25 January 2023

Akademie der Künste awards the Berlin Art Prize ‒
Jubilee Endowment 1848/1948,
2023 Berlin Art Prize ‒ Grand Prize to Joachim Trier
Awards ceremony on 18 March 2023

Norwegian film director and screenwriter Joachim Trier is the recipient of the Berlin Art Prize ‒ Grand Prize in 2023. The Akademie der Künste awards the prize annually on behalf of the State of Berlin. The Grand Prize, chosen on a rotational basis from an arts discipline matching one of the Akademie’s six sections, is endowed with 15,000 euros. The award ceremony takes place at the Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz, on 18 March 2023.

The Grand Prize jury consisted of Bettina Böhler, Zsuzsanna Kiràly and Christian Petzold. Petzold wrote the following about the award recipient: “Trier is a great humanist. He portrays people. His characters are not always sympathetic; they don’t seek to please. They’re not hustlers turning tricks at our expense. Sometimes they’re weak. They lie. They’re egomaniacs.” He continues: “The great Helmut Färber once said that we should make films in such a way that when other generations see them in twenty or thirty years’ time, they will be able to learn how we lived, how we worked, how we cheated, laughed and dreamed. Joachim Trier’s cinema is a wonderful way of experiencing this.”

Joachim Trier (b. 1974 in Copenhagen, Denmark and raised in Oslo, Norway) studied at the National Film and Television School in Great Britain, where he shot his first short films, including Procter, which won international awards right off the bat. He graduated from the European Film College in Ebeltoft, Denmark. Like all his other works, Trier’s first feature-length film, Reprise (2006), was shown at international festivals and won multiple awards. Reprise and Thelma were selected to represent Norway as entries for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. All his feature film screenplays have been written together with author Eskil Vogt. Presented in 2022, The Worst Person in the World is part of the thematically linked “Oslo Trilogy”, which also includes Reprise and Oslo, August 31st. In his only documentary, The Other Munch, Trier follows Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård as he is appointed guest curator of an Edvard Munch exhibition. Trier has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2018. In 2022 he served on the competition jury for the 75th Cannes Film Festival.

In addition to the Berlin Art Prize ‒ Grand Prize, six Berlin Art Prizes, in the amount of 5000 euros each, will also be awarded on 18 March. These prizes will go to to Petrit Halilaj (Visual Arts), Chinese design architect Xu Tiantian (Architecture), British composer Joanna Bailie (Music), Serbian author Barbi Marković (Literature), actor, director and theatremaker Marcel Kohler (Performing Arts), and French film editor Nelly Quettier (Film and Media Arts).

The Berlin Art Prize ‒ Jubilee Endowment 1848/1948 was endowed by the Berlin Senate in 1948 to commemorate the March Revolution in 1848. The Akademie der Künste has presided over the award on behalf of the federal state since 1971. Grand Art Prize recipients in recent years include Richard Peduzzi (2022), Annett Gröschner (2021), Younghi Pagh-Paan (2020) and Renée Gailhoustet (2019).