Playlist
This selection brings together films presented at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), held in Berlin, Germany, from February 12–22, 2026, showcasing bold contemporary cinema that reflects the festival’s long-standing commitment to artistic innovation, political engagement, and diverse global voices.
<p>In the arid Brazilian hinterland, girls play poised between their mothers’ difficult pasts and fantastic dreams for the future. In a place where men are still seen as giants compared to women, the girls cross the threshold from childhood into adolescence.</p>
<p>Novelist Tanja and web designer Jerome, both in their thirties, have perfected a balance of intimacy and separation in their long-distance relationship. When Tanja catches a glimpse of a settled future together, she wonders if it is really what she wants.</p>
<p>Lemmy Caution, a western intelligence agent in East Germany, travels through the unravelling country, visited by the ghosts of Germany past. A multi-layered collage of sound and image that uses numerous classic German films.</p>
<p>With this blisteringly funny, unapologetically confrontational satire, writer-director Spike Lee examined the past, present, and future of racism in American popular culture, issuing a daring provocation to creators and consumers alike. Under pressure to help revive his network’s low ratings, television writer Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) hits on an explosively offensive idea: bringing back blackface with The New Millennium Minstrel Show. The white network executives love it, and so do audiences, forcing Pierre and his collaborators to confront their public’s insatiable appetite for dehumanizing stereotypes. Shot primarily on unvarnished digital video and boasting spot-on performances from Wayans, Savion Glover, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tommy Davidson, Michael Rapaport, Mos Def, and Paul Mooney, Bamboozled is a stinging indictment of mass entertainment at the turn of the twenty-first century that looks more damning with each passing year.</p>
<p>When a streetlamp lights up on a country road in the jungle, a group of insects goes crazy – which proves to be handy for the hungry bats in a nearby cave.</p>
<p>A changing of track. Observations and interviews with border guards and commuters at Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse station in 1990, as the border between East and West Germany was becoming ever more porous and this crossing was already being dismantled.</p>
<p>Adorkable Luthando is on track for an ordinary year at the prestigious boarding school she attends on scholarship – until the arrival of a new girl in her class ignites Luthando’s suppressed desires and threatens her self-image and relationships.</p>
<p>A classic of New Black Cinema. Growing up in disadvantaged circumstances in a neighbourhood riddled with drugs, robberies and shoot-outs, a young man develops a strong personality that saves him from sliding into a life of crime.</p>
<p>Boys in Downeast Maine are shaped by the brutal winters, their harvesting of the ocean’s bounty and the rigid codes of their fathers. explores growing up in a community where a man’s worth is often defined by the strength of his back.</p>
<p>A psychological study of a “borderline” regime fanatic. A former East German border guard is unable to come to terms with the fall of the Wall. The widowed loner continues to show up for “duty” at the abandoned border crossing where his behaviour ends in tragedy.</p>
<p>Ten‑year‑old Rabia defies rural superstition and bureaucratic neglect to uncover why her school abruptly closed. Untangling eerie rumours, corrupt local power, and silence, she undertakes a solitary, courageous search for truth and justice.</p>
<p>A visual study of believers and religious charlatans in Siberia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A fascinated Werner Herzog encounters real spirituality and genuine ecstatics, but also dubious faith healers and shamans.</p>
<p>After the Red Army withdraws from the former East Germany, a Russian major is left wandering aimlessly around Berlin, which he experiences as a theatre of the absurd. A post-socialist satire incorporating documentary fragments and archival footage.</p>
<p>Citizens of East Germany talk about their experiences and feelings in the face of upcoming elections that will lead to reunification with the West. The past is tinged with regret, frustration and anger, while the future is uncertain.</p>
<p>In a greenhouse in southern Spain, Iván falls in love with his newly hired co-worker, Hadoum. But his long-awaited promotion interferes with their relationship, forcing Iván to decide what kind of person he wants to be.</p>
<p>A journey to Michoacán’s hypermasculine rodeos descends into the subconscious of memory, queer desire, and longing, leading to a reckoning with the wounds and beauty of a home left behind.</p>
<p>Beguilingly staged, yet with a documentary feel, the film follows four women travelling alone from western Europe and the USA who are taken hostage by a Mongolian princess and establish close contact with the culture of “the most hospitable people on Earth”.</p>
<p>Spike Lee’s cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson’s directorial debut. A story of four young Black men in Harlem featuring hip-hop stars Tupac Shakur and Queen Latifah. Quincy dreams of becoming a star DJ, while his pal Bishop wants to be a rich gangster.</p>
<p>Krzysztof Kieślowski's international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Though unknown to each other, the two women share an enigmatic, emotional bond, which Kieślowski details in gorgeous reflections, colors, and movements. Aided by Slawomir Idziak's shimmering cinematography and Zbigniew Preisner's haunting, operatic score, Kieślowski creates one of cinema's most purely metaphysical works. The Double Life of Véronique is an unforgettable symphony of feeling.</p>
<p>Lola has 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 marks or a gangster will kill her boyfriend. The film is split into three segments, each depicting a possible way to get the money. A flash-forward photo story – a post-modern bricolage as cinematic loop.</p>
<p>Lola is part of “The Migrant Workers”, a Turkish drag queen troupe who perform to great acclaim. Lola’s gay little brother Murat, on the other hand, is just beginning his search for an identity. An intense family drama set in “Anatolian” Berlin-Kreuzberg.</p>
<p>Bobby shuttles between Vienna and Salzburg, picking up strangers. Their conversations range from casual to intimate, revealing how anonymous connections create warmth in modern Europe.</p>
<p>Following crackdowns on protests in Iran, civilians begin documenting the unrest from behind windows. When a woman is shot while recording, a film student writes her a letter raising the question: Can revolution emerge from behind windows?</p>
<p>Callie and Minnie’s relationship is suddenly upended at the start of the summer before their senior year of high school. Left rudderless without her charismatic best friend, Minnie starts to form a complicated friendship with Callie’s mother.</p>
<p>Rong Chen would like to keep her place in the recorder group, Shao Yu wants to give up playing. She asks him for tips, and by practicing together, they not only improve their skills, but also learn something much more important from each other.</p>
<p>Seventeen-year-old Ni’er feels trapped between her monotonous daily grind at a petrol station and the weight of family expectations. A fleeting encounter with a female truck driver radiating freedom and self-determination sparks a quiet revolution within her.</p>
<p>Suzanne and Osmane meet in crisis-ridden Beirut. Osmane is a young Sudanese man without papers, searching for a better future; Suzanne is a widow with Palestinian roots more than twice his age. Against all odds, they fall in love.</p>
<p>When a boy has trouble falling asleep at night, he begins to ponder his place in the world. If the Earth is just a small marble flying through space, and he is only one child among many, what is the meaning of his existence?</p>
<p>A radical cinematic letter about the hardships facing women in the collapsing Soviet Union. Shot in Belarus, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Siberia, these interviews and observations document the exploitation and repression of an unwavering patriarchal doctrine.</p>
<p>Papaya, a tiny seed in the Amazon rainforest who is passionate about flying, must keep moving to avoid taking root. But when she discovers the power of her roots, it triggers a revolution that transforms her world and fulfils her dreams in an unexpected way.</p>
<p>After she is arrested for organising an illegal dance party, a madcap New Yorker works in a public library to pay off her bail money. Parker Posey is brilliant as the “Gen X Holly Golightly” in this indie version of a screwball comedy.</p>
<p>A maverick living in a trailer in Kreuzberg has a heroin habit that wrecks his relationship and, in the end, his entire precarious existence. The film is a graphic, sometimes extreme portrayal of the queer, off-the-grid milieu in gritty West Berlin.</p>
<p>After the nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl, a journalist attempts to report from the site of the catastrophe. is an unusual disaster film, with decay raging on many levels, interspersed with astonishing breaks from reality.</p>
<p>Horse-obsessed Jaleal comes of age on the West Yorkshire moors while carrying forward the ancient cavalry sport of neza bazi. Filmed over three summers, this joyful portrait blows the dust off traditional tales of Empire, migration and belonging.</p>
<p>A boy who no longer speaks, shaped by a tyrannical father and a mother he both resents and loves, grows up on Japan’s northern coast. With nowhere to belong, he returns to seek his father and sets his fate in motion.</p>
