Berlinale

2026, 120 min
by Yulia Lokshina

In one of the poorest regions of Paraguay lies Caazapá, the “city of magic and legends”. Here, two young Paraguayan students are searching for happiness, gold and a magic bird. Behind the fences of a gated community, European dropouts are seeking freedom, healing and salvation from Armageddon – for themselves and their savings. Separating them are 12 kilometres of red-earth road which transforms into a quagmire every rainy season. Around them hovers the humid heat and choruses of cicadas. Step by step, the film explores the new community of settlers and the local population; the camera drifts through construction sites, schools, treatment rooms and shooting ranges, gazes up at the sky and into the internet. While the newcomers experience turf wars and loss, the locals follow their own myths which hark back to the country’s missionary and colonial history. They all have a version of paradise. Source of Synopsis

Germany 2026, 110 min
by Sabine Lidl

Young, curious and full of drive, Siri Hustvedt leaves the wide, quiet landscapes of Minnesota and plunges into the pulsating life of New York City. In search of the protagonist for her first novel, she embarks on a journey that not only shapes her as a writer but leads her to become one of the most compelling voices in contemporary American literature. The film opens a perspective that reaches far beyond Siri Hustvedt herself, discovering women who courageously and independently realise their artistic visions. As Siri Hustvedt and her husband Paul Auster reflect on language, identity and the power of words, life intervenes: Paul Auster becomes seriously ill. In Siri Hustvedt – Dance Around the Self, director Sabine Lidl portrays Siri Hustvedt’s distinctive way of living and thinking, weaving her writing together with the major themes of life: love and farewell. Source of Synopsis

Germany, Netherlands 2026, 85 min
by Viv Li

Viv, a Chinese wannabe artist, found herself stuck in Berlin after the pandemic and accidentally ventured into the city’s vibrant alternative culture scene. Drifting between new environments and traditional expectations, Viv is constantly adapting to shifting opinions about herself, the world and, of course, China, only to feel more lost than ever. Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest follows Viv’s eclectic encounters and the nuanced culture clashes that shape them. Told in a deeply personal and humorous voice, the film takes a witty yet sharp look at the quest for a sense of belonging in a globalised world and how different societies define our lives. ' A story of the perpetual search for oneself, identity and acceptance, woven into a spiral of surreal yet tangible moments. Source of Synopsis

2026, 14 min
by Pavel Mozhar, Pavel Mozhar

An abandoned GDR factory. More than 400 dusty job application letters from the years 2004 to 2008 lie scattered in the cellar of the administrative building. Alongside the traditional phrases of a covering letter, the documents contain descriptions of personal circumstances and memories. The wishes of the applicants, as well as their fears and pain, are laid bare in their effort to find a place in the free market economy. A documentary contemplation of the individual behind the workforce. Source of Synopsis

Germany, Georgia 2026, 31 min
by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

A speculative documentary essay connecting the filmmaker’s medical history with post-Cold War geopolitical shifts and their impact on contemporary politics. The film originates from the filmmaker’s diagnosis with a rare form of cancer, T-cell lymphoma, a condition that causes the failure of the immune system and the body’s defence mechanisms. The medical treatment unfolds in three stages: 1. Remission of cancer cells; 2. Immune transplantation; 3. Adaptation to a new immune system. The film adopts these three stages as a framework to mirror the collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the introduction of the free-market economy as a new system of governance, and a prolonged process of adaptation marked by chronic side effects. Far from claiming that biology offers a model of perfect social order, Graft Versus Host uses medical terminology to grasp complex geopolitical transformations of recent history and the layered roots of today’s unsettling political reality.

