Actor Bae Doo-na will serve as a jury member in the competition at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival next month.
The festival's organizing committee on the 28th (local time) released the list of the international jury in an official announcement, including Bae Doo-na. Bae will join as a juror alongside U.S. director Reinaldo Marcus Green, Nepal's director Min Bahadur Bham, India's Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Japan's director Hikari, and Poland's producer Ewa Puszczyńska.
The jury chairperson will be German master director Wim Wenders. He is well known for Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas. The jury will select the main award winners, including the Golden Bear for best film, from among the 22 entries in the competition.
The festival described Bae Doo-na as "one of the actors representing Korea," noting that "she has won numerous prestigious awards, including the Blue Dragon Film Awards best new actress and the Asian Film Awards best actress." It added that after debuting in 1999 with the drama School, she delivered impressive performances in Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) by director Bong Joon-ho, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) by director Park Chan-wook, Take Care of My Cat (2001) by director Jung Jae-eun, The Host (2006), and Air Doll (2009) by director Hirokazu Kore-eda.
She also built international recognition through collaborations with the Wachowski sisters on Cloud Atlas (2012), Jupiter Ascending (2015), and the Netflix series Sense8 (2015–2018), and was credited with broadening her acting spectrum with A Girl at My Door (2014) and Broker (2022). Bae Doo-na is also set to appear in the sci-fi comedy Alpha Gang, directed by brothers David and Nathan Zellner, which is slated for release in 2026.
This is the third time a Korean film figure has been appointed to the jury of the Berlin International Film Festival competition. Previously, actor Lee Young-ae served as a juror in 2006, and director Bong Joon-ho in 2015.
Among the 22 films set to vie for the Golden Bear this year is Queen at Sea (directed by Lance Hammer), starring French actor Juliette Binoche.
Meanwhile, several Korean films have been invited to various sections of this year's festival. Director Hong Sang-soo was invited to the Panorama section with his new film The Day She Returned, and director Jung Ji-young's My Name Is was selected for the Forum section. Director Yoo Jae-in's feature debut A Way to Erase will screen in Generation 14plus, a section for youth audiences.
The 76th Berlin International Film Festival will be held in Berlin, Germany, from Feb. 12 to 22.