The Italian-American actress and director Isabella Rossellini will be the President of the Jury for the 61st Berlin International Film Festival (February 10-20, 2011).
"It’s fantastic that Isabella Rossellini will be the President of the Berlinale Jury in 2011," says the festival's director Dieter Kosslick. "She is a multifaceted, creative film artist with extensive experience in European, American and international cinema."
Isabella Rossellini is one of the most renowned actresses in international cinema. Over the past years, she has also become a distinguished producer and director. The daughter of Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and of Italian director Roberto Rossellini, she first started her career as a fashion designer and journalist. At the time she worked mainly in New York. Her acting debut came in 1976, when she appeared alongside her mother in Vincente Minelli's A Matter Of Time. She then went on to roles in films by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Norman Mailer, Robert Zemeckis, Joel Schumacher, John Schlesinger, Peter Weir, Abel Ferrara, Stanley Tucci, Guy Maddin, Peter Greenaway and many others. She acquired international fame above all for her performance in David Lynch's films Blue Velvet (1986) and Wild at Heart (1990). In addition to her career in cinema, Isabella Rossellini was also a top cosmetics model in the '80s onward.
Isabella Rossellini first attended the Berlinale in 1994 as the lead actress in Peter Weir's Competition film Fearless. She has been a regular guest at the Berlin International Film Festival in recent years: in 2005 she created the short film My Dad is 100 Years Old with Canadian experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin, an homage to her father Roberto Rossellini which screened in Berlinale Special in 2006. In 2007 she returned to Berlin as a narrator for Guy Maddin's experimental silent film Brand Upon the Brain! in the festival's Forum section. She presented her directorial debut Green Porno in the Forum Expanded section of the 2008 Berlinale: Eight playful episodic shorts explaining the sexual behaviour of earthworms, dragonflies, snails, bees and praying mantises.
In late July 2010, Isabella Rossellini was in Studio Babelsberg to perform in the movie adaptation of the graphic novel Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud. It was Rossellini's second time shooting in Babelsberg. In 1992 she came to the former DEFA studios to star in The Innocent, directed by John Schlesinger and adapted from a novel by Ian McEwan. Isabella Rossellini can next be seen in Saverio Constanzo's La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers), a film adaptation of Paolo Giordano's novel of the same name, screening in the upcoming Venice Film Festival.