2026, 200 min
by Volker Koepp

“Sarmatische Zeit” (Sarmatian Time) is the name of a poetry collection by Johannes Bobrowski, which becomes a personal, lyrical leitmotif for Volker Koepp in this visually striking, far-reaching exploration of the region between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, along the Memel, Dnister and Pruth rivers. It is a place of different origins, longings and crimes: a melting pot for myriad cultures and affiliations, a point of reference and refuge for over half a century in the work of the great chronicler and the setting of repeated cruelties and destruction. Returning to his own oeuvre with companions old and new becomes a simultaneous process of looking back and bringing things up to date. Like the arms of a delta, connections to German history and the entire European context are created, between past and present. And for a long while, time seems to stand terribly still within this flow, for since the start of the Russian war against Ukraine in 2022, the echo of the experience of violence inscribed into this region becomes impossible to ignore. What originates in poems about the Memel region develops into a monumental contemplation about people in time and space. Source of Synopsis

2026, 92 min
by Sandra Prechtel

“There have only been two geniuses in Germany since the war, Fassbinder in the West and Schleef in the East”, remarked Elfriede Jelinek. When Einar Schleef died far too early in 2001 at the age of 57, he was alone, with the public only finding out about his death days later. How is it possible that this painter, author and pioneer of German theatre direction in the East, later in the West and finally in the reunified Germany – at once recognised and unappreciated, celebrated and misjudged, resolute and misunderstood – remained such a perpetual outsider? The elliptically edited archive material lets Schleef have his own say above all – mercurial, stuttering, unflinching. Sandra Prechtel’s film carefully avoids glorifying or co-opting this 20th century artist, who refused any sort of mass psychology and pushed theatre to its outer reaches. By highlighting different biographical elements, this portrait of a combative, yet vulnerable loner and enfant terrible with self-destructive potential is gradually pieced together. It is an account of theatre and the suppression mechanisms of post-war society and – unlike one has seen before – of the two German realities. Source of Synopsis

1968, 42 min
by Claudia von Alemann, Reinhold E. Thiel

Turn of the year 1967/68: the 4th International Experimental Film Festival is taking place at the Belgian seaside resort of Knokke. In addition to clips from the films, Claudia von Alemann and Reinold E. Thiel’s documentary above all shows the parallel events, the spontaneous performances, happenings and protest actions that took place there. They include the works of Harun Farocki, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Shirley Clarke, Holger Meins, Gustav Lamche, Armand Gatti and Mauricio Kagel, as well as of students from the Ulm School of Design, the DFFB and American underground filmmakers. The film captures the electrifying and inspiring atmosphere that made the festival legendary and provided a decisive impetus for independent film in Europe.The film is being shown in a new digital restoration by the Arsenal Film Institute. Source of Synopsis

Germany, India 2026, 105 min
by Madhusree Dutta

Spurred by her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother’s strange evocation of home-invading tigers, filmmaker Madhusree Dutta travels to Assam, India. Here, she learns about the Flying Tigers: US aircraft that transferred military supplies during WWII across the perilous Himalayas, from Assam to Kunming in China. So begins a globetrotting, decades-spanning docufiction essay on the human-scale experience of monumental logistical phenomena, featuring small histories that unfold in the quiet shadows of History writ large. Teaming up with Kunming-born media theorist Mi You and Assam-based researcher Purav Goswami, Dutta contrasts the smooth international flow of goods today with increasing restrictions on people’s movement across borders. Her film reveals how lived realities of frontier populations have always been fluid and malleable, refusing the homogeneity demanded by cartographic political imagination. Appropriately, Dutta adopts a heterogeneous, genre-defying form, mixing interviews, archival material, performances, animation and musical numbers to craft a personal, wide-ranging work at once intimate and colossal. Source of Synopsis

Germany 1981, 142 min
by Chetna Vora, Chetna Vora

A film from East Berlin, 1981, with a curious history of preservation. Having created an open, intimate atmosphere while interviewing other international students in the halls of residence at her East German film school in Potsdam-Babelsberg for Oyoyo a year previously, Indian exchange student Chetna Vora now spoke to German native speakers, women in Berlin. Here too, remaining in their private realm was key to establishing a communicative setting in which unforced, unrehearsed, horizontal conversations could unfold. Kitchen chats mostly. A film in the form of a rough cut, sometimes with unedited sequences and long stretches of talking and listening, which – fortunately – preserves the traces of the associative and authentic. The women are from different milieus, from young to old. Real life as a woman in the GDR. Caretaking, having children and bringing them up, work, living, forming bonds, separating, loving. Rock ’n’ roll by the window. These revelations have survived because the film material was pilfered from university storage, projected on an improvised screen and filmed on VHS in turn, with the result now having been restored by the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF. Source of Synopsis

