Cinema of Care, with Claire Denis, Abby Sun, and Marek Hovorka

This week, Film Comment is reporting from Berlin, where the 2023 Berlinale is currently underway. Throughout the festival, we’ll be sharing daily podcasts, dispatches, and interviews covering all the highlights of this year’s selection. A couple days ago, before the festival kicked off, FC co-deputy editor Devika Girish attended the opening conference of the Berlin Critics’ Week—an autonomous sidebar to the Berlinale, organized independently by a collective of German critics, including Amos Borchert, Elena Friedrich, Petra Palmer, and Dennis Vetter. The topic of the conference was “Cinema of Care - Who Looks After Film Culture?” which included a panel discussion moderated by Devika, and featuring a stellar lineup of guests: curators Abby Sun and Marek Hovorka, and the filmmaker Claire Denis. The four had a provocative, in-depth conversation about what care looks like on the level of aesthetics, in filmmaking, and in film programming, and how we might build a sustainable and collective film culture. We’re very grateful to Berlin Critics Week for letting us share the conversation on the podcast.