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President of the Jury
 

"I find it an exhilarating city to be in." President of theJury Ben Kingsley gazes out of the window at the serried rows of cranes which dominate the skyline. "The whole of the history of European experience is in these streets - under the ground, in the monuments. It's beautiful, isn't it?"
Kingsley is settling down to see 30 films over the next fortnight. He has sat on juries before, in Montreal and in Dinard, and once helped judge the European Film Awards, but this is the first time he has served as President. What is he expecting of his fellow jurors? "There are sure to be political agendas, personal agendas, chauvinisms. That's all part of the melting pot, but what we hope to do is to debate those through and get those back to the actual film on the screen."
He claims to relish the experience of sitting around a table with 10 other people, "all of them intelligent and articulate", and working out just why one movie works when another doesn't. In Berlin, he believes, there are few of the distractions which sometimes make other festivals seem more like circuses than celebrations of cinema. "Berlin seems to me to be much less personality-driven and much more to do with a celebration of the craft of filmmaking than with the showbiz, glamour-driven side of our industry."
On Sunday, Kingsley is taking time off from his jury duties to introduce Shooting Stars, the special initiative organised to promote Europe's next generation of acting talent. "We just want to get them out there, to get them seen by the people in power. It's a coming out party. I think it's a lovely idea."
Kingsley's new movie, The Confession (in which he stars alongside Alec Baldwin and Amy Irving) should be ready for Cannes. He plays a killer, quite a change from his most celebrated roles as Gandhi and as Schindler's factory manager.
He spent six months of last year treading the boards at the Old Vic in London, playing Estragon to Alan Howard's Vladimir in a production of Waiting For Godot. It was the first time he had been back on stage for several years. After so long 'away' in movies, coming back to theatre came as a culture shock. "The camera likes behaving," he says, "but it doesn't really like acting."
He is vague about his future plans, but says he is fascinated by the challenge of film comedy. "It's exhilarating. Nobody laughs. The crew members are completely silent. So it's only your intuition which tells you when it is working." Geoffrey Macnab