The Berlin Film Festival is to launch a new competition focusing on new talent discovery starting from next year’s edition. At the same time, it will drop the Encounters section.

The moves represent the first major programming shifts to be announced by the Berlinale’s new festival director Tricia Tuttle.

The new stand-alone competition, Perspectives, will include up to 14 fiction debuts from all over the world, with a jury of three deciding on the best first feature award. The award is endowed with EUR50,000 euros, funded by GWFF, a society dedicated to safeguarding film and television rights. The prize money is to be split between the producers and the directors of the winning film.

Films selected to participate in the Perspectives competition will be curated by the festival director together with the co-directors of film programming and the section heads of Panorama, Forum and Generation.

World premieres will be given preference, but films that have already premiered in their country of origin can also be considered at the discretion of the festival director. First features may also appear in other sections, organizers explained.

“Perspectives will offer a more visible platform for exceptional emerging filmmakers from around the world. We are looking for features representing a genuinely international range of voices which have a bold and fluent cinematic language and offer arresting perspectives and new ways of seeing the world,” said Tuttle. “I would like to thank the GWFF for their decades of support in our commitment to emerging filmmakers and for continuing to accompany us in the reorientation of the award.”

Encounters was launched in 2020 under the previous festival leadership and ran for four editions. It was intended to showcase narrative features and documentaries with innovative storytelling styles or perspectives. The festival offered no specific explanation for its termination, but said, “As is historically the case, the Berlinale will still seek to profile aesthetically and structurally daring works from independent filmmakers across different sections of the festival.”