Nigeria, Italy, Germany 2025, 22 min
by Karima Ashadu

With no single protagonist or linear narrative, the film immerses us in a spectacle of strength through an intimate portrait of bodybuilders in the slums of Lagos. Inflated muscles, bulging veins and luminous skin glistening with sweat fill the screen. Shot almost entirely in close-ups, the camera hovers so near its subjects, moving softly like breath on skin, that at times figures become blurred, abstracted forms. Karimah Ashadu’s slow, measured pans across backs, chests and arms meditate on visibility, drawing attention to the embodiment and representation of the Black male body without rendering it singular or fixed. The metallic clang of barbells is punctuated with guttural sounds of exertion set against the ambience of the streets. Breath and muscle move in syncopated sonic choreography, and the men’s commitment to the ritual of maintaining the body is evident. Source of Synopsis

Germany 2026, 91 min
by Marie Wilke

The Bundeswehr has arrived at a decisive “turning point” (“Zeitenwende”): in Schnöggersburg, Europe’s biggest military model city, defending the nation and the alliance is not just rehearsed, but also directly taught. Marie Wilke’s sober, focused observational documentary puts together a 360-degree view of its subject, which captures the current state of the German army from different perspectives. Between press appointments, swearing-in ceremonies, visitor tours, roleplays and an artificial underground train tunnel, the process of adapting to the present becomes visible. With a sound grasp of representative situations and communication nodes, Wilke gets close enough to her subject to illustrate its complexity – while retaining exactly the necessary distance for open, critical engagement. The shots are mostly static and impartial, bearing witness to a Bundeswehr searching for its self-image while in the midst of grappling with the past, state-of-the-art war simulations and an uncertain future. Szenario is a portrait of an institution that just as equally depicts the society and politics that produce it. Source of Synopsis

Germany, Great Britain 2026, 15 min
by Daniel Mann

In 1904, European leaders of the Zionist Organisation secretly surveyed the Ugandan highlands as a potential “New Promised Land” for the Jewish people. Supported discreetly by British colonial administrators, who described East Africa as a barren and blank imperial canvas and were eager to rid England of its Jewish population, one Jewish delegate began mapping the terrain, climate and life in Uganda towards a new Jewish settlement. What occurred on that mountain that led the explorer to vow never to return remains unknown. Drawing on present-day film location scouting and an email exchange with an Ugandan scout, The Recce meditates on cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with (neo)colonial imagination. Through the recce, land becomes vital both to filmmaking and state-building. It is sought after, colonised and constantly reimagined as elsewhere. At the core of the recce lies a potentially violent act: the erasure of one place in creating another. The recce, as this test is often called, is seldom regarded as a film, but embodies this very violence and the ongoing shadow of coloniality in its form. Source of Production

Germany, Serbia 2026, 17 min
by Mina Simendić

Treating language as a device of meaning, the film deals with the transposable power inherent in language itself – the value that derives from the device, rather than from the meaning. Given the opportunity to work with alluring and costly 16mm film stock within a restrictive political climate, a filmmaker reflects on the transactions made in the process of immigrating to Germany. What does one have to give up to be able to live in the “promised land”? By conceiving analogue film itself as a linguistic device, the film turns back on its own means of communication, questioning the use of film stock in current times. Source of Synopsis