<p>An improvised circle dance of some 100 players on the streets of Austin, Texas. The fanciful experiences and absurd dialogue of these young “slackers” turn Richard Linklater’s first theatrical outing into a manifesto for Generation X.</p>
<p>A young Turkish man working in West Berlin looks for a girlfriend in East Berlin, so he can move there and save up money faster for a return to Istanbul. This culture-clash comedy was Andreas Dresen’s graduation film at the Konrad Wolf film school.</p>
<p>After a racist assault, prosecutor Seyo Kim pursues her own case through the courts, challenging both her attackers and a legal system that ignores right-wing extremism.</p>
<p>A satire about a West Berlin commercial producer with an East German background. To stave off his company’s bankruptcy and collect a second round of Western aid money, he “repeats” his flight from East Berlin – on, of all days, November 9, 1989.</p>
<p>On a sweltering summer day, Bianca feels unseen by her parents. Then an unexpected encounter with her favourite female actor, Billie King, helps her to find herself. A tender, imaginative tale about dreams and carving out a space for yourself in life.</p>
<p>Grace is born of dual heritage: she has a white British mother and a Black Jamaican father. As she reaches her early teens, Grace takes her identity into her own hands and begins to navigate how to exist as a young woman, fully Black, fully white.</p>
<p>An actor dresses up as the former Yugoslavian ruler, Tito. Walking around Belgrade, he talks to passers-by, evoking a variety of reactions. This “happening” triggers heated discussions, documented on film.</p>
<p>Thirty years of war, seven million displaced, ten million dead. is a plunge into the chaos of the city of Goma, capital of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.</p>
<p>A Chinese wannabe artist drifts between Berlin’s overwhelming queer scene and her traditional family in Beijing. With wit and insight, the film follows her search for identity and belonging in a globalised but polarised world.</p>
<p>After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Margarita, Yuri and their friends are pushed into exile from Russia as they refuse to comply with the regime. Suspended between countries, they have nowhere to return, and nowhere they feel truly welcome.</p>
<p>A minute-by-minute chronology of the Romanian revolution in December 1989 in Bucharest. This cinematic montage of live footage from the state television company TVR and video taken by numerous amateurs becomes a new media-based form of historiography.</p>
<p>Shot with an all-female crew on Super 8, Wildwood, NJ catapults the audience into the lives and stories of young American women in the 1990s. Yet under the blazing sun of the Jersey Shore, it also sometimes reveals the underbelly of the boardwalk carnival.</p>
<p>Seventeen-year-old Sara is hiding a secret on a school trip. When the trip spirals out of control and Sara witnesses a classmate’s sexual assault, she and the girl seal a bond that will last forever.</p>
<p>The film focuses on the light and shadow playing on the walls of the Castro Camera Store, a location in Gus Van Sant’s . The soundtrack features Harvey Milk himself, shortly after his election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.</p>
<p>The city of Delhi is a site of constant excavation, formed by fragments of what is left behind. Archaeology becomes method and metaphor, revealing an absence in the ground around which the city forms.</p>
<p>Caught in the crossfire of their parents’ divorce, Nina and Eli are torn between loyalty, anger and a longing to be seen. Through their mirrored perspectives the same story unfolds, revealing how love can fracture and still find its way home.</p>
<p>Keitaro lives in a fireworks factory that is about to be shut down. He is determined to unravel the mystery of the Shuhari, a mythical firework created by his father before he disappeared without a trace – and launch it before the factory closes.</p>
<p>In the wake of the American Civil War, veteran Jacob Hansen’s dream of a new life in Friendship, Wisconsin becomes a nightmare. As an epidemic spreads chaos, Jacob – sheriff, undertaker and pastor – must fight to save his town, his family and his soul.</p>
<p>Lilia returns to Tunisia for her uncle’s funeral and reunites with a family that knows nothing about her life in Paris, especially her love life. Determined to confront her family’s secrets, Lilia sets out to unravel the mystery of her uncle’s sudden death.</p>
<p>After the death of their mother, twin sisters face eviction from the loft that has been their home for more than three decades – a place like a living time capsule, filled with layers of memory, art, motherhood, sisterhood and New York history.</p>
<p>On a school bus ride that feels both endless and fleeting, Agastya wrestles with identity, guilt and unspoken emotions when his best friend chooses to sit elsewhere.</p>
<p>Menlibayeva explores fake news, propaganda and the power and powerlessness of AI through a disturbing animated film on political violence in post-Soviet Kazakhstan that culminates in January 2022. From fragments towards a countermemory.</p>
<p>In the outskirts of Lima, eleven-year-old Chito cares for the carrier pigeons used in his brother’s drug trade. After violence shatters his childhood, grief and a fragile gesture of humanity open the possibility of another destiny.</p>
<p>Twelve-year-old Maxi lives in the slums of Manila where he is the calm centre of his petty criminal family. They accept his homosexuality – but when Maxi befriends a young police officer, conflict at home is inevitable.</p>
<p>Behind the walls of a young offender institution, Troy is thrust into a brutal world of gangs, loyalty and violence from the moment he arrives. When an unspoken bond develops with a fellow inmate, it becomes a dangerous vulnerability for them.</p>
<p>A supermarket as both a microcosm of Japanese society and the setting for a socially critical horror film. Expressionless faces and a supervisor who demands zombie-like friendliness. Only the young Sakai does not stop hoping. What a debut!</p>
<p>Sámi reindeer herder Maia fights to protect her ancestral lands from a looming mining project. Amid the growing protests, she is also confronted with deeply buried family traumas. Maia is forced to make a decision.</p>
<p>After serendipitously finding a bundle of money, a poor villager tries his luck in the big city. There, he encounters a range of people also hoping for a better life – preachers, soothsayers, jugglers. A seminal work of post-colonial Moroccan cinema.</p>
<p>After a stint in rehab, a woman returns to her family’s Cape Cod home where sobriety forces her to confront buried trauma and the terrifying question of who she is without her career as a dancer.</p>
<p>After mistakenly buying two right-footed shoes, a ten-year-old boy sets off across the countryside to find the missing left one. An unexpected journey of courage, friendship and self-discovery.</p>
<p>A year in Berlin: Leonie wanders through the city and the texts of Anna Maria Ortese. Speaking with friends and translator Sigrid Vagt, she is also looking for the narrative threads of her own life. A film about reading, shot in glowing, matter-of-fact 16mm.</p>
<p>An archive-driven exploration of the life, work, and legacy of iconic, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer.</p>
<p>Pascale accompanies her Egyptian friend Amr on his rocky path to a residency permit. The system, authorities, lawyer, papers, paperwork, a language course. A refreshingly honest film full of solidarity about “the state of migration” and “se comprendre”.</p>
<p>Decades in the making, Haile Gerima’s sweeping survey of Italy’s brutal colonial legacy in Ethiopia is a monumental reckoning with suppressed history. With a balladeer’s spirit, Gerima forges an epic saga of resistance, freedom and national pride.</p>
<p>A techno-mythological ritual of light and sound to an imagined demigod born of a yam. This 16mm expanded cinema performance evokes the spectres of ritualism and mythic idols in our modern times.</p>
<p>This analogue multi-screen installation is part of the ongoing artistic research project “Expanded Spectropoetics”. It addresses collections from natural history museums to activate haunting memories of the forthcoming.</p>
<p>When Camille, a teenager with Down’s syndrome, auditions for a dance troupe, her sister Agathe discovers the quiet cruelty of prejudice – and the fierce love that fights back.</p>
<p>In Beirut, actors audition for a film based on a soldier’s diary written in Jerusalem in 1915. They interpret scenes, reflect on the First World War and the present-day, and explore longing, identity and memory.</p>
<p>In a villa in the north of Iran, the dividing lines between different generations of a family and those separating celebration from discord are sounded out, as is the meaning of love. An intense, wild and philosophical depiction of contemporary Iran.</p>
<p>La Maestra and Paula are inseparable friends and the strongest swimmers on their team, until an incident at a party forces them to choose between silence and speaking out, testing the limits of their friendship.</p>
<p>When their city is placed under siege, the lives of a group of ordinary people are turned upside down, forcing each of them to confront impossible choices in pursuit of what they believe is survival in a war zone.</p>
<p>Tracing biographical lines, Volker Koepp steps into his oeuvre, rich in encounters. Returning to Lithuania, Moldova and Czernowitz, he looks back and brings things up to date, as the war against Ukraine becomes a determining element of the present. Epic.</p>
<p>In the remote Siberian Arctic, an Indigenous Sakha scientist descends into the depths of the melting permafrost. Searching for an ancient creature, he makes his way through the dangerous, claustrophobic caves to the mythical realm of the Underworld.</p>
