The 66th annual Berlinale, as the event is known, will kick off on February 11 with a screening of Joel and Ethan Coen's "Hail, Caesar!", a send-up of Hollywood's Golden Age starring George Clooney.
The competition among 18 international productions will start the following day and the panel led by three-time Oscar winner Streep, whose appointment was previously announced, will select the winners of the Golden and Silver Bear top prizes on February 20.
Owen, the star of movies including "Children of Men" and "Inside Man", is currently appearing in Steven Soderbergh's television series "The Knick".
He will be joined on the jury by Lacombe, a New York-based photo portraitist whose iconic work appears regularly in Vanity Fair, Vogue and the Financial Times.
The panel will be rounded out by British film critic Nick James, Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, German film and stage actor Lars Eidinger and Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska, who won the festival's Teddy Award for gay and lesbian-themed cinema in 2013 for "In the Name Of" about a closeted priest.
Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick announced a special Berlin Camera prize for US actor and director Tim Robbins, who will be honoured with a screening of his 1995 death row drama "Dead Man Walking".
The festival will also pay tribute to three luminaries who died last month:
British actor Alan Rickman, who will be commemorated with a presentation of Ang Lee's 1995 drama "Sense and Sensibility"; Italian director Ettore Scola, whose 1983 film "Le Bal" will be shown; and rock legend David Bowie, who lived in West Berlin in the late 1970s.
"Bowie was a tremendous musician, an avant-garde artist who expressed his creativity in many disciplines," Kosslick said. The festival will screen Bowie's 1976 movie "The Man Who Fell to Earth".
Among the most keenly awaited premieres in competition this year are "Alone in Berlin", an adaptation of the Nazi-era international bestseller starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, and "Genius", a British-US biopic starring Colin Firth as legendary literary editor Max Perkins. The cast includes Jude
Law, Nicole Kidman, Dominic West and Guy Pearce.
Other titles drawing buzz are an audacious eight-hour-long Filipino film, Lav Diaz's "A Lullaby for the Sorrowful Mystery", which will be shown in a single screening, and the feature debut by Tunisian director Mohamed Ben Attia, "Hedi", a love story set against the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
Comments