Germany 2026, 16 min
by Vika Kirchenbauer

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. This Suffocating Now witnesses the historical present as a condition marked by vectors of violence that have continuously and habitually existed, and puts its focus on the fault lines that have most explicitly exposed the illiberal underbelly of a liberal state and society in recent years: Palestine solidarity as well as queer and trans rights. Drawing from a vast variety of source material, the 16-minute essay film flows in an uneven rhythm through still and moving imagery. Observations from the past three years – such as the increased police presence and recurring police violence, which Kirchenbauer captures from her balcony in Berlin – are viewed within a broader German historical framework. Over mundane images of her home improvement efforts, the artist problematises her own social ascent to becoming a university professor and civil servant. This personal reflection serves as an entry point to addressing the intimate relation between state and contemporary art in the German cultural system as a whole. Source of Synopsis

Germany 2025, 19 min
by Juliane Jaschnow, Stefanie Schroeder

The future of humanity’s precarious legacy is discussed in relation to issues of location in an endless online conference with 122 participants from civil society. The experts all agree: stones are more reliable than politics. A partly three-dimensional film about the search for the German-German nuclear waste repository, between warning signs, feedback loops and communication problems, glowing flocks of birds and the area between sign and object. A peace steamship cruises among Moselle vineyards – past the NATO nuclear weapons base, past missed climate goals. The Last Generation and the one before that do not meet. “We’re in a climate catastrophe. Does it take mashed potatoes on a painting for you to listen?” A praying mantis transformed into a stereoscopic pre-cyborg gazes into a shifted past. A decommissioned nuclear reactor is turned into an all-inclusive amusement park in the Lower Rhine region. There is still no final repository for highly radioactive waste in Germany, but “how should those who come after us be warned? Isn’t there also a right to forget?” Source of Synopsis

Germany 2026, 91 min
by Daniela Magnani Hüller

A film like a house full of dark chambers long closed. Yet every room will be opened: puppet shows, butterflies, colour, light! This autobiographical documentary debut sets out to deprive silence of its power. Fourteen years ago, the director survived an attempted femicide carried out by a schoolmate, who had harassed her before. An act whose subjective and objective inconceivability Daniela Magnani Hüller will not accept. In images of great sensitivity, she uncovers memories, makes her voice audible in voiceover, enabling herself to find a stronger, own perspective – on what happened, the present of the trauma, a future life without fear. She wants conversations to happen and conducts them in large spaces often shot with considerable distance, with a teacher, a school friend, a detective, the state prosecutor; trying to find out why each of them did (or did not) act the way they did. Matter-of-fact, consistent and impressively composed, she reconstructs events and failures and – years after the crime – poses the question of responsibility: to the individuals, the school, the justice system and society. Violence against women – the unfolding of an internal and external perspective. Source of Synopsis

1991, 86 min
by Konstanze Binder, Lilly Grote, Ulrike Herdin, Julia Kunert

The Berlin Wall has fallen. Doors are now opening and barriers are disappearing. Even before the Deutschmark starts to flow eastward, waves of people gush through the train station at Friedrichstrasse. Beginning in July 1990, when the treaty unifying the two German states takes effect, the controls at this border crossing become ever more lax. Four filmmakers from West and East keep tabs on the dismantling of the border operation posts and checkpoints. In the labyrinthian depths of the Tränenpalast (Palace of Tears), a border guard talks about comparing real ears with the ones on I.D. pictures “like a conveyor belt”. There are first-hand tales of chicanery and currency transactions, while the sales assistants from the hard currency Intershop reflect on the uncertain future they face.Madeleine Bernstorff, production manager on the film, said in 2021: “The train station is an out-of-focus, hyper-mobile image of society’s restructuring. Looking back now, I think it is even clearer than back then how certain historical events or political watersheds are best told from varying perspectives. All four filmmakers bring their own experiences, issues and work backgrounds to bear on the film. The resulting effect is full of depth and nuance.” Source of Synopsis