<p>On an intergalactic cruise for singles, lonely souls chase a kiss, a caress or just a glimpse of love among the stars. A colourful collision of desire, longing, humour and absurdity.</p>
<p>In Nigeria, the young art collective The Critics, armed with makeshift gear, conjures homemade sci-fi spectacles, chronicling their reality while blasting into wild imagined worlds. A vibrant documentary and a gleeful ode to the power of (self) invention.</p>
<p>Paco, a teenager from Guadalajara, explores his identity through his friendship with Andrea and his attraction to Mario. This tests his bond with his grandmother as he prepares for the feast of the patron saint.</p>
<p>A film in which two celebrations of life, a wedding in France and a commemoration in Guinea Bissau, are organically intertwined with the threads of a family and heritage that live and travel between these two worlds. Perpetual circular movement framing reality.</p>
<p>Flavia’s mother a carer in Italy; her father on a building site. Luca and Tina supposed to be looked after by their fragile grandmother. A wonderful coming-of-age film about growing up among those of the same age when the adults have left the stage.</p>
<p>After 14 years away, Hein returns to his home village on a remote island, only to discover that the close-knit community no longer recognises him. Suspecting him to be an impostor, they demand a trial to determine his true identity.</p>
<p>A rough wind is blowing between the dreary apartment blocks. In this world of adults, a rebellious boy struggles to find his way and encounters violence everywhere he turns. A portrait of a society in fragmented images.</p>
<p>The Blood Countess and her maid embark on a quest for the red elixir of life and a book that threatens the vampire realm. Hot on their heels are a police inspector, two vampirologists, a vegetarian nephew and his therapist.</p>
<p>Instead of finding a “proper” job, Alf, pushing 40, lives with his mum and drifts though Norrköping’s cultural scene. Chats and faces, routines and intuitions, local politics and everyday life – the intimate and the social, in black-and-white analogue images.</p>
<p>An intimate portrait of the celebrated artist. As the boundary between reality and performance blurs, the shifting relationship between filmmaker and subject calls into question who is actually making the film.</p>
<p>At the end of the 1990s, during the height of the Belgian tech boom, visionary entrepreneurs Luc and Geert watch their empire collapse as news of their fraud breaks. With just one day of freedom left, they part ways in search of redemption.</p>
<p>In mourning, Anat Even began travelling with a camera along the Gaza Strip after October 7 – again and again. Striving to show the reality of this painful border. Trying not to look away. An essay about questions of causality and responsibility.</p>
<p>“It seems to be the time to consider bridges.” – James Benning</p>
<p>In the microcosm of a small village, paths and fates cross. A car is burning at the roadside, pigs are dying in their sties and a man is lying on a park bench. Is he dead? Who is to blame, who is responsible and when did the playful mood turn sour?</p>
<p>With his monumental productions, Einar Schleef pushed theatre to the outer reaches, confounded expectations in East and West alike, grappled with GDR origins and the BRD present. A universal artist emerges from the archive: “I’m not human, I’m dynamite”.</p>
<p>In a land not their own, amid a dwindling forest, a family carves out a fragile bubble of tenderness – a fleeting garden of hope where love can still take root.</p>
<p>Strange images overlap like floating ghosts: a dead body, a singer, an audience. The film shows, paradoxically and theatrically, how death inhabits the León de Greiff Auditorium in Colombia.</p>
<p>Nine-year-old Milo lives in a remote Argentinian village where he studies the Malambo, a folk dance full of bravura. He is an excellent dancer, but Milo’s only desire is to escape the countryside on a train for the Buenos Aires of his dreams.</p>
<p>Following the disappearance of her teacher, the pregnant pupil Yun-ji is left all alone. To pay for an abortion, she steals the savings of her roommate, Kyung-sun. A film about the rights over one’s own body, about society and community.</p>
<p>Yios, a lonely mythical boy whose head shines like the sun, struggles to make friends in the clouds. After an unfortunate prank sends him down to Earth, an unexpected encounter challenges the way he sees himself.</p>
<p>To avoid losing custody of her six-year-old daughter in Manila, Luz, an undocumented Filipina cleaner working in a luxury Swiss ski resort, must earn money at any cost – even if it means transgressing her own moral limits.</p>
<p>After losing his friend Poupelle, young Lubicchi wanders into a mysterious realm where a clock in a tower is frozen at 11:59. To return home, he must restart it – and find the courage to believe again.</p>
<p>Three women, three lives in parallel worlds, until the moment a fly causes a bug in the system. The universe collapses, sex is in the air, bras are overrated and the stars twinkle.</p>
<p>Subu makes pornographic films. He sees nothing wrong with it. They are an aid to a repressed society, and he uses the money to support his landlady, Haru, and her family. From time to time, Haru shares her bed with Subu, though she believes her dead husband, reincarnated as a carp, disapproves. Director Shohei Imamura has always delighted in the kinky exploits of lowlifes, and in this 1966 classic, he finds subversive humor in the bizarre dynamics of Haru, her Oedipal son, and her daughter, the true object of her pornographer-boyfriend's obsession. Imamura's comic treatment of such taboos as voyeurism and incest sparked controversy when the film was released, but The Pornographers has outlasted its critics, and now seems frankly ahead of its time.</p>
<p>“Who are you and what defines you?”, Lea is asked by the production crew of a reality talent show. She does not know. And with this question, her search for an identity within and beyond her family’s hotel in the forests of the former East Germany begins.</p>
<p>At the height of his career, legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans loses his bassist and musical soulmate in a tragic car crash. The film portrays the inner life of a musical genius as he struggles to learn that sometimes an intermission is part of the music.</p>
<p>In Mexico, Tere, a musician-composer, opens her home to a TV interview with a friend, as topics meander and new voices drift in. An absurdist comical chamber piece that skewers art-world hypocrisy, mocks pretension and celebrates a singular womanly bond.</p>
<p>When an interdimensional rupture unravels reality, an unlikely hero must channel her newfound powers to fight bizarre and bewildering dangers from the multiverse as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.</p>
<p>Turn of the year 1967/68: at the fourth EXPRMNTL festival in the Belgian seaside resort of Knokke, the film documents spontaneous performances, happenings and protest actions, capturing – only a few months before May ’68 – the harbingers of cultural upheaval.</p>
<p>Deep down in the bowels of a mountain, a Dutch geologist’s volcanic theories clash with local cosmologies in the Indonesian archipelago. Colonial science encounters the poetic, radical possibilities of reading nature otherwise.</p>
<p>Gugu, an almost-twelve-year-old boy with football dreams, is raised in the accepting care of his grandmother, Dilma. As she becomes increasingly frail and their world shifts, he struggles to protect the place where he is free to be who he is.</p>
<p>Tee girl Isabel feels strangely drawn to Dr. Palanca, the president of the country club where she works. However, after piecing together a violent picture of what lies beneath the club’s pristine surface, she realizes that what began as an innocent infatuation is actually rooted in a sinister shared history. Displaying an extraordinary command of his surreal and unnerving visual language, first-time filmmaker Rafael Manuel adapts his award-winning 2020 short film of the same name to chilling effect. Manuel plumbs the depths of Filipino identity and national consciousness to uncover ominous fragments and cracks that defy picture-perfect unity. Through a stylized, colorful approach lensed with care and precision by cinematographer Xenia Patricia, Manuel takes us into a world where violence and control are exerted with the subtle flick of a wrist or tip of a hat. Painting a scathing portrait of class disparities and post-colonial power structures in ways that are both quiet and unsettling, Filipiñana announces the arrival of an accomplished writer-director who unflinchingly confronts his country’s past, present, and future.</p>
<p>In silent, black-and-white sequences, Yoko Ono shows naked, walking buttocks. The Fluxfilm from 1966 offers a new take on the portrait, proposing an image of humanity in its most vulnerable and egalitarian form.</p>
<p>Between light, metal and silver, a collection of solidarity pins turns into an archive of another scale: spectres of exile and international struggle against Portugal’s fascist and colonial regime.</p>
<p>A visual and acoustic reflection about perception, deception, truth and the medium of film itself. Between visibility, irritation, structure and dissolution, a space arises for one’s own vision. An experimental film that wants to be experienced.</p>
<p>Suely, an Indigenous woman living in a large Brazilian city, spends her days in a small apartment. In her dreams, she communicates with a forest and connects to secrets of a world undergoing radical changes.</p>
<p>An Alzheimer’s-plagued mother’s fear of tigers in Assam sparks a multi-location probe into the US army unit supplying Kunming in WWII. A collective quest through history’s butterfly effects, told via found stories and turned hybrid.</p>
