Inside (Vasilis Katsoupis).
Berlinale have begun announcing the titles selected for the 73rd edition of their festival, set to take place from February 16 through 26. This page will be updated as further sections are announced.
COMPETITION
20,000 Species of Bees (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren)
The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lu)
Till the End of the Night (Christoph Hochhausler)
BlackBerry (Matt Johnson)
Disco Boy (Giacomo Abbruzze)
The Plough (Philippe Garrel)
Ingeborg Bachmann – Journey into the Desert (Margarethe von Trotta)
Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything (Emily Atef)
Limbo (Ivan Sen)
Bad Living (Joao Canijo)
Manodrome (John Trengove)
Music (Angela Schanelec)
Past Lives (Celine Song)
Afire (Christian Petzold)
On the Adamant (Nicolas Philibert)
The Survival of Kindness (Rolf de Heer)
Suzume (Makoto Shinkai)
Totem (Lila Ayles)
ENCOUNTERS
The Klezmer Project (Leandro Koch, Paloma Schahmann)
The Adults (Dustin Guy Defa)
The Echo (Tatiana Huezo)
Here (Bas Devos)
In the Blind Spot (Ayse Polat)
The Cage is Looking for a Bird (Malika Musaeva)
My Worst Enemy (Mehran Tamadon)
White Plastic Sky (Tibor Banoczki, Sarolta Szabo)
In Water (Hong Sang-soo)
Family Time (Tia Kuovo)
The Walls of Bergamo (Stefano Savona)
Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado)
Samsara (Lois Patino)
Eastern Front (Vitaly Mansky, Yevhen Titarenko)
Living Bad (Joao Canijo)
Absence (Wu Lang)
PANORAMA
After (Anthony Lapia): A club in Paris. Driving techno beats sweep everyone away. People dance, consume and talk. Félicie meets Saïd and takes him to her place for an afterparty. On the cusp between night and day, different lives and views collide.
All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White (Babatunde Apalowo): Bambino and Bawa meet in Lagos and hit it off immediately. During their long trips around the city they develop a deep affection for each other. But in a society which considers homosexuality taboo, they feel the pressure of social norms.
Al Murhaqoon (The Burdened (Amr Gamal): During the civil war in Yemen, Isra’a becomes pregnant again and, together with her husband, she decides for an abortion. But this creates enormous problems, including in their relationship. A moving story from an all-too-often forgotten crisis region.
And, Towards Happy Alleys (Sreemoyee Singh): A passionate declaration of love for the cinema and poetry of Iran, which also offers a frank view of the precarious situation for critics of the regime and shows the uncompromising daily struggle of Iranian women against their oppression.
The Cemetery of Cinema (Thierno Souleymane Diallo): Thierno Souleymane Diallo sets out with his camera in search of the birth of filmmaking in Guinea. Charming and determined, he traces his country’s film heritage and history and reveals the importance of film archives.
The Beast in the Jungle (Patric Chiha): The club as a place of endless (im)possibilities. A man and a woman are waiting here together for 25 years for a mysterious, all changing event to occur. From 1979 to 2004: from disco to techno. A love story and an obsession.
The Castle (Martín Benchimol): The inheritance from her former boss is a poisoned chalice for Indigenous housekeeper Justina: a huge, derelict mansion in the back of beyond. Justina’s daughter Alexia would much prefer to return to Buenos Aires and work as a car mechanic. A dark fairy tale.
Drifter (Hannes Hirsch): Moritz has moved to Berlin to be with his boyfriend, but their relationship soon ends. The 22-year-old embarks on a journey filled with kinks, metamorphoses and self-discovery into the depths of Berlin’s party scene.
The Eternal Memory (Maite Alberdi): When Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, his wife begins to document his advancing disease on video. The film hints at the tragedy and sadness that his slide into oblivion brings for them both.
Femme (Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon Ping):Jules is a drag artist in London. After a performance, he is brutally attacked and, traumatised, withdraws into himself. Months later, he recognises his assailant in a gay sauna and begins an affair with him, incognito. A gripping revenge thriller.
Ambush (Chhatrapal Ninawe): An unsparing psychological portrait of the civil war that has been raging in central India for over 50 years. Set in the middle of the jungle, we see what happens to perpetrators and victims whose lives are marked by a constant proximity to violence and death.
Green Night (Han Shuai): Two lone female fighters who have learned to rely on no one but themselves venture into Seoul’s underworld. In search of the big hit that could mean liberation from their useless husbands, these disparate women grow closer.
Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk): Assembling hundreds of film clips and media images, artist duo Soda Jerk creates a startling narrative about the changes undergone by American society since Trump, while relishing in reflecting on contemporary cultural values.
Heroic (David Zonana): Luis, 18, sees only one way to be able to provide for himself and his mother: training at Mexico’s national military academy. The rigid system of violence that is designed to turn him into the perfect soldier pushes him to his limits.
Inside (Vasilis Katsoupis): After a robbery goes wrong, art thief Nemo finds himself trapped in a swanky New York penthouse. Locked in by the high-end security system and surrounded by nothing but priceless works of art, he must fight to survive.
Iron Butterflies (Roman Liubyi): This lesson in political revelation focuses on the shooting down of the Malaysian passenger jet MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014. A meticulous, investigative exposé that lays bare the mechanisms of Russian warfare.
