Films

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

2025, 64 min
by Stephan Hayn

In 2024 (2023), Stefan Hayn reveals layer by layer what he sees, where he is and what he does. He paints the city of Berlin, where he lives. He portrays his family. The daughters are used to it and do not pose. It is a togetherness in relationship that is reflected in his painting, and a struggle for the image. Wouldn't it be easier to take a photo? Painting takes time and gives time, it shows the variation of seeing and how necessary it is to be within reach of what is being depicted. What shows itself? Hayn also makes this struggle for the visible - every day, for hours on end - his subject. He himself becomes a motif, as a street painter with a large canvas, in front of the Jewish Museum, the Haus der Deutschen Wirtschaft, the Amerika-Gedenk-Bibliothek. In 2024 (2023), his first film shot solely on a smartphone, the “painter-in-film” director takes diary-like and very personal samples of the two years that give the film its title. Without forcing a reading, light, weather, turpentine, tired limbs and fleeting encounters create an airy, sharp critique of the availability of images. A social medium.

Germany, France 2024, 98 min
by Victor Kossakovsky

From filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky (Gunda, Aquarela) comes an epic, intimate and poetic meditation on architecture and how the design and construction of buildings from the ancient past reveal our destruction — and offer hope for survival and a way forward.Centering on a landscape project by the Italian architect Michele de Lucci, Kossakovsky uses the circle to reflect on the rise and fall of civilizations, capturing breathtaking imagery from the temple ruins of Baalbek in Lebanon, dating back to AD 60, to the recent destruction of cities in Turkey following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in early 2023.Rocks and stone connect the disparate societies, from ghostly monoliths stuck in the earth to tragic heaps of concrete rubble waiting to be hauled off and repurposed anew. Through Kossakovsky’s inquisitive lens, the grandeur and folly of humanity and its precarious relationship with nature posits the urgent question: How do we build, and how can we build better, before it’s too late?With: Michele de Lucchi, Mauro Mella, Davide Alioli, Nick Steur, Abdul Nabi Al-Afi

Germany, Canada 2024, 90 min
by Larry Weinstein

In early 2023, filmmaker Larry Weinstein set out to make a documentary about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was supposed to be about how far we have come in the two hundred years since it was written. But when world events pull Larry into his own film, the question becomes a deeply personal one. BEETHOVEN'S NINE is a documentary about music, but also about war and hope. It follows nine unique individuals, including Ukrainian musicians, a deaf composer, a Polish rock star, a best-selling author, a legendary cartoonist and Weinstein himself, as they try to better understand the legacy of Beethoven’s Ninth, the composer’s own struggles, the inspiration music can provide and how humanity continues to look for hope even in the darkest times.With: Gabriela Lena Frank, Keri-Lynn Wilson & The Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, Brodka, Charles M. Schulz, Leonard Bernstein, Franz Kranke, Steven Pinker, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Germany, Canada 2024, 97 min
by Oliver Schwehm

'Born to Be Wild' made the band Steppenwolf famous overnight and around the world. The song, synonymous with the cult film EASY RIDER, became the anthem of a generation. What’s less well-known is that singer John Kay and bassist Nick St. Nicholas come from Germany. This documentary traces their journey from their war-ravaged homeland to the streets of Toronto to the pinnacle of the music world. [41 FILMFEST MÜNCHEN]

2024, 27 min
by Boris Dewjatkin

The film directs the viewer's attention to the 'Museum of the Inconspicuous', which unveils itself on the urban material. The material becomes a medium and an impactful protagonist. The narrator uses his experience of the urban space of Berlin to describe a subjective paradise in which man-made systems of order are repeatedly overwritten by the chaotic force. A homage to chaos, inconspicuous signs and the city as palimpsest.

Germany, Austria 2024, 184 min
by Alexander Horwath

A personal essay about the United States, viewed through the life and work of a movie actor. Henry Fonda and the roles he played merge into a dazzling and conflicted figure. A very private man who thought he had "no good answers to anything" becomes the unlikely anchor of a parallel history. His voice, recorded in 1981, and his onscreen avatars guide us through America's past and present – on a road trip from the village of Fonda, NY, across the Midwest to the Pacific; from 1651 to the 1980s and the presidency of another movie actor. It takes many places and times and characters to imagine an invisible republic – the United States of Fonda.