<p>In 2017, young Mapuche Rafael Nahuel was killed by police in the Patagonian forest. Site visits, court proceedings – the film unites the elements involved in solving the crime. Meticulously observed: the struggle for civil rights and narrating history.</p>
<p>In the northern Alps, Anne, Hélène and Suzanne take turns looking after a mountain hut. Through the seasons, hikers come and go. Stories bloom and fade, leaving each of them facing the silence of their chosen solitude and the poetry of nature.</p>
<p>The uninterrupted light trail of one year and ten months, condensed down to 20 minutes, filmed on a self-made camera. Daily rhythms accelerate, slowly at first, then more intensely. A structuralist film about transience.</p>
<p>Who knows how many films would have been lost forever if it weren’t for a lousy quality VHS tape? Frauen in Berlin is one such nearly lost work. The graduation project of Chetna Vora, a student from the Indian state of Gujarat, who had come to the German Democratic Republic through the nation’s foreign student programme. Originally she had set out to learn book printing, but after a while found herself at the GDR’s film school in Potsdam, Babelsberg, where she studied directing.</p>
<p>While making a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an Iranian filmmaker is thrust into war himself. He is forced to flee Tehran with his family, and his political essay transforms into a twelve‑day diary of survival, exile and identity.</p>
<p>A man develops a phobia of knives and turns to psychoanalysis for help. A psychological thriller in the strict sense of the term. Accompanied by music by Yongbom Lee, with the neural activity of one musician translated live into light and sound.</p>
<p>Life is good for Derya and Aziz, a celebrated artist couple from Turkey, until an incident at their play’s premiere. Suddenly targeted by the state and struggling to balance their ideals with life’s necessities, their marriage is pushed to a breaking point.</p>
<p>She has just finished the shoot of an independent film and now has to give three interviews about it. Afterwards, in her acting class, her teacher asks her to reenact the interviews. But for some reason, she is unable to remember them.</p>
<p>Joko Anwar’s supernatural horror-comedy set in a prison: inmates must unite against a murderous ghost who turns corpses into art installations. Staying calm is near-impossible – and riotously funny, laced with sharp jabs at power, corruption and violence.</p>
<p>A man from the future enters a diner in Los Angeles. He has to recruit exactly the right combination of people from the customers present for a nighttime mission to save the world.</p>
<p>In this speculative video essay, the filmmaker connects his medical history with the shifts in post-Cold War geopolitics and their impact on contemporary politics.</p>
<p>As the 1973 military coup unfolds in Chile, Air Force Captain Jorge Silva is torn between duty and conscience as his academy turns into a detention centre.</p>
<p>Due to family matters, Suna returns to the Turkish village where she is from. Riven with cracks caused by drought, her parental home is as fragile as the relationships between the local people. Undeterred, Suna shines a light into the past’s dark corners.</p>
<p>The filmmaker writes a letter to her cat, Henry. She is looking for a soft and tender place to inhabit – a quiet refuge of warmth to retreat into when the world becomes too loud. An ode to our captive pets and the intimate worlds we build together.</p>
<p>When violence erupts before the 1985 European Cup Final at Brussels’ Heysel Stadium, killing 39 people, the mayor’s daughter and a journalist are drawn into the heart of the tragedy, caught between professional duty, family loyalty and moral responsibility.</p>
<p>A budgie finds itself in a luxurious wellness hotel that promises stressed birds peace and relaxation. But between the lulling sound of the fountains and soothing massages, it longs only to return to the safety of its cage.</p>
<p>In 1949, a girl disappears from an isolated house in the Black Forest. Fifty years later, another girl disappears. Now, in the present, the ghosts of the past step out of the shadows once more in this six-part mystery series.</p>
<p>There is a murder at a snowed-in mountain hotel. Could supernatural forces be at work here? This genre-busting film noir with elements of fantasy is based on the eponymous book by legendary Soviet writing duo Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.</p>
<p>Fifty-something Rosa, lying in an MRI scanner, is prompted to summon a happy memory. She plunges into a meandering, subconscious road trip with her bubbly mother, where wild imagination becomes a tender, unruly form of therapy.</p>
<p>Heike, a customer service manager at an understaffed cleaning company, must secure more working hours and revenue for a subcontractor after she is caught trying to poach an employee from his company.</p>
<p>Alcohol addiction is a constant in Pepa Lubojacki’s family. In an attempt to find a sisterly way of dealing with it, text, long-term observation, beats and AI-animated photos are combined into an unflinching, yet loving form of disclosure.</p>
<p>Late at night, two lab assistants analyse an unknown substance. A coffee break turns into a fortune-telling session, shifting their gaze from science to intuition. They imagine a space where rational inquiry and foresight coexist.</p>
<p>In Caazapá, the “city of magic and legends”, two Paraguayan students are searching for happiness, gold and a magic bird. Their European dropout neighbours are hoping for freedom, healing and salvation from Armageddon. Everything has its price.</p>
<p>Mirna and her father take the bus from their village to the city of Niš for her to participate in the national mathematics competition. It is a big day: winning an award could gain her a place at a prestigious school and pave the way to a better future.</p>
<p>At architecture college in 1974 New Delhi, student Annie fails his final exams four times because the dean has it in for him. Now he is facing his fifth attempt. This whimsical campus comedy with a screenplay by Arundhati Roy became a cult hit.</p>
<p>A cartographic installation with 16mm archival photographs and essayistic travelogues, weaving together the Baghdad Railway’s history and the denial of genocidal politics with the migration routes of eastern Anatolian minorities.</p>
<p>Isabel, a sommelière in São Paulo, dreams of escaping her boss and opening her own bar. When plans do not go as expected, she must decide whether to halt everything or take bold steps to uncork her fate on her own terms.</p>
<p>Young women in the country, a village disco – idyllic? Far from it. Life in 1970s Hungary already forces 14-year-olds to choose: marriage (for which everything is ready) or profession (for which a woman must fight). Judit Elek: “My most important film.”</p>
<p>After 8-year-old Josephine accidentally witnesses a crime in Golden Gate Park, she acts out in search of a way to regain control of her safety while adults are helpless to console her.</p>
<p>African American composer Julius Eastman’s music and voice take turns. Sparked by colonial and life history. Raw, radical, crystal clear. A multipart, flashy, transnational-collective performance by six artists. An homage.</p>
<p>During his wanderings through Edo-era Japan, a young ninja warrior meets eight opponents who present him with demonic challenges. An anime film full of action, splatter and fantasy elements, that was quickly recognised as a masterpiece of the genre.</p>
<p>In the heart of the Alta Guajira, 15-year-old Weinshi, a girl from the Wayuu people whose name means “Time”, begins to hear an ancestral calling in her dreams: the earth must be healed through her people’s sacred dance, the Yonna.</p>
<p>In a cave situated between the ridges of a human fingerprint, a primordial encounter with matter, light and sound unfolds.</p>
<p>Morning routines and conversations in bed, gossip and real talk. In encounters and interviews, D. Smith portrays four Black trans sex workers in New York and Georgia. The protagonists discuss their lives with relish but without any sugar-coating. The conversations that emerge are deep and passionate reflections on socio-political and social realities as well as perceptive analyses of belonging and identity within the Black community and beyond. Dramatisations and reconstructions, performative interventions and associative collages of biographical set pieces are brought together organically in haunting black-and-white images accompanied by a carefully deployed soundtrack. Dreams and memories, battles fought and crises overcome are openly addressed without skirting topics such as precarity and violence. The protagonists also tell us about their lovers, friends and families, and how these relationships are marked by taboos and fetishisation, but also by their own desires. This vibrant portrait gives them space for their uninhibited and defiant narratives and undermines white, cis-heteronormative assumptions and stigmatisations.</p>
<p>A ghost trapped in stone meets the director's elderly grandmother, sparking an intimate conversation that weaves through haunting footage both real and staged.</p>
<p>After a pacifist artwork incurs the displeasure of totalitarian state authorities, its creator is accused of the murder of a state official. A Ukrainian political drama, influenced by German expressionist films and the Ukrainian avant-garde movement.</p>
<p>In a remote village, an exiled clan returns, reviving a decades-old land feud. Seized by divine visions, Mesut challenges his brother’s leadership to save his people. Will this new path bring salvation or tragedy?</p>
<p>One member of the family is not remembered – only 25 photos of the uncle who died of AIDS remain. His nephew asks both his mother, who looks back via the pictures, and AI tool Google Vision API, which reads the photo data statistically. Memory cultures.</p>