Joan Baez I Am A Noise (Karen O'Connor, Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle): This intimate and candid portrait of American music legend and civil rights activist Joan Baez interweaves images from her farewell tour with previously unseen footage and highly intimate insights into her life and emotions. Not just for Baez fans.
Kokomo City (D. Smith): A series of moving interviews and encounters with four Black trans sex workers from New York and Georgia in which they talk frankly about their experiences. Questions of belonging and identity within the Black community are candidly addressed.
The Teachers’ Lounge (İlker Çatak): When one of her students is suspected of theft, teacher Carla Nowak decides to get to the bottom of the matter. Caught between her ideals and the school system, the consequences of her actions threaten to break her.
Matria (Álvaro Gago): A vibrant portrait of a woman in a Galician fishing village who is struggling to get by with hard work and rough charm. With her 18-year-old daughter now ready to stand on her own two feet, Ramona begins to question her life up to this point.
Opponent (Milad Alami): Iman, an Iranian, lives with his family in Sweden in an ever-changing succession of refugee hostels. To increase his chances of obtaining residence permits for them all, he resumes his career as a wrestler – and is confronted with why he had to flee.
Passages (Ira Sachs): On the last day of his shoot in Paris, film director Tomas sleeps with a woman and proudly tells his husband about it. A passionate, jealous and narcissistic relationship unfolds between Tomas, Agathe and Martin.
Perpetrator (Jennifer Reeder): On her 18th birthday, tough-girl Jonny eats a cake baked by her aunt according to a magical family recipe and goes through a radical metamorphosis. As several classmates go missing, a bloody coming-of-age story takes its course.
Property (Daniel Bandeira): When rebelling workers occupy Teresa’s family estate, she flees at the last minute in an armoured car. She is trapped, but refuses to negotiate. A thriller about the extreme disparities between social classes in Brazil.
Reality (Tina Satter): Director Tina Satter presents a snapshot of recent US history and, using unedited original dialogue from an FBI recording, re-enacts the 2017 search of whistle-blower Reality Winner’s home as a tense chamber piece.
Midwives (Léa Fehner): Sofia and Louise are newly qualified midwives. They quickly encounter the challenges of everyday hospital life. A sensitive and searing exposé of a key profession and the ramifications of a broken health system for the individual.
Silver Haze (Sacha Polak): Franky comes from a gritty East London borough and works as a nurse. When she falls head over heels in love with her patient Florence, her life changes profoundly. A film about coming to terms with the past, social origins and the need to belong.
Sira (Apolline Traoré): After a brutal attack, a young nomad named Sira refuses to surrender to her fate without a fight and instead takes a stand against Islamist terror. A feminist counterpoint to current reporting from the Sahel region.
The Siren (Sepideh Farsi): Iran, 1980. After an Iraqi missile strike, the oil metropolis of Abadan descends into chaos. Fourteen-year-old Omid, who works as a food delivery boy, is searching for his missing brother – and for an escape route out of the besieged city.
Sisi & I (Frauke Finsterwalder): In this wild reinterpretation of the “Sisi” myth, the focus is on Austrian Empress Elizabeth’s close friendship with her last lady-inwaiting, Irma Countess von Sztáray, who falls in love with the charismatic Sisi and is captivated by her modern ideas.
Stams (Bernhard Braunstein): The ski boarding school in Stams in the Tyrolean Alps is considered a training ground for the very best. The goal: the Olympics. Over the course of one academic year, the film closely follows the young skiing elite in their meticulous daily training regimen.
The Quiet Migration (Malene Choi): Carl is expected someday to take over his parents’ agribusiness in a rural backwater in Denmark. But, as an adopted child, he alsolongs to learn more about his South Korean heritage. A film about otherness and finding your own place in life.
Transfariana (Joris Lachaise): An unexpected love story between a trans former sex worker and a FARC rebel begins in a Colombian prison and leads to an alliance in solidarity between trans activists and FARC militants who have laid down their arms.
Do You Love Me? (Tonia Noyabrova): Ukraine at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Vivacious 17-year-old Kira witnesses her family and the country she lives in falling apart. The transformations in their lives arrive gradually but are sweeping. Their whole world is shaking.
Under the Sky of Damascus (Heba Khaled, Talal Derki, Ali Wajeeh): Experiencing violence is commonplace for Syrian women but they do not discuss the prevalence of – often sexual – exploitation for fear of revenge. A collective of young women want to break the taboo with a theatre project. But how free are they themselves?
GENERATION KPLUS
Aaaah ! (Osman Cerfon): The tumultuous school day is filled with cries of "Aaaah!": cries of anger, of boredom, of joy and surprise—in short, the full spectrum of young emotions. A charmingly grotesque animated short about an uproar in a world that dances to the tune of the adults.
Longing For The World (Jenna Hasse): When teenager Margaux bonds with seven year old Juliette and a local fisherman, her summer holidays turn upside down. An unusual friendship, where Margaux experiences tenderness and play and discovers a new way to understand herself.
Dede Is Dead (Philippe Kastner): Dede is dead. Before, she was always around: day and night, outside or inside, nestled in the family's arms. In his animation, Philippe Kastner shows the darkness of grief and the rich colors of memories and dreams. Dede was not just any dog. She was his dog.