Germany 2024, 71 min
by Alisa Berger

Invisible People is a multi-layered depiction of the unique Japanese contemporary dance Butoh that flows between revolt, eroticism, trance, prayer, ancestral experience, and physical anonymity. The film gradually drifts away from its core issue and becomes a general portrayal of life itself, with all its unforeseen strokes of fate and strange micro-connections.

2024, 88 min
by Günter Atteln

Recognized early on for her exceptional talent, Joana Mallwitz was Europe’s youngest general music director before becoming chief conductor of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, one of Germany’s leading classical orchestras, in August 2023. Over two years, the film follows her as she embarks on a decisive phase of her international career – with debuts in Munich, Paris, Salzburg, and Amsterdam. At the same time, she and her husband have to reorganize their lives after the birth of their first child.JOANA MALLWITZ – MOMENTUM offers a candid and detailed portrait of the musician. We experience Mallwitz as a perfectionist who works hard, a music mediator, and an energetic orchestra leader. Despite all her success, we feel the enormous pressure that the conducting profession brings with it, which, like a musical crescendo, steadily increases until her inaugural concert in Berlin.

Germany 2024, 30 min
by Daniel Burkholz

Lore Krüger was a German-Jewish photographer and a political activist. She was also a buddy of Lisa Fittko. Together they managed to escape from the French concentration camp Gurs. Lore catched the last steamer over the Atlantic, just before the Nazi-Wehrmacht took over in Marseille. Lisa Fittko saved many refugees, artists, intellectuals, etc., many of them having a Jewish background, by bringing them over the Pyrenees Mountains to Spain – out of reach of the German Nazis and their French Fascist collaborators.

Germany 2024, 117 min
by Arne Körner

Dietrich Kuhlbrodt: Hitler boy, film critic, actor, senior prosecutor, screenwriter, punk musician, temporary porn commissioner, and family man! What kind of life, can it be, where all this just happens? On an adventure trip that takes us through the third reich, the nazi poisoned post war BRD, Paris and the reunited Germany we dive into Dietrich’s incredible biography. A trip that shows how to live five different lives at the same time with ease.

2024, 99 min
by Enrique Sánchez Lansch

A star dancer at the Cambodian royal court lovingly raises her husband's little brother as her own son. Decades later, as a forced labourer under the Khmer Rouge, she discovers that her foster son is Pol Pot.Chea Samy was an outstanding soloist in the royal dance ensemble at the Cambodian Royal Palace in the 1930s. But she was also Pol Pot’s foster mother. After marrying Pol’s older brother, a low-level official at the royal court, she looked after the boy as if he were her own. They lost contact when he disappeared into the underground after his graduation. In 1975, like millions of other Cambodians, she was driven to the rice fields. Only after three years of forced labour did she learn that Pol Pot was the boy she had raised decades before. As one of only few dancers, she managed to survive his reign and returned to Phnom Penh as a dance teacher, thus preserving knowledge of the traditional dance. One of her first pupils was Sophiline Cheam, now a successful choreographer. Her ensemble incorporates events from Cambodia’s past in its dance routines. The starting point is a curious fact about Pol Pot’s career, which few Cambodians know about: the connection between Pol Pot and classical Cambodian dance. Artists and intellectuals, in particular, fell victim to the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge, whose leader ironically spent a crucial part of his childhood in the royal palace and gained access to higher education thanks to this dance.

Germany 2024, 111 min
by Katharina Pethke

The ensemble of buildings that makes up the maternity clinic and art school in Hamburg where the director taught is the starting point for this sober interrogation of how motherhood and career can be combined based on three generations of German women.How much does a place reveal about its history? How much can forbears and their descendants know about one another? And how much continuity is contained within progress? When Katharina Pethke became a professor at Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts, it set in motion a process of reflection and research. Before, she had studied there, and so too had her mother and grandmother. Each of the women believed they were breaking new ground and yet, consciously or unconsciously, through stance or in protest, continued to carry on a legacy. This essay film examines the three generations caught between social determination and artistic ambition, self-will and motherhood, production and reproduction. The university building and its sole sculpture by a woman artist purchased by urban planner Fritz Schumacher, “Frauenschicksal” (Women’s Fate), become a mirror as well as showcase for enduring ambivalences. A virtuosic and astute work from an established filmmaker, Reproduktion explores questions of feminine and artistic identity through the lens of Pethke’s personal experience, interweaving her family biography with the architectural history of the art and media campus. [74 BERLINALE – Forum]

Germany 2024, 115 min
by Andres Veiel

A captivating insight into the private estate of Leni Riefenstahl, who became world-