<p>Based on Isabel Allende’s book, “The House of the Spirits”, the series follows three generations of the revolutionary and resilient Trueba women through a remote and conservative South American nation of upheaval, disaster and magic.</p>
<p>Dimitri loves photographing friends, strangers, lovers. Over the years, images have slipped away from his sight. Behind his camera, he gathers light and bodies, inviting us to gaze toward the hidden face of the Earth.</p>
<p>Patricio works for his sisters and feels trapped in a life that no longer fits him. Searching for change, he agrees to go on a date with a mysterious man.</p>
<p>In 1616 Flanders, a city is facing the influx of Spanish troops. The clever townswomen use courage and charm to make sure the occupation is peaceful. A nimble costume drama with visual references to Flemish painting.</p>
<p>In the sprawling African metropolis of Lagos, a fiercely independent young cab driver meets a band of radiantly reckless sex workers whose sisterhood pulls her into danger and joy, setting her on a journey toward her own transformation.</p>
<p>Bound by love and haunted by fate, Zeba and Sajawal spiral through feelings of desire, superstition and fear in , a darkly comic tale where the living share a restless world with the ghosts.</p>
<p>is an 8-bit video game that reimagines the history and legacy of colonialism, letting players symbolically confront intergenerational trauma through arcade-style gameplay.</p>
<p>A little boy, bored with building a bed, seeks something more exciting. A mischievous fire creature lures him into a magical mushroom world, where anything is possible and adventure awaits – beyond his father’s reach.</p>
<p>is a heady cocktail of unsentimental boozer film and touching love story. His portrayal of an alcoholic who sets out to drink himself to death in the neon-lit Sin City of the title garnered Nicolas Cage an Oscar.</p>
<p>Dembe died of an overdose in the distant metropolis of Dakar. His father refuses to bury him in the family graveyard in the village, believing that his soul has become “impure”. Dembe’s mother decides to take matters into her own hands.</p>
<p>In English, we say “rich, richer, the richest”. In Yiddish, we say “Rach (which means rich), Miè Guizoukt (which means: may it happen to me), A Ganèf (what a thief!)”. According to the director, this film will almost make you Jewish.</p>
<p>A train passes through a tunnel and hurtles onto a station. Time and space are toyed with. Composed to the first part of “Drumming” by Steve Reich. Presented in memory of Flo and Ken Jacobs.</p>
<p>This provocative, ironic and playful film from the early 1990s focuses on subtitles and other marginal phenomena, making an entertaining attempt to intertwine the various layers of film, visual language, speech and mood.</p>
<p>An invisible bond links a young cam girl and a trade fair hostess, making the impossibility of female satisfaction all too apparent. Constant disquiet pervades this Elfriede Jelinek adaptation, fuelled by the dismal promises of late capitalism.</p>
<p>Innocence descends into savagery when a group of English schoolboys become desert island castaways in the first television adaptation of William Golding’s landmark dystopian classic.</p>
<p>Cheekily inverted gender roles, history revisited, empowerment. The weapons here: long fingernails and AI counterimages that serve to expand the visual canon of imagined collectives. Things never archived become visible and culturally imaginable.</p>
<p>With formal rigour and subtly playing with genre, body and soul, this story of knots and liberation follows Lilian, who is as inscrutable as her desires, constrained by a pact of celibacy. When her father dies, she returns to the place of her past.</p>
<p>On a quiet late-summer day, Alessandro and Flavio set out in search of the last secrets of their city. Sitting on the branch of a large cherry tree, they wait for the night. A beer with friends, mopeds heading home, and a farewell.</p>
<p>After her mother’s death, Nao retreats to a Zen temple to wrestle with grief. Blending family archives, hand-drawn animation and performance art, this seductively meditative documentary explores suffering, and the gentle art of transcending it.</p>
<p>After gaining alcohol-fuelled superpowers, Ricardo, a young punk from the outskirts, sets out to change society. But one brutal mistake ignites an international conflict, with him at the heart of the storm.</p>
<p>What connects the clones of Paris Hilton and rapper Haftbefehl and why are people sick of performing on social media? We find out from Leandra’s questionnaire, which is answered by a chatbot fed by Elisa. How to appear online? Be a hottie! Frindz??!</p>
<p>An ordinary workday on a building site. Forty-year-old crane operator Thomas receives a call from his wife: he has to pick her up from the hospital. Once there, he finds her sitting alone on a park bench, crying.</p>
<p>A man dies young. Funeral rites – yes; mourning – not so much. A death that stirs and shakes things up. A film that shows the violence of family relationships with uncanny subtlety and verve, the pendulum of void and solace. What a debut feature!</p>
<p>A live expanded cinema performance: a realm of light and shadow blending with sound textures. Moving images and material collages create a dreamlike landscape, awakening something undiscovered and untamed.</p>
<p>Seventeen-year-old Gerardo hopelessly wanders the streets after a breakup. He is tormented by images: every male body reminds him of his lover. Gerardo desperately seeks to cling to the dying embers of their love …</p>
<p>A love story about a crime family. And not your usual gangster series – no shootouts or drug deals. Instead, the story is told through the eyes (and the imagination) of the family’s daughter, who is desperately searching for love.</p>
<p>A film letter from the director to her aunt, who was murdered by her partner. She talks about the aftermath of the femicide, her grief, the family’s persistent fear and how she has managed to break the silence to open a space for healing.</p>
<p>More than 400 dusty job application letters in an abandoned GDR factory tell of the personal circumstances and memories of a generation. Wishes and fears are laid bare in the effort to find a place in the free market economy.</p>
<p>A travel film along a trajectory that does not actually allow travel. A gay couple in a place where homosexuality is a punishable felony. confronts institutional boundaries in today’s Middle East.</p>
<p>The world is forcing humans into excessive work. For the sake of the future and their loved ones, they sacrifice sleep to keep on working. It is at this moment that a dark figure appears and takes possession of their bodies.</p>
<p>Olga rents out a room to a man whose wife has been admitted to a hospital nearby. However, the man has a nine-year-old son he has been sneaking into the room, which leads to Olga’s carefully controlled world shifting as their lives become intertwined.</p>
<p>is an intimate portrait of Lagos bodybuilders. Close-ups of inflated muscles, bulging veins and glistening skin blur into abstract forms, reflecting on the shifting embodiment and representation of the Black male body.</p>
<p>South Central L.A., the 1980s: family, friends, neighbours and class relations are all a source of worry for the young Pierce. Following , Burnett’s second film wrote Black cinema (and ) history thanks to its social profundity.</p>
<p>Young-oak is a boy with a girl’s name at a boys’ school rich in testosterone. His mother is not concerned. Veteran director Chung Ji-young allows the violence of South Korea’s early years to slam into this complex identity drama with the force of a comet.</p>
<p>Paraguay, 1958. The charismatic Narciso returns from Buenos Aires with rock ’n’ roll in his veins. Under the suffocating military regime, he becomes a music sensation and a symbol of freedom. But then, after his final show, he is found dead …</p>
<p>The film stages a fictional trial around the 2010 Bangkok massacre, blending witness testimony with the filmmaker’s research. A meditation on truth and justice in the absence of official accountability.</p>
<p>An art dealer travels from Quebec to the homeland he abandoned to see the paintings of an elusive pre-teen prodigy in the Bulgarian countryside. It is only by viewing her work firsthand that he will be able to determine if she is a fraud, or a genius.</p>
<p>Naru, the only camerawoman at Kabul TV, is convinced there are no good men in Afghanistan. But when a reporter takes her on an assignment just before the Taliban’s return, sparks fly between them – and she begins to question this belief.</p>
<p>After her girlfriend’s death, Liz hides her true self until a weekend trip with friends awakens forbidden desires. The result is paranoia and violence that consumes the group as Liz’s secret unleashes a deadly force.</p>
<p>A family drifts through their home in silence, struggling to rebuild their lives after a recent loss. Each mourns alone, until the youngest child reveals a secret that enables them to realise that they must come together with love and courage to defy grief.</p>
<p>Exiled from city comforts to his ancestral village, a boy meets his embittered aunt, befriends a horse and joins the local kids on wild adventures, discovering the beauty of life and a courage he never knew he had.</p>
<p>The Indigenous Bunong practice agriculture by hand and end up in conflict with Cambodia’s lucrative trade in CO2 certificates, losing the forest of whose ownership they have no conception. Now and then, split screen. A visual firework display.</p>
<p>“Rock, water, fire, air…” – the rhythmic singing of a children’s song echoes on. This film intertwines play and the memory of the forced baptism of three African girls in 1855 Bruneck, Tyrol, into acts of resistance.</p>
<p>A dream-like portrait of life on the streets of Cairo. The unobtrusive camera accompanies fire-eaters, childlike serpent people and others whose stories are told by the piercing voice of poet Abdel Rahman Al Abnoudy, husband of the director.</p>