To Be Sisters (Anne-Sophie Gousset, Clément Céard): Two sisters set their world in motion. The older one pulls the younger one along: through the playroom, childhood, and from frame to frame in the animation. The younger one follows until she can determine the direction herself. She now takes her sister with her.
Just Super (Rasmus A. Sivertsen): Neither acrobatic nor athletic, Hedvig is probably too clumsy to become a superheroine. In order to be able to follow in the footsteps of her father Super Lion, she accepts the challenge of convincing her skeptical environment of the opposite.
Nanitic (Carol Nguyen): Nine-year-old Trang and her family take care of her dying grandmother. As in an ant colony, each member has an important function. Carol Nguyen sensitively provides insights into the construct of family as a microcosm.
The Properties Of Metals (Antonio Bigini): In an Italian village, where the idyllic beauty of the landscape belies the toughness of life, word has it young Pietro has psychokinetic powers. A tender portrait of a young boy, and an allegory of the science of invisible forces.
Waking Up In Silence (Mila Zhluktenko, Daniel Asadi Faezi): A summer’s day in a former German military barrack: children forced to flee Ukraine have found refuge here. In their games, they discover military symbols from the past and link them to their experiences.
Sea Sparkle (Domien Huyghe): When her father dies at sea, Lena starts desperately looking for the cause, convinced a sea monster is to blame. Her relentless push against the tide reveals a tale of anger and grief, yet also of the strength and comfort the ocean provides.
GENERATION 14PLUS
Adolfo (Sofía Auza): When Momo, Hugo and his cactus, Adolfo, meet one night, they are heading in opposite directions. Their peculiar encounter will not only magically change the course of their lives, but also encourage them to warmly embrace the beauty of the unexpected.
Before Madrid (Ilén Juambeltz, Nicolás Botana): Today is their last chance to have sex for the first time. Early tomorrow morning, Micaela is moving to Madrid, Santiago is staying behind in Uruguay. They have it all planned out: a secluded spot, condom—and getting a few tips from a friend, just in case.
Crushed (Ella Rocca): A crush is emotionally very draining: what to do with all the infatuation, especially when it is unrequited? Ella Rocca questions the person they adore, the internet and themselves. The data is sampled into an essay about a very (in)determinate feeling.
Dreams’ Gate (Negin Ahmadi): Driven by the desire to understand her inner truth as a marginalized woman in Iran, Negin Ahmadi embarks on a self-exploring precarious adventure to meet the Kurdish women fighters in the war zone of North Syria.
Infantry (Laís Santos Araújo): In opulent lush scenery a birthday party is being held. Joana longs for her period to start, her brother Dudu misses his absent father, Verbena looks for a way out. Fulfilling your dreams can come with pain, in this magical realist glimpse from Brazil.
Tomorrow Is A Long Time (Jow Zhi Wei | with Leon Dai, Edward Tan): Acts of violence bring repercussions for exterminator Chua and his son Meng, who has been under pressure from bullies. Military service offers Meng escape into the jungle, an unknown world which could bring him closer to understanding his own nature.
The Lost Boys (Zeno Graton): In a youth correctional facility, Joe is preparing his return to society. But William’s arrival turns his desire for freedom into desire of another kind. Behind fences and cell walls, passions begin to play havoc with the need for liberty.
Sica (Carla Subirana): Waiting for answers that don’t seem to come, Sica stares at the waves crashing against the coastal rocks. Her father, a fisherman, drowned in the sea. In an isolated corner of the world, Sica doesn’t lose hope. Even if she needs to go against the current.
To Write From Memory (Emory Chao Johnson): A young person’s physical gender transition is steadily progressing, despite their mother’s vocal objections. To Write from Memory is an essay on moving forward, and the inevitability of confronting one’s own past in the process.
PERSPEKTIVE DEUTSCHES KINO
Ararat (Engin Kundağ): Zeynap has caused a traffic accident in Berlin. She escapes to her parents’ home in Turkey where her self-destructive and sexuallyassertive behaviour infuriates more than just her family. Looming above them like a portent is the dormant volcano Ararat.
Ash Wednesday (Bárbara Santos, João Pedro Prado): In a favela in Rio de Janeiro, Demétria waits for her daughter on the last day of Carnival. But a brutal police raid seals the fate of thetwo women. Set to Brazilian rhythms, this short musical addresses racism and other social conflicts.
Dora or the Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents (Stina Werenfels): When Kristin stops giving her mentally disabled daughter her meds, the 18-year-old Dora discovers sex. But her parents feel she isallowing herself to be abused. A sensitive performance from Jenny Schily as the mother who also experiences her own body anew.
A Hologram for the King (Tom Tykwer): An American businessman is sent to sell a telecommunications system to the King of Saudi Arabia. While he awaits an audience, theproject becomes secondary. Frank Kruse’s sound design in Tom Tykwer’s tragicomedy is as convincing as lead actor Tom Hanks.
Elaha (Milena Aboyan): Elaha, 22, believes she must restore her supposed innocence before she weds. A surgeon could reconstruct her hymen but she cannotafford such an operation. She asks herself: why does she have to be a virgin anyway, and for whom?