Germany, USA 1993, 60 min
by Werner Herzog

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, “mythomaniac” Werner Herzog travels to Siberia. Despite more than 70 years of Marxist-Leninist dogma, he finds a wide variety of religious practices that have survived communism. In addition to disciples of the Russian Orthodox church, he meets herders who consult with shamans before deciding on a direction of travel, as well as numerous miracle healers and itinerant preachers. They include a reborn Jesus Christ, a faith healer who sets free cosmic energy, an exorcist who fights the demons possessing women, and a former film projectionist who now favours people with his bell ringing. Herzog takes a close look at Lake Svetloyar, whence church bells purportedly sound from the lost city of Kitezh submerged there – as long as pilgrims approach on their knees.Authentic spirituality is woven together with charlatanism. The former gives Herzog insight into the “Russian soul”. At the same time, with his profound flair for showmanship, he boosted the entertainment value of his film when, unable to find any real pilgrims, he hired some admittedly drunken locals and had them belly crawl across the ice of the frozen lake.

Germany 1990, 83 min
by Johann Feindt, Jeanine Meerapfel, Helga Reidemeister, Dieter Schumann, Tamara Trampe

Rhine wine in Saxony! It is being served at an information stand set up by West Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) just before the first and only free elections to East Germany’s People’s Assembly; the ballot will give the CDU almost 41% of the vote. But while the East Germans appear entirely sober about it all despite the sweet swill on offer, during the election campaign in February/March of 1990 the West Germans seem drunk on the new order. “Socialism is over. Nobody wants it anymore”, exults Helmut Kohl. Meanwhile, his finance minister is speaking of an “expanded economic territory”. And very soon, a Nazi banner is proclaiming the “east regions” of Germany as the next goal for a “reunification”.“How do various generations experience the uncertainty, the disorientation and the reconsideration of East Germany’s old values?”, asked the East-West German documentary film collective Blick ins Land. In their questioning of workers, schoolchildren, border guards and police, a teacher and an East German state security (Stasi) officer about their experiences and feelings, the collective provided an unvarnished look at the downsides of the “splendid happiness”. Source of Synopsis

1991, 13 min
by Eduard Schreiber

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?The documentarian, writer and translator Eduard Schreiber was considered the only essay filmmaker in East Germany when it still existed. In the highly symbolic images of this 1991 short film, he made manifest the dissolution of Soviet dominance. His Östliche Landschaft (Eastern Landscape) is a filmic elegy on the end of a state, of which what remains, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, is “what passed through it, the wind!”. Source of Synopsis

Germany 1993, 66 min
by Yury Khashevatsky

After a visit to the West, Ella Milova and Irina Pismennaja realise that concepts of feminism differ greatly between east and west. The Belarusian filmmakers task director Yury Khashevatsky with shooting a cinematic letter directed at, among others, their Bremen colleague Helke Sander. The film documents everyday hardships in a dictatorship and an economy of scarcity. They speak about women’s work and sexual equality to workers and party functionaries, prisoners and women in Tajikistan who describe what they do as slave labour. Not long before the film was made, expressing those kinds of views would have been a criminal act. They travel as far as Siberia to bear witness to how the women in orange vests do the heavy labour in the country. It boils down to: “You know, the longer we flew, drove and filmed, the more I became convinced that you were right – men built this world for themselves.” Shot during the last two years of the Soviet era, the film documents exploitation, repression, militarism, violence and corruption as elements of an unwavering patriarchal doctrine. Source of Synopsis

Germany 1992, 107 min
by Harun Farocki

“Television is on our side! We have won!” This chronicle of the 1989 revolution in Romania is put together from live coverage by the state broadcaster TVR and video recorded by numerous amateurs. Harun Farocki and Romanian writer and director Andrei Ujica had access to 125 hours of material, from which they compiled a minute-by-minute account of the period from December 21st to the 25th. Seen from multiple perspectives, these videograms cover the rapid succession of events from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s last public speech in Bucharest to the execution of the dictator and his wife four days later. The digital images are condensed to shape a historical drama, and the audiovisual historiography takes on the form of a classic stage play: “The people revolt, power is overthrown, the rulers are executed.” In 1992, the directors said: “Our goal was to untangle the existing bundle of images and edit them into sequences so that the viewer has the impression that they are moving through the same film loop from one camera to the next for five days.” The work has been presented as an installation in museums, including in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2023. Source of Synopsis