<p>Years ago, a helicopter crashed under mysterious circumstances high in the mountains. Climbing the slopes to investigate the accident, a journalist and a soldier encounter a shaman deep in the forest who tells them about ancient rain rituals.</p>
<p>Four wraithlike figures of different ages and pasts, haunted by memory, drift along Nanjing’s wintry riverbanks. They share an abandoned ruin where talk turns to poetry, painterly pauses, instrumental reveries and the unabashed group therapy of karaoke.</p>
<p>A social satire about the difficulties of life and community in a newly-built, but already shabby housing estate on the fringes of Prague. The film was not officially approved until two years after its completion and has now been digitally restored.</p>
<p>The enigmatic captain of a burning cargo ship binds together the fates of two families; one in the bustling Ghanaian city of Accra, the other in a quiet Canadian town.</p>
<p>Corroded pixels struggle to form an image as they move through Cold War promises of development in rural Thailand, haunted by archival voices.</p>
<p>Machado is a Colombian immigrant who has been living in France for years, where he works as a grape-picker. He barely earns enough to cover Europe's high cost of living. An acquaintance introduces him to Madame Chiara, gemstone collector who hires him to go to Colombia and steal an emerald. Despite Machado's insistence of the danger involved in his returning to Colombia, Chiara convinces him to go by offering him a sum of money he can't refuse. In Colombia he will have to cope with the bustling life of central Medellín and nature in the mountains. While travelling through Colombia he is involved in a crime committed by a pilot and will try to double-cross Chiara by looking for someone else to buy the emerald.</p>
<p>In 2024, a deteriorated 16mm print of a film about Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances resurfaced, now awash in vibrant pink from chemical aging. Oliver Husain and collaborators use this flamboyant tint to reimagine the 1925 choreographies.</p>
<p>During the 1980s, the American journalist Edward Serotta documented the harsh realities and Jewish life in socialist Romania. The secret services clandestinely accompanied him on his journey. A photo essay from opposing perspectives.</p>
<p>Far from the Argentine capital, in Córdoba, the end of the dictatorship heralds a spring that will be short-lived. "La Delpi" is the only survivor of a group of transvestite and transformist friends who, towards the end of the 1980s, were beginning to die, one after another, of AIDS. In a Catholic provincial city, Grupo Kalas made playbacks and improvised dresses their weapon and their defense. Today, the images from a unique and unpublished archive are a farewell letter, a manifesto of friendship.</p>
<p>Flowers as a gift for guests, the Latin alphabet as a form of order. A film of rules which varies, multiplies and expands into a novel of nomadic world knowledge as it narrates. Nurith Aviv visits her friends and asks for their first names – c’est ça!</p>
<p>Director Achache and writer Lafon engage with Anne Frank by way of smart mental jumps, hand-picked footage, refinement and breathtaking montage, liberating this symbolic Shoah figure from cliché. Cinema of remembrance, complex and empathetic.</p>
<p>Four enslaved girls dream of freedom. When a turn of events puts their lives at risk, they decide to run away. To their surprise, their mistresses discover the plan – and insist on going with them.</p>
<p>As advanced dementia erodes an older woman’s ability to communicate her inner life, her husband and daughter struggle to act in her best interests, navigating love and the fragile boundaries between care, protection and autonomy.</p>
<p>In Barcelona’s Raval neighbourhood, the family-run restaurant “Can Mosques” faces eviction after an investment fund buys the building. The family’s fight to survive escalates, pushing them to cross any and all boundaries.</p>
<p>Young women imagine themselves as a river: what starts off as a poetic metaphor is linked to images of landscape and becomes a many-voiced narration, radically morphing into a political statement. The Kazakh woman, she prefers life without man.</p>
<p>In the early 17 century, a soldier arrives at an isolated Protestant village in Germany claiming to be the heir to an abandoned farmstead. Even though he proves to be a good man, the villagers’ suspicions about his identity grow and they force a reckoning.</p>
<p>In a Spanish villa, American siblings Jack, Ed, Anna and Robert wallow in isolation and their inherited fortune. When Jack wants to move in with his girlfriend and Ed uncovers the truth about their mother’s death, the fabric of the family begins to unravel.</p>
<p>Roya, an Iranian teacher imprisoned for her political beliefs, is faced with a choice: make a forced televised confession, or remain confined to her three-square-metre cell.</p>
<p>The mid-1990s on the Filipino island of Sibuyan. After he has been raped, a young man retreats into a world of silence and isolation. Then he witnesses a plane crash and embarks on a quest for justice.</p>
<p>Hana, a lovelorn medical student, becomes terrorized by a hungry ghost after taking part in an obscure weight loss craze: eating human ashes.</p>
<p>A psychological thriller following Samaan, a young security guard who, like many of his generation, is struggling with trauma. His parents were murdered in the religious and ethnic violence that has been unfolding in the Arab region for decades.</p>
<p>Li Yan’s life is as regimented as the production lines in the local poultry factory. Her grandmother is determined to get her a job there, but Li Yan refuses. Obsessed with the mystery of life and creation, she secretly attempts to hatch a stolen egg.</p>
<p>Gilberto and Jacira promised to grow old together – for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. Till death them do part.</p>
<p>A Shanghai woman journeys alone to a rubber plantation in southwest China, where her late father was sent during the Cultural Revolution. As she searches for a mysterious woman, some strangers unexpectedly drift into her path.</p>
<p>Sabine Lidl presents Siri Hustvedt’s journey from her first novel to being a leading voice in contemporary literature – a film about feminist perspectives, Hustvedt’s soulmate Paul Auster, and the power of thought.</p>
<p>Seventeen-year-old Kellou has been gifted with supernatural powers she does not understand. Her disquiet and uncertainty only change when she meets Aya. It is an encounter with destiny that forges a mystical world where the visible and invisible converge.</p>
<p>In a small village classroom, a teacher often transforms the blackboard with a simple white sheet. When it is taken for a burial rite, the children refuse to let their moment slip away – and set out to reclaim what they were promised.</p>
<p>casts a spell. poetic fever dream exploring queer longing and the magic and mysteries of adolescence.</p>
<p>In Europe’s biggest military model city, war is not just rehearsed, but also directly taught. Marie Wilke’s sober, focused observation shows the Bundeswehr navigating how to deal with the past, adapt to the future and present itself.</p>
<p>After their mother’s death, a cognitively disabled woman and her estranged sister must learn to communicate in order to move forward</p>
<p>A shy encounter. A blind date on a park bench. Budapest, 1963. The focus is on a woman who works as a nurse, knows what life is and is looking for more. Elek underpins her fiction with documentary glances whose openness is unbelievable precision.</p>
<p>A director has to reimagine his film – a love story between two men – because he was not allowed to shoot it in his home country. In a different location, he finds a new leading actor and, together with him, a tender gesture of resistance.</p>
<p>follows heavy metal pioneers Judas Priest and their half-century journey from working-class origins in England to their recent induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.</p>
<p>The story of a city and its uprisings. From the 1940s into the present, Rania Rafei follows Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-biggest city, over the years, moving through different generations and factions. An act of political tenderness.</p>
<p>Suakin, a formerly flourishing port in Sudan, today lies in ruins, a shadow of its former self. The film interweaves an artistic tapestry using visual imagery, symbols, abstraction and the melodic voice of the late Sudanese singer Abdel-Aziz Dawoud.</p>
<p>Edinburgh, 1810. Two female teachers find themselves at the centre of a scandal when one of their pupils accuses them of having a love affair. A drama about prejudice, survival and the courage to stand up for the truth.</p>
<p>Sixteen-year-old Ilay drifts through the summer on the outskirts of Berlin while a palliative nurse accompanies his ailing mother during her last days.</p>
<p>Blues musician Al Cook lives in an apartment filled with memories. Outside, the world carries on without him. But when his home is slated for demolition, out of the ruins of his existence, a long-forgotten dream suddenly resurfaces.</p>
<p>A rising pop star navigates the complexities of fame and industry pressure while preparing for her arena tour debut. A flashy, tongue-in-cheek hyper-pop mockumentary, The Moment is Charli xcx’s creative reflection on her own meteoric success with brat. Directed and co-written by “360” music video director Aidan Zamiri in his feature debut, the film has a stylishly effortless rhythm and a uniquely self-aware, ironic sense of humor. Charli xcx plays an exaggeratedly manic version of herself, surrounded by a cast of characters that mirror both the friends and foes of the era. Hailey Gates and Alexander Skarsgård personify near-diametrically opposed influences in Charli xcx’s dynamic career; pieces in the grand scheme of brat’s enduring cultural power. Behind the satire and Charli xcx’s celebrity is an earnest and heartfelt expression of the weight of success, the price of legacy, and the fight to preserve artistic integrity. The Moment is a film for fans and newcomers alike — a lively, current, dazzling capsule of one of the most iconic artists of our time.</p>