On Mothers and Daughters (Tanja Egen): Nina, a young actor, returns to the Ruhr region for her grandmother’s funeral. Tensions surface between her and her mother. Thenoises of a small town fill the eloquent silences in the complex mother-daughter relationships explored in this endearing film.
Jacob the Liar (Frank Beyer): A Polish ghetto during the Second World War. Jakob Heym, a Jew, overhears a confidential message at an SS police station that the RedArmy is advancing. What should he do with this uplifting news? Will people believe him?
Kash Kash (Lea Najjar): The pigeons flying over Beirut can be seen as a beacon of hope in an age-old game of chance, “kash hamam”, that is all aboutincreasing the size of one’s own flock. This film portrays three pigeon fanciers and a girl hoping to fly her own birds one day.
Bones and Names (Fabian Stumm): Boris and Jonathan’s relationship is at a turning point. Actor Boris begins to confuse work and reality and writer Jonathan must face hisfears. This very personal film explores notions of distance and closeness with razor-sharp wit.
Long Long Kiss (Lukas Röder): To preserve the memory of his ex-boyfriend’s kisses, Aaron no longer brushes his teeth. His sister’s appeals to reason fail andeverything escalates when their authoritarian father visits. A touching drama about mental health.
Nuclear Nomads / Atomnomaden (Kilian Armando Friedrich, Tizian Stromp Zargari): The French workers who clean nuclear reactors are exposed to high levels of radiation. With impressive images the film portrays“nuclear nomads” who travel from one nuclear power plant to another in caravans, risking their health in the name of the future.
Requiem (Hans-Christian Schmid): In the mid-1970s, Michaela, an epileptic, becomes the victim of exorcisms performed on her by two priests. After several sessions, shedies. This moving film is shaped by Hansjörg Weißbrich’s assured and sensitive editing.
The Kidnapping of the Bride / Die Brautentführung (Sophia Mocorrea): The relationship between German Fred and Argentinian Luisa is a partnership of equals that eschews conventions. At their weddingthey are caught up in others’ expectations. The strange tradition of “kidnapping the bride” challenges the way they want to live.
Seven Winters in Tehran (Steffi Niederzoll): After seven years in prison, a female student in Tehran is hanged for murder. She had acted in self-defence against a rapist. For apardon, she would have had to retract her testimony. This moving film reopens the case.
Tehran Taboo (Ali Soozandeh): Three Iranian women confronted by taboos in Tehran are denied the right to sexual self-determination and professional fulfilment. AliN. Askin’s pulsating score intensifies the compelling plea for equality in this multi-layered animated film.
Lonely Oaks (Fabiana Fragale, Kilian Kuhlendahl, Jens Mühlhoff): In 2018, Steffen Meyn died from a fall during the protests in Hambach Forest. This film combines the footage he shot on a 360-degreehelmet camera with interviews with environmentalists and asks how far activism should go.
BERLINALE SHORTS
8 (Anaïs-Tohé Commaret): In suburban housing estates in France, young people are wishing for money and success. Their dreams even clog up the air conditioning ducts until everything begins to drip. What might happen if you swallow light?
Back (Yazan Rabee): He has left his Syrian homeland, but he cannot escape from a recurring nightmare where state security forces are pursuing him while the home that can save him seems beyond his grasp. How deep into the past do the roots of a trauma reach?
Les chenilles (Michelle Keserwany, Noel Keserwany): Two women meet as waitresses and tentatively become friends. They are both from the Levant and living in exile in France. A film about the Silk Road, about exploitation – then and now – and about female solidarity, friendship and solace.
Eeva (Morten Tšinakov, Lucija Mrzljak): It is pouring down with rain at the funeral. There are many tears, too much wine, several woodpeckers and a handful of dreams to fill in the gaps.
From Fish to Moon (Kevin Contento): A small supermarket somewhere in the American backwoods. The staff come in early, drink coffee and restock the shelves. They chat about the air conditioning, would like to read poetry in peace and sometimes even get lucky on the slot machine.
Happy Doom (Billy Roisz): Flickering and pulsating, spitting and swallowing at the same time. The screen becomes a vibrating membrane; colours, shapes, beats and sounds a psychedelic whirlpool. A short, fast-paced audiovisual ode to the hypnotic power of colour and vertigo.
Daydreaming So Vividly About Our Spanish Holidays (Christian Avilés): Driven by their desire for light and warmth, British teenagers take a trip to the Balearic islands. They must absorb the sun and store it in their bodies to take it back to their cloud-covered kingdom.
It’s a Date (Nadia Parfan): Kyiv in 2022. A car races at breakneck speed through the city at dawn. Filmed from a subjective camera angle in a single unedited shot, this film captures the emotions in a state of emergency caused by the war.
Jill, Uncredited (Anthony Ing): At first you do not even notice her, she is one of many. But, little by little, you begin to become aware of her and her special presence. A tribute to the figures in the background without whom the foreground would not be the centre of attention.
A Kind of Testament (Stephen Vuillemin): A young woman comes across animations on the Internet that have clearly been created from her private selfies. An unknown female with the same name confesses to identity theft. But death is quicker than the answer to the question: “Why?”
Dipped in Black (Matthew Thorne, Derik Lynch): Wanting to leave behind his life in the predominantly white city of Adelaide, Derik returns to Aputula, his Indigenous homeland in the heart of Australia. A journey into the past, into pain and joy, dreams, wishes and memories.
