novel by Messrs William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, in which a bibliophile boy in Malawi helps his village by building a wind turbine. Shot by Mr Mike Leigh’s go-to cinematographer Mr Dick Pope, the film previewed at Sundance, where early reviews were promising. After its European premiere in Berlin, it will be released on Netflix on 1 March.

Directed by Ms Isabel Coixet

Since opening the 2015 festival with her film Endless Night, Ms Coixet returns to Berlin with a black-and-white period romance about the first same-sex marriage in Spain. Set at the turn of the 20th century in 1901, one woman assumes a male identity to marry her lover of 15 years. The first Netflix film to screen in competition at Berlin, this could follow in the footsteps of Oscar-nominated Roma as Netflix burnishes its reputation for enlightened Spanish-language cinema.

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