<p>In Pahokee, Florida, the myth of the absent Black father is contradicted every day: housework, children’s birthdays, neighbourhood, care. In vignettes brimming with solidarity, Contento traces out his protagonists’ self-confidence. Calm and attentive.</p>
<p>When a theft goes awry, a veteran pickpocket is sent on a mission through New York to reclaim the stolen goods. Harry is a classic native New Yorker, an old-school hustler who has moved through life lubricating palms with pickpocket cash since the 1980s. He stays smooth, continually sharpening his skills, but times are changing for Harry. Now it’s 2025, and the daily take from the streets? Fancy trackable phones. Cashless wallets full of credit cards. Gym bags holding cryptocurrency and guns. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a nostalgic portrait of a hustler getting lapped by today’s digitally networked world, who now must prepare for the final act of his life. Director Noah Segan’s modern metropolis is powered by the ephemera of a time gone by, with OG street action brought to radiant life by a terrific cast — led by John Turturro’s exceptional turn as Harry.</p>
<p>After the fall of Assad’s regime, five survivors return to the former torture prison of Saidnaya to reenact what they experienced there during their incarceration. They reclaim their voices and bear witness for those who can no longer speak for themselves.</p>
<p>Drawing on a location test filmed in Uganda and an email exchange with the scout, this short film captures cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with colonial imaginaries, binding the fiction of filmmaking with state-building.</p>
<p>Tracing the evolution of documentary film across time, examining landmark works and hidden treasures, while revealing how the form has helped us see and make sense of our world. Following his groundbreaking series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, filmmaker Mark Cousins turns his analytic eye and storytelling voice to the history of documentary. Ambitious, detailed, and eclectic, Cousins surveys the filmed representation of reality from the invention of cinema to our contemporary, digital age with curiosity and an infectious enthusiasm. Over 16 hours, with surprising insights and an incredible collection of clips from the most well-known to obscure works from around the world, The Story of Documentary Film is an inspiring journey, destined to enrich every viewer who sees it — from the most seasoned cineaste to those taking their first steps into the world of documentary film.</p>
<p>A power plant on Maribor river island in present-day Slovenia, built under German occupation, now powers a computing centre monitoring extinction. Thermal and infrared visions reveal lingering presences, blurring the line between living and non-living.</p>
<p>Ann Lee, the founding leader of the Shaker Movement, proclaimed as the female Christ by her followers. Depicts her establishment of a utopian society and the Shakers' worship through song and dance, based on real events.</p>
<p>A female character born from code, LOAB leads us through six iconic horror eras from Nosferatu to Get Out: a prompted being, cursed by design. Whoever knows her becomes part of the algorithm; whoever resists will be punished. An AI meta genre essay.</p>
<p>The wry, incisive debut feature by Cheryl Dunye gave cinema something bracingly new and groundbreaking: a vibrant representation of Black lesbian identity by a Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye stars as Cheryl, a video-store clerk and aspiring director whose interest in forgotten Black actresses leads her to investigate an obscure 1930s performer known as the Watermelon Woman, whose story proves to have surprising resonances with Cheryl’s own life as she navigates a new relationship with a white girlfriend (Guinevere Turner). Balancing breezy romantic comedy with a serious inquiry into the history of Black and queer women in Hollywood, The Watermelon Woman slyly rewrites long-standing constructions of race and sexuality on-screen, introducing an important voice in American cinema.</p>
<p>In Oregon in 1933, Samuel Murphy is torn from his daughter and sent to a brutal work camp. Warden Clancy tempts him with early release if he smuggles gold through deadly wilderness, but betrayal festers within the crew, and Murphy questions how far he’ll go to see his child again. Padraic McKinley’s tense, atmospheric Depression-era crime drama follows a group of desperate convicts on a perilous journey through a physically and morally treacherous backcountry. Set against the stark beauty of the Oregon landscape, The Weight draws on the introspective action cinema of the 1970s, combining gritty survivalist set pieces with uncommonly intelligent dialogue and finely drawn characters. Although rich with period detail, The Weight is charged with elemental energy, fueled by brothers Latham and Shelby Gaines’ harrowing score and Matteo Cocco’s vivid cinematography. Ethan Hawke gives a muscular performance as the film’s reluctant but resourceful hero, while Russell Crowe is quietly menacing as his foil. Julia Jones brings dignity and defiance to her role as Anna, the gang’s Indigenous guide.</p>
<p>Exploring the power that comes with language itself, the worth of the device, not the meaning, an artist considers the actual price of emigrating into a “better life”, while working in a restrictive political climate.</p>
<p>At a time when elements of fascisation are becoming ever more apparent, ever more pervasive, artist Vika Kirchenbauer takes a personal look at what is in the air in present-day Germany.</p>
<p>Queer time moves differently. Selves are multiplied and then hidden away, secret objects are infused with mimesis, desires are internalized. Vials of synthetic testosterone provide most of the narration in Emory Chao Johnson’s collage. The filmmaker withholds the audience’s view from domestic drama and traumatic squabbles that invade the soundtrack, keeping at bay what Moyra Davey once referred to as “the wet.” Instead, Chao Johnson focuses on methodical practices—injections, cooking, commuting, inspecting one’s own body—collapsing those fraught, wet questions of identity until they undergird their quotidien present</p>
<p>Laure is new in town. She just moved in with her family in the heart of summer. When she meets Lisa and a group of kids they assume she is a boy. She decides to become Michael.</p>
<p>Despite the deep traces of trauma caused by sexual violence and torture at the hands of Russian troops, Ukrainian women survivors are uniting to break stigma and silence, transforming their testimonies into a powerful form of resistance.</p>
<p>For 30 years, a doctor from Paris has maintained a friendship with a fisherman on Tristan da Cunha, the most isolated inhabited island in the world. Now he travels back one more time, with the plan to stay there for good.</p>
<p>An introverted teen, who has only ever experienced sex through the lens while working for his father’s pornography business, must step out from behind the camera when a feisty classmate challenges him to embrace a real connection.</p>
<p>In the mid-1980s, Ichgola Androgyn, BeV StroganoV, Tima the Divine and Ovo Maltine come together in West Berlin to develop shows, political actions and media appearances. They collaborate, argue and love each other – because they see themselves as a family.</p>
<p>Through never-before-seen archival footage and first-hand accounts of those who knew him best, the film traces Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s rise as the voice of the oppressed, guided by faith, hope and an understanding of the power of forgiveness.</p>
<p>Arthur Rimbaud’s ghost wanders through history, meeting revolutionary figures such as Emma Goldman, David Wojnarowicz and Marsha P. Johnson. A layered collage of encounters questioning identity, revolution and the role of the artistic avant-garde.</p>
<p>The profound desire to become a mother and pressure from her surroundings drive Alejandra to fake a pregnancy. What begins as a simple lie turns into a complex charade and unleashes a media scandal that makes it impossible for her to continue the pretence.</p>
<p>Marina is a transgender woman. When her partner dies, she finds herself faced with his family’s anger and prejudice. She fights for her right to grieve – with the same unbroken energy she displayed when she fought to live as a woman.</p>
<p>When her goldfish dies, six-year-old Feifei sets off through a small Welsh seaside town in search of answers. Her journey leads her to reimagine a folktale from her mother’s homeland – on her own terms.</p>
<p>However permanent and stable any order may seem, it may eventually crumble when reality outside of the system creeps in, growing like organic matter through the boundaries that the order has imposed. An animated odyssey.</p>
<p>A film that today remains what the heart desired in 1985: queer and sensual, drama and S & M, cool and hot, avant-garde and subversion, dreamers and toilet slaves, camp and critique, “Venus in Fur” and pure Eighties. Treut and Mikesch – and Udo forever!</p>
<p>Barbara and Heli are professional clowns, living out their dream of an alternative, joy‑filled life with their two children. But when Heli and the children die in a car crash, Barbara’s faith in humour, hope and humanity is put to the ultimate test.</p>
<p>“How should those who come after us be warned of danger?” A film about the search for the German-German nuclear waste repository – between warning signs, feedback loops, flowing flocks of birds and the area between sign and object.</p>