The Beads (Rafaela Camelo, Emanuel Lavor): Two young women retreat to a remote holiday home. While one of them undertakes a medical abortion, the other quietly cares for her. A snake slithers around them, unnoticed.
A Woman in Makueni (Daria Belova, Valeri Aluskina): She is in prison, waiting. But he has a long way to travel and arrives too late. He wanders through the strange city, lost, until he meets a woman who is willing to help him with some gentle magic.
Sleepless Nights (Donatienne Berthereau): April 2022 in France. The presidential election is entering its final round and the atmosphere is tense. Solène, a waitress, drifts through the night. She takes drugs, hurts people’s feelings and increasingly loses her grip.
Bear (Morgane Frund): An amateur filmmaker meets the film student who is supposed to edit his material, the focus of which is allegedly bears. A debate arises about the power of the voyeuristic gaze.
Daughter and Son (Cheng Yu): Sachiko and Ming are living together, perhaps they are a couple. They discuss everyday things, slip into different roles and thus tell each other about their relationship.
Terra Mater – Mother Land (Kantarama Gahigiri): There she stands, confidently, like a goddess of technological junk, surrounded by endless mountains of rubbish, plastic, stench and rare earths. Her accusations are angry, composed and to the point.
The Veiled City (Natalie Cubides-Brady): In 1952, London was engulfed in the Great Smog. As a result of industrialisation, a leaden fog settled over the entire city. These archive images from the period become letters from a desolate future.
The Waiting (Volker Schlecht): A biologist describes her research into various species of frogs in the rainforest of Central America and their mysterious disappearance as if it were a criminal case. Brilliantly animated drawings accompany her vivid scientific analysis.
All Tomorrow’s Parties (Zhang Dalei): China during the 1990 Asian Games. A cinema screening is taking place at a factory in the evening. The janitor distributes the limited tickets while a shy poet waits for someone. A gently told, nostalgic portrait.
BERLINALE SPECIAL
Golda (Guy Nattiv)
Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg)
Kill Boksoon (Byun Sung-hyun)
Kiss the Future (Nenad Cicin-Sain)
Massimo Troisi: Somebody Down There Likes Me (Mario Martone)
Loriot’s Great Cartoon Revue (Peter Geyer)
Last Night of Amore (Andrea Di Stefano)
#Manhole (Kazuyoshi Kumakiri)
Mad Fate (Soi Cheang)
Seneca - On the Creation of Earthquakes (Robert Schwentke)
She Came to Me (Rebecca Miller)
Sun and Concrete (David Wnendt)
Talk to Me (Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou)
TÁR (Todd Field)
Untitled Boris Becker Documentary (Alex Gibney)
Der vermessene Mensch (Lars Kraume)
FORUM
Allensworth (James Benning): In 1908, Allensworth became the first self-administered African-American municipality in California. In lengthy shots, Benning surveys the buildings (school, church, library) of the now-abandoned town and looks for the traces of a Black cultural history.
Anqa (Helin Çelik): “I am not the remains. I exist.” Three Jordanian women barely survived the violence inflicted on them by men. Çelik films them from as up close as possible in their flats, which they barely leave, listening to them speak with the opaque logic of trauma.
About Thirty (Martin Shanly): This comedy of errors revolves around a hapless 30-year-old named Arturo. His penchant for indiscretions is as impossible to overlook as the finesse with which the film glides from March 2020 to the preceding decade and back again.
Being in a Place – A Portrait of Margaret Tait (Luke Fowler): Luke Fowler’s portrait of Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait takes its inspiration from her unrealised project about her homeregion of Orkney, drawing and riffing on her notes and footage to produce a blissful union of two artistic sensibilities.
The Bride (Myriam U. Birara): Rwanda, 1997. Three years after the genocide against the Tutsi minority, Eva is kidnapped by a stranger and raped. Her aunts agree to a forced marriage. When Eva finds a confidant in the form of the man’s cousin, she discovers the family’s traumatic past.
Cidade Rabat (Susana Nobre): When her mother dies, 40-year-old Helena now has time for herself after years of taking care of her family. She works at a film production company, dances boisterously, gets drunk. A quiet film about letting go morphs into a coming of middle age story.
Concrete Valley (Antoine Bourges): A Syrian family has lived in Canada for five years. As Farah tries to settle in with her community in Toronto, Rashid – an unlicensed doctor – struggles with the ruptures in his biography. A film about the everyday difficulties in a new country.
Dearest Fiona (Fiona Tan): As a voice reads letters from a father to his daughter off camera, 20th century archival images from the Netherlands are shown. Fiona Tan touchingly explores what potential emerges when sound and image diverge.
De Facto (Selma Doborac): How can cinema engage with complicity in crimes against humanity, extreme violence and state terror without conniving in it? De Facto finds answers to this question via two actors, a precisely compiled collage of texts and a deliberately reduced setting.
The Intrusion (Flora Dias, Juruna Mallon): The name of Brazil’s biggest airport, Guarulhos, references the fact that it was built on indigenous territory. In a blend of realistic and stylised scenes, the film follows a member of the ground staff as she seeks her roots beneath the runway.
The Temple Woods Gang (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche): Two neighbours, each as overwhelmed as the other: an ex-soldier grieves for his mother alone, while a family father leads his criminal gang into a heist with fatal consequences. French genre cinema in the desaturated colours of a banlieue façade.
Leaving and Staying (Volker Koepp): Meetings with readers, acquaintances and contemporaries of writer Uwe Johnson at the places where he lived. Volker Koepp, who is also from Pomerania, looks for Johnson’s sophisticated literary voice in the landscapes of the region they both stem from.
Horse Opera (Moyra Davey): Narrations of parties and nightly lectures meet images of urinating horses and still lives in a country house. The soundtrack – from Lauryn Hill to Prince – is overshadowed only by Moyra Davey’s laconical voice.
Between Revolutions (Vlad Petri): A semi-fictional correspondence between two women: one goes to Iran in 1979 to topple the Shah; the other experiences the onerous years of Ceaușescu’s Romania. Their biographies run in parallel via images of everyday life and videograms of revolution.
There Is a Stone (Tatsunari Ota): A young woman spends a day in some non-place between town and countryside, has random encounters and watches stones skip over the surface of the river. Tatsunari Ota’s film explores a world without productivity and finds joy in idle time and playfulness.
Where God Is Not (Mehran Tamadon): A prison cell is set up in an empty room on the edge of Paris. Three former political prisoners from Iran re-enact how they were once interrogated and tortured. With quiet scepticism, the film asks whether their experiences can be accessed in this way.
The Trial (Ulises de la Orden): 1985 – two years after the end of the military dictatorship in Argentina, leading members of the junta are tried in court. Ulises de la Orden creates 18 succinctly edited chapters from 530 hours of footage, bearing witness to state terror.
Calls from Moscow (Luís Alejandro Yero): A prefabricated estate in Moscow is meant as a transit stop for four young people from Cuba – until Russia’s attack on Ukraine radically shifts their outlook. Moving telephone calls back home provide the structure of Luís Alejandro Yero’s debut work.
Mammalia (Sebastian Mihăilescu): When he spies on his partner, Camil discovers something sinister: a cult with white robes and strange rituals. Sebastian Mihăilescu’s experimental narrative cinema plays with myths, gender roles, and the set pieces of the horror genre.
Our Body (Claire Simon): First observational and later hugely personal, Claire Simon’s film is an example of the sheer power of documentary cinema. With a gaze full of tenderness, she explores a gynaecological clinic in Paris to ascertain what it means to live in a female body.
A Golden Life (Boubacar Sangaré): In Burkina Faso, young men look under the earth for gold – and a better future. As a result, 16-year-old Rasmané barely seems like a teenager any more. This mainly observational film follows him into the 100-metre abyss of small-scale mining.
Notes from Eremocene (Viera Čákanyová): Scientist Edward O. Wilson has named the coming geological era Eremocene. In her analogue science fiction essay, Viera Čákanyová explores this era of loneliness in dialogue with a virtual alter ego from the future.
The Face of the Jellyfish (Melisa Liebenthal): One day, Marina no longer recognises herself. Is she ill, a different person, prettier? Those around her take it in their stride, her doctor is puzzled, the authorities block her ID card. A gentle comedy that poses serious questions about the human face.
Remembering Every Night (Yui Kiyohara): A visit to the employment office, practicing dance steps, making music with friends: several women’s everyday lives are captured in long shots and with a superb sense of place. A film like a summer’s day, bright, friendly, with the occasional chill.
This Is the End (Vincent Dieutre): Road trips through Los Angeles, famous verses in the Poetry Lounge and love in times of the pandemic: Rendezvous with an old flame, fourty years later. After Jaurès (2012), Vincent Dieutre presents another tender autofictional piece in the Forum.
Forms of Forgetting (Burak Çevik): Nesrin and Erdem talk about their relationship, which they don’t remember in exactly the same way. Çevik’s visually stunning essay uses their conversations to forge a pensive treatise on what it means to forget, where word and image play an equal role.
Regardless of Us (Yoo Heong-jun): After suffering a stroke, actress Hwaryeong is visited in hospital by her colleagues. With its garrulous film people and disparate relationships, this formally sparse film in elegant black and white comes across like a Hong Sang-soo fever dream.
In Ukraine (Tomasz Wolski): Bombed-out streets, destroyed Russian tanks, evening meals in an Underground repurposed into a shelter. Image by image, the directors push beyond easily reproducible images of war to enter the reality the country has experienced since February 24, 2022.
FORUM EXPANDED
The Tree (Ana Vaz): A meditation-film in 30-second sequences about the artist’s father that links geographies, times, the living, and the dead with a metal sword—the montage. A film shot alongside Bruce Baillie.
Achala (Tenzin Phuntsog): Achala contains a personal message between the artist’s mother and her sister in Tibet. They discuss keeping in touch through pictures, which represents a safe form of exchange for their monitored communications.
AI: African Intelligence (Manthia Diawara): This essay film explores the contact zones between African rituals of possession within traditional fishing villages of the Atlantic coast of Senegal and the emergence of new technological frontiers known as Artificial Intelligence.
Black Strangers (Dan Guthrie): After seeing him mentioned on a Bishop’s Transcript held in Gloucestershire Archives, Dan goes for a walk in the woods in search of Daniel, a man buried in Nympsfield on December 31, 1719 and described on the document as “a black stranger”.
Borrowing a Family Album (Tamer El Said): Tamer El Said appropriates another family’s amateur footage to reclaim a memory of a lost sibling. The installation invites visitors to look for their own recollections in the same footage, creating an act of collective remembrance in the process.
Dancing Boy (Tenzin Phuntsog): A joyful moment of a child dancing to a contemporary Tibetan song in a Tibetan dwelling. The boy, all the while making lively dance moves, looks straight at the camera—for which he is seemingly performing—humorously and charmingly.
Desert Dreaming (Abdul Halik Azeez): A collage film about Sri Lankan labor migration to the Middle East, using popular culture and anecdotal, intimate recollections by the filmmaker’s relatives to challenge monolithic narratives of personal history and middle-class Muslim upbringing.
Dreams (Tenzin Phuntsog): The artist’s parents are seen sleeping on a single mattress on the floor, akin to the one they used when they first immigrated to the West from Tibet. Despite the uncertainty of the time, this remains one of the artist’s fondest childhood memories.
The early rain which washes away the chaff before spring rains (Heiko-Thandeka Ncube): The title of this film translates to the Shona word “Gukurahundi,” a cynical euphemism which refers to a series of massacres, executed in wake of Zimbabwe’s liberation. The work unfolds as a mosaic, evoking ghosts in the shape of nationhood and ancestry.
Exhibition (Mary Helena Clark): Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—one marries the Berlin Wall, the other stabs a Velásquez painting—Exhibition is a meditation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood.
Home Invasion (Graeme Arnfield): A nightmarish essay film on the history of the doorbell, tracing its invention and constant reinventions through 19th century labor struggles, the nascent years of narrative cinema, and contemporary surveillance cultures.
If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move (Kevin Jerome Everson): This short film features Dripp and ChoSkii of the music group BmE composing and recording their latest composition, “Shiesty,” in the Columbus, Mississippi, studio of Country Blakk only to be interrupted by a John Cage score.
Mangosteen (Tulapop Saenjaroen): A story about storytelling: After returning to his hometown to work in his sister’s fruit processing factory, Earth slowly but surely pulls out of the family business to dedicate himself to writing an abstract, gory novel.
The Man Who Envied Women (Yvonne Rainer): Around a familiar theme—the breakup of a marriage—Yvonne Rainer constructs an honest, graceful, and wickedly funny account of aself-satisfied womanizer, Jack Deller, the man “who almost knows too much about women.” Restored version of the 1985 film.
Pala Amala (Father Mother / Vater Mutter) (Tenzin Phuntsog): A 2-channel-video on feelings around familial expressions of care, language, identity, and memories of and longing for a lost homeland, which are expressed unspoken. Featuring the artist’s parents, who fled Tibet as children in the early 1960s.
Revolver (Crystal Z Campbell): A descendant of Exodusters—African Americans who founded settlements in the American Midwest in the late 19th century—recounts memories, dreams, and visions of her ancestor’s memories.
Scenes of Extraction (Sanaz Sohrabi): Sanaz Sohrabi creates an archival constellation from the still and moving images of the British Petroleum Archives, documenting the expansive colonial network behind the British geophysical expeditions that spanned across Iran in the early 20th century.
Simia: Stratagem for Undestining (Assem Hendawi): Speculation as a method for worldmaking: Simia was created in conversation with the fictitious artificial intelligence program ProjectSimiyaa, which aims to create a planned economy and manage infrastructural commons across Africa and the Middle East.
Summer Grass (Tenzin Phuntsog): A Yak herder shares a series of clips during their typical day on the sunny grasslands of Tibet, offering a rare glimpse of daily life shared between two family members that have been separated for over 40 years.
Prototype (Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory): At the Marshall McLuhan Salon, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s VR-Video Tartupaluk (Prototype) invites the viewers to the eponymous island state in the Arctic north between Canada and Greenland.
The Time That Separates Us (Parastoo Anoushahpour): Shot in Jordan and Palestine, Parastoo Anoushahpour’s essay film takes inspiration from the Sodom and Gomorrah tale of Lot to examine questions of family, geography, and the fraught ownership of narratives.
Time Tunnel: Takahiko Iimura at Kino Arsenal, 18. April 1973 (Takahiko Iimura): As a preview of the 60th founding anniversary of the Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek (today: Arsenal), the installation of videos by the Japanese avant-garde pioneer, who died in July 2022, commemorates a screening at the Arsenal cinema on Welserstraße.
Trip After (Ukrit Sa-nguanhai): Trip After is a 2022 travel vlog inspired by the reports of the 1960s United States Information Service mobile film units’ field trips for anti-communist psychological operations in Northeast Thailand.
Tsumikh (Taus Makhacheva): Tsumikh—a plateau in Dagestan—is turned into a stage set that collapses public memorialisation with personal memory of Makhacheva’s late grandfather, a prominent Soviet poet. Among other questions the film asks, who can claim a memory?
Yugantar Film Collective (Yugantar): The exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary is dedicated to the film collective Yugantar.
In-between World (Cana Bilir-Meier): Stories of migrants and their descendants in Germany: a monument for a Pakistani poet in Munich, the payslips of a Turkish Gastarbeiter in Kiel, three sisters turning a decolonial gaze on Bavarian history.
FORUM SPECIAL
Aufenthaltserlaubnis (Antonio Skármeta): In exile in Berlin, Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta celebrates the end of the autocrats: Franco’s death, Idi Amin on the run, the fall of the Shah. Cheerful farewell rituals accompany others facing political persecution on their way to fly home.
Ein Herbst im Ländchen Bärwalde (Gautam Bora): Indian director Gautam Bora documents the everyday work and life perspectives of a family of farmers from Brandenburg. An inverted ethnography on East German agriculture without romanticisation.
I Heard It through the Grapevine (Dick Fontaine): On the trail of the civil rights movement: with typical astuteness and charisma, James Baldwin returns to key locations of protest in the American South and sees old injustices repeated in new legal frameworks.
The Battle of the Sacred Tree (Wanjiru Kinyanjui): Mumbi leaves Nairobi for her ancestral village and gets into a quarrel with a Christian women’s group seeking to eradicate the remains of pre-colonial belief systems. Wanjiru Kinyanjui graduated from the DFFB with this smart comedy shot in Kenya.
Black Head (Korhan Yurtsever): Korhan Yurtsever’s feature is the story of a family’s disintegration, but also of left-wing activism in the context of Turkish migration to West Germany. The Turkish censorship office deemed it an insult to “the honour of Germany, our befriended nation”.
A Lover & Killer of Colour (Wanjiru Kinyanjui): “I strike with the brush until the white canvas tears.” Wanjiru Kinyanjui’s fiction short about a Black painter in West Berlin was shot on 16mm and draws its power from its atmospheric night scenes and self-confident stream of consciousness.
I, Your Mother (Safi Faye): “Sooner or later, I’ll return to where my other self is.” The everyday experiences of a Senegalese student in West Berlin are marked by a sense of uneasiness in Europe and his family’s expectations in the form of a constant stream of letters.
Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter (Yüksel Yavuz): The first generation of migrants before the camera held by the second: Yavuz creates a portrait of his father, who never felt at home in Germany and returned to his Kurdish village after working for 15 years at a Hamburg shipyard. His children stayed.
Other than That, I'm Fine (Eren Aksu): Aslı has recently moved to Berlin from Turkey. At a casting for an audio guide for a Berlin museum, she sees archaeological artefacts from her home. Via short encounters and precise images, Eren Aksu’s short film maps out a feeling of not belonging.
All in Order (Sohrab Shahid Saless): Iranian director Saless’ radical style was unique in the West German cinema of the 70s and 80s. His black-and-white film dissects the disturbed state of an unemployed construction engineer entirely at odds with social norms.
Oyoyo (Chetna Vora): Indian director Chetna Vora’s portrait of students in East Germany from Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Chile and Mongolia shows them chatting, studying, dancing and making music in their hall of residence.
The Devil Queen (Antonio Carlos da Fontoura): Brazil’s black acting icon Milton Gonçalves plays the queen of the Rio de Janeiro gangsters in this slice of queersploitation cinema from the military dictatorship era: flamboyant costumes, tons of makeup and even more fake blood.
BERLINALE CLASSICS
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer)
Mapantsula (Oliver Schmitz)
Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg)
Romeo and Juliet in the Village (Valerien Schmidely, Hans Trommer)
Sweet Dreams (Nanni Moretti)
Twilight (György Fehér)
A Woman of Paris (Charles Chaplin)
Undercurrent (Kōzaburō Yoshimura)
HOMAGE
Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg): A New York lawyer unsuccessfully defends a Russian spy in court. He then organises a prisoner exchange for him in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Based on historical events, Spielberg’s thriller sports the style of contemporary spy movies.
Duel (Steven Spielberg): Driving through the California desert, a businessman finds himself besieged and threatened by a tanker truck. To survive, he must draw on unknown reserves of courage. This breakneck gem of visual storytelling was Spielberg’s first theatrical release.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg): A lonely young boy gets a new best friend when he finds a small alien in the trash. This moving story of home and separation not only won over the hearts of millions of children, but became a box office smash with vast merchandising potential.
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg): The story of the colourful Fabelman family, and son Sammy’s passion for amateur movie-making. The film is Steven Spielberg’s homage to his own journey to a successful directing career, making it his most personal film to date.
Jaws (Steven Spielberg): After a great white shark kills several swimmers in a small resort town, three very different men set out to sea together to hunt the predator. Steven Spielberg’s thriller pioneered the blockbuster movie trend, using Hitchcockian cinematic devices.
Munich (Steven Spielberg): After the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Israeli secret service tasks a group of men with killing those deemed responsible. A high-octane thriller with international locations and actors that explores the legitimacy of violent retaliation.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg): In this opener in what would become a five-part franchise, Harrison Ford’s archaeologist Indian Jones skirmishes with Nazi henchmen on three continents. A fast-paced adventure film filled with tongue-in-cheek references to classic Hollywood movies.
Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg): One of Steven Spielberg’s most notable works. The multi-award-winning film tells the story of a manufacturer in Nazi-occupied Poland who managed to save more than 1000 of his Jewish employees from deportation to the concentration camp Auschwitz.