The Arab jurors are Karim Aïnouz (Brazil/Algeria), Saïd Ben Saïd (France/Tunisia) and Rana Eid (Lebanon).

Aïnouz and Ben Saïd are both on the International Jury panel, which will decide who will take home the Golden and the Silver Bears.

The same panel also includes Anne Zohra Berrached (Germany), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Japan), Connie Nielsen (Denmark/USA) and M. Night Shyamalan (South Asia/USA) as jury president.

Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz was born in 1966 to a Brazilian mother and an Algerian father. His feature film debut Madame Satã premiered at Cannes in 2002, later O Céu de Suely (Love for Sale, 2006) and Viajo Porque Preciso, Volto Porque te Amo (I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You, 2009) screened in Venice.

Aïnouz is also a regular guest at the Berlinale. In 2014, his Praia do Futuro (Futuro Beach) had its world premiere in Competition while Cathedrals of Culture ran in Berlinale Special. Aïnouz’s latest feature film, the documentary Zentralflughafen THF, premiered at the 68th Berlinale – Panorama, winning the Amnesty International Film Award. 

Ben Saïd is a French-Tunisian film producer, founder and chairman of SBS Productions. His distribution company SBS Distribution is behind over 40 films directed by renowned international filmmakers, with the most recent productions being David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars with Julianne Moore, who won Best Actress in Cannes in 2014, Paul Verhoeven’s Elle which was awarded with Best Foreign Picture at the 2017 Golden Globes, Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms, which won the 2019 Golden Bear at the Berlinale, and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau, which received the 2019 Jury Prize in Cannes. 

Ben Saïd’s latest production is Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, which premiered in the Competition at Cannes 2021.

Eighteen films are competing for the awards in this year’s Competition. The winners will be announced at the Berlinale Palast on February 16.

Rana Eid, a Lebanese sound designer and filmmaker, joins Wang Bing (China) and Susanne Schüle (Germany) on the jury panel of the Berlinale Documentary Award, where 18 documentary forms from all around the world are competing for the award.

Born in 1976, Eid received her BA in Cinema in 1999 and her MA in Film Sound in 2002 both from Université Saint Joseph, IESAV. In 2002, she trained for a year in sound editing in Paris (France).

Her portfolio includes numerous collaborations with established filmmakers and emerging talents. In 2019, she worked on two Oscar nominated films, The Cave (2019) and Honeyland (2019).

Her most recent works include sound design for You Will Die at 20 (2019) and Memory Box (2021), which ran in the Competition at the Berlinale 2021.

As a filmmaker, she directed her first feature documentary Panoptic (2017), which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and received Best Lebanese Documentary at the Lebanese Movie Awards (2019) and Best Documentary Debut or Second Film at the Czech Republic’s Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (2019).

The 72nd edition of Berlin International Film Festival is going to take place in person with the opening scheduled for 10 February, and the awards will be given out a little earlier than initially planned, on 16 February. The festival will continue until 20 February.