Berlinale Camera
At the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival, the cinematographer Caroline Champetier will be honoured with the Berlinale Camera.
The Berlinale Camera was awarded to Caroline Champetier on Thursday, February 23, at 2.45 pm in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Champetier has chosen Anne Fontaine's The Innocents, for which she did the cinematography. The film was screened after the Award Ceremony as part of Berlinale Special.
Caroline Champetier
Caroline Champetier can count more than one hundred films in her career as a cinematographer, spanning from 1979 to present. She started out with François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Chantal Akerman with Toute une nuit and shot several short and feature films with Jean-Luc Godard. Since then she has worked with the great stars of French cinema among them Xavier Beauvois, Leos Carax, Arnaud Desplechin, Jacques Doillon, Anne Fontaine, Philippe Garrel, Benoît Jacquot, Claude Lanzmann as well as international filmmakers such as Margarethe von Trotta, Wang Chao, Amos Gitai and Nobuhiro Suwa.
Known for her talent beyond borders, Caroline Champetier has garnered numerous awards, notably the César for Best Cinematography, the Gianni di Venanzo Prize for Of Gods and Men by Xavier Beauvois in 2011, and the Silver Frog at Camerimage 2012 for Holy Motors. She was nominated four more times at the César for Holy Motors (2012), Les Innocentes (2016), Les Gardiennes (2017) and Annette (2021). The latter earned her the Lumière Award in 2022.
Caroline Champetier’s most recent work includes Fyzal Boulifa’s The Damned Don’t Cry, shown at the Venice Film Festival 2022 and she has just completed filming Cliquot, with Haley Bennett, Sam Riley and Tom Sturridge.
The Trophy
The Berlinale Camera has been awarded since 1986. Until 2003, it was donated by Berlin-based jeweller David Goldberg. From 2004 through 2013, Georg Hornemann Objects, a Dusseldorf-based atelier, sponsored the trophy, which goldsmith Hornemann redesigned for the Berlinale in 2008: Modelled on a real camera, the Berlinale Camera now has 128 finely crafted components. Many of these silver and titanium parts, such as the swivel head and tripod, are movable.