US writer and director Todd Haynes will in February head up the jury at Berlin’s international film festival, Europe’s first major cinema showcase of the year, organizers said Thursday. The Berlinale, as the festival is known, was “overjoyed” to have Haynes leading the panel selecting the winners of the Golden and Silver Bear top prizes. “Todd Haynes is a dazzlingly gifted writer and director with an impressive range,” festival director Tricia Tuttle said in a statement.

The filmmaker’s “body of work is at once stylistically versatile but also unmistakably his”, Tuttle said. Haynes’s debut feature, “Poison”, a triptych of stories inspired by the works of French novelist Jean Genet, was awarded the “Teddy” prize for queer films at the 1991 Berlinale. He has since written and directed several other features, receiving a nomination for best original screenplay at the Academy Awards for his 2002 film “Far From Heaven”.

The portrait of a housewife in crisis also garnered an Oscar nomination for the lead actress Julianne Moore. Cate Blanchett was nominated for the same award for her part in Haynes’s 2015 drama “Carol”. Haynes has also drawn inspiration from the world of music. A 2007 biopic of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan “I’m Not There” gave the titular role to six actors who played different aspects of the celebrated troubadour’s persona.

Haynes has also directed a feature length documentary on New York rock legends The Velvet Underground, which was released in 2021. He succeeds Mexican-Kenyan actor Lupita Nyong’o as the head of the jury. Nyong’o was the first black person to head the jury in the history of the festival, now in its 75th edition. The Berlinale, which will run February 13-23, ranks with Cannes and Venice among Europe’s top three film festivals and serves as an early annual launchpad for the industry. The top prize at the 2024 Berlinale went to the documentary “Dahomey” by Franco-Senegalese director Mati Diop, which probed the issues around Europe’s return of looted antiquities to Africa. — AFP