<p>Soberly and with restraint, the director reconstructs the attempted femicide she survived 14 years before. Intense conversations with people from her past provide an external perspective on an act subjectively and objectively impossible to grasp.</p>
<p>Starting from a hotel in Addis Ababa built by Emperor Haile Selassie, Ruth Beckermann explores a place both familiar and foreign to her. Archive footage and conversations on the ground combine personal reflections with the histories of Ethiopia and Europe.</p>
<p>A 16mm film installation responding to legacies of Scottish colonialism and slavery in Guyana through archival research, matrilineal lines and sewing.</p>
<p>The title is taken from maritime folklore about a whale that’s been labeled the “loneliest whale on the planet” because he can only emit sounds at 52 Hertz, a frequency that no other whale can hear. It’s believed that “Whale 52,” as he’s known, travels the oceans of the world desperately searching for other whales like himself. Some believers even suggest that the sounds he makes are cries for help. Animated by two-time Oscar® nominee Bill Plympton, Whale 52 tells the story of Enam, a third-grade student who's selectively mute. When his school assigns him to Mr. Kaufman, a lonely 80-year-old volunteer who’s mourning the death of his male partner, Enam and Mr. Kaufman embark on a poignant journey by means of a magical journal which enables them to hear – and heal – each other’s silent cries.</p>
<p>Co-directors Lexie and Logan weave together the stories of two trans boys who died by suicide and their trans masculine+ community, offering resources and imagination for a way forward.</p>
<p>Hassan, a 55-year-old Palestinian Uber driver, shuttles partygoers through endless Berlin nights. Amir, a young Israeli who is in danger of losing himself to these nights, becomes Hassan’s regular passenger when they find themselves bonded by heartbreak.</p>
<p>The assassination of a beloved Palestinian American activist in Southern California ignites a 40-year quest for justice, revealing the roots of a dangerous political movement that thrives today. Activist, teacher, and poet Alex Odeh was a leading voice in his community, advocating in the media for peace and justice through dialogue and respect for all people. In October 1985, he was assassinated by a tripwire bomb placed in his office. Despite evidence and suspects identified at the time, no one has ever been held accountable for this horrible act of political violence. Using archival footage and contemporary investigation, directors Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans take us back to the time of Odeh’s murder and trace the extremist forces that may have been behind his death and the disturbing ramifications that remain today. With a gripping style and surprising revelations, Who Killed Alex Odeh? asks a question that has never been more relevant and in need of answering.</p>
<p>A life-altering event forces 21-year-old Junyang and his girlfriend to face reality. At the same time, while Junyang’s father is struggling to hold their modest life together, a woman enters his life and both generations are forced to redefine their family.</p>
<p>1930s Australia, the colonial frontier. Two swaggering outlaws roll into a mining town and unleash a wave of cruelty, leading three kids to break free from their white masters and set off across the “sweet country” of central Australia in search of a safe home.</p>
<p>A boy with extraordinary powers lives with his uncle in a Lebanese village where the noise of warplanes is a daily occurrence. As his uncle tries to train him to appear “normal”, the boy’s gift becomes impossible to contain.</p>
<p>Deniz plays happily with her best friend Umut at their secret hideout. But at school, she is excluded by the boys and also fails to fit in with the girls. Then, a childhood dream becomes true and takes on a new meaning.</p>
<p>After losing her friend Yo, Anna builds a detailed 1/3-scale version of her friend’s house. It is just big enough for Anna to squeeze into, and inside lives a puppet of Yo. When the pair first met, Yo was 73 and Anna 24.</p>
<p>Eager to start a family, Saga and Jon move to her childhood home in the Finnish forest. But after their baby is born, the couple’s dream of a perfect child turns into a nightmare – and only Saga senses the unsettling truth.</p>
<p>A film about the gift of re-membering what was dis-membered by the colonial project. Dreamscapes, ritualised practices of sharing and ancestral rhythms render visible the previously invisible lines that once held communities and ecosystems in sacred balance.</p>
<p>“In the spring of 1996, my senior year of high school, I documented a group of 8th-grade girls who were notorious for their crass behavior and allegedly bad hygiene…” Sisters Amber and Harper, and their friends Carly and Lauren regard themselves as proud adherents of the Riot Grrrls movement. They publish a xeroxed black-and-white fanzine called “Sour Grrrls”. It is full of declarations opposing sexism, racism and homophobia, as well as poems that give voice to their feelings. At school, their behaviour makes them laughingstocks and the object of intense animosity. Still, Amber sticks to her guns – “being different is fine!”</p>
<p>The future. Winter. Space travel is no longer a dream. A once-thriving film studio faces bankruptcy. The enormous compound, with structures ranging from the Great Sphinx of Giza to the Forbidden City, is now completely covered in snow and stripped of its former glory. Zha, a lonely janitor, tends to this forgotten place, with only a cat that used to perform in films for company. Running out of money, the studio owner gives him a VR headset as partial compensation. Zha is immediately drawn into the virtual world and embarks on a romantic journey with a female player who invites him on a trip to the moon. Meanwhile, the studio, which is about to close permanently, is temporarily brought back to life when a film crew arrives to shoot an alien invasion movie on the expansive backlot – with the studio’s actual destruction slated to be shot as the movie’s final showdown.</p>
<p>Black-and-white photographs of old buildings in a run-down neighbourhood provide the background for the stick figures who live there. A drunk who has been kicked out by his wife holds fast to the bottle; rain pours into a family apartment; a bulldozer lays waste to flower seedlings. A place where it is entirely possible to throw the baby out with the empties. Between the cracks in the façades, fresh graffiti blooms – “not interested in Germany” and “money is evil”. Added to that is rap music and breakdancing in dazzling hues, colourful life blossoms amid the ruins.</p>
<p>A doomsday mood wafts over a garbage dump near East Berlin. Crows and seagulls circle above it while below, a heavy machine trundles over a photograph of Mikhail Gorbachev. Not far from the flag of East Germany, a brochure offers information “about the beginnings of our state” and another on “the economy and national defence”. Mixed among the physical remnants of a defunct state are private artefacts of its citizens – letters, photos, questionnaires rustling gently in the wind next to a broken doll, a damaged accordion, a discarded prosthetic. A young man takes off his clothes. Naked, he sets out. Ah, but whither?</p>
<p>Premiering his new film Wolfram in Competition, Warwick Thornton joins Berlinale Talents to reflect on his work as both director and cinematographer. Drawing from his Indigenous Australian background, Warwick’s films including Samson & Delilah and Sweet Country engage deeply with questions of stolen land, his Kaytetye identity, and the lasting presence of colonial violence. In this conversation, Warwick Thornton outlines his approach to cinema as a space for storytelling including history that has been erased or denied. Through image, silence, and duration, Warwick Thornton disrupts dominant narratives and visual conventions, operating between beauty and brutality, intimacy and distance, refusing an easy resolution.</p>
<p>Whether it is the garish neon colours, fuzzy VHS images or iconic music videos, the 1990s are experiencing a big revival in video, streaming and social media. But why is this aesthetic so fascinating, especially to young filmmakers and visual storytellers? The panel discussion “Rewinding the 90s: Pop Culture, Music Videos & Visual Trends” combines perspectives from pop culture practice and current music video and film production. With Jenni Zylka hosting, Nico Beyer, Nilz Bokelberg and Laura Russ will discuss influential videos from the 1990s, their experimental visual language and narrative strategies, and the impulse they are providing to the shape of today’s visual storytelling. The focus is on visual codes amid MTV, rave and underground culture, analogue technologies, early digital image practices, and how young filmmakers are reading anew, citing and transforming the 1990s. The panel shows that between looking back, analysing the present and facing the future – the 90s are still with us.</p>
<p>Five skateboarders demonstrate their skills in this promotional video for a board manufacturer. They include California skateboarding pioneer and professional Mark Gonzales and a young Jason Lee, who would go on to become an actor and regular player in Kevin Smith’s films. Over five segments, a title card introduces each skateboarder by name, followed by each showing off their skills on public streets and squares, in skate parks and halfpipes, as breakneck fun and in risky competitions. The five young men aimlessly riding around in an Oldsmobile sedan provides a framework for the performance segments. After heckling a group of people supporting the second Gulf War, they put the pedal to the metal. With loud music blaring from the open car windows, and well-fuelled with alcohol, they drive off into the Californian desert, where the driver loses control of the car.</p>