Oscar-winning Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round”) will preside over the jury of the upcoming Marrakech International Film Festival, with which he has a longstanding rapport.
The Marrakech jury will award its Étoile d’Or to one of the 14 first and second films in the fest’s international competition. Recent winners include Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir’s “Mother of all the Lies” last year and French-Iranian helmer Emad Aleebrahim-Dehkordi’s “A Tale of Shemroon” in 2022.
Vinterberg, who was a co-founder with Lars von Trier of the Danish Dogme 95 movement in the mid 1990s, previously served as a Marrakech jury member in 2015 when Francis Ford Coppola was jury president.
His vast and widely praised filmography comprises “The Celebration,” aka “Festen,” (1998) for which Vinterberg won the Cannes jury prize when he was 28; “It’s All About Love (2003)”; “Dear Wendy” (2005); “When a Man Comes Home” (2007); “Submarino” (2010); “The Hunt” (2012); “Far From the Madding Crown” (2015); and “The Commune” (2016).
Vinterberg’s latest work is the climate change-themed TV miniseries “Families Like Ours,” in which Denmark literally closes due to flooding, which launched from the Venice Film Festival in September and will air in Denmark this month.
“In this rapidly changing and increasingly divided world, festivals such as Marrakech provide a much-needed window into a wide variety of cultures,” Vinterberg said in a statement. “Films can describe what cannot be explained. Make us understand the unacceptable. And there is indeed a lot to understand right now.”
The 21st edition of the fest, which has close ties with the crème de la crème of global auteurs, is set to run Nov. 29 to Dec. 7 in the ancient Moroccan city.