The speech by Kristen Stewart, President of the Jury of the 73rd Berlinale, when awarding the Golden Bear – February 25, 2023.

People have gone in circles for thousands of years trying to pin down what can be deemed art, who’s allowed to do it, what determines its value. This is a boundary-pushing festival and so it offers us the opportunity to be expansive in how we define these things, how we value works of art, how we categorize them. Was the effort back-breaking, bank-breaking? Expensive, cheap? Was it real or “constructed”? Was it just an accident or an act of sheer will?

With all due respect to every school of thought, I mean we can start with Aristotle here, we can move to Barthes, we can move to Sontag, to Beavis and Butthead on this matter – that’s a rowdy reference. To all of the brilliant minds who have given this topic a crack, I think that for all of us, you just know it when you see it. This film, this “movie”, that we saw, it puts thought and feeling and sound and picture to these questions on a deep level, on a humanist level that really cut into all of us on the jury. It’s cinematic proof of the vital necessity of human expression and it’s also masterfully crafted. We’ve been asking ourselves all week what makes a movie a movie and these invisible parameters set forth by industry and academia don’t stand a chance with this film or movie or whatever you wanna call it. When you focus too much on what something is, you tend to lose track of what it does, so I am honoured and I’m overwhelmed to present this year’s Golden Bear to Sur l’Adamant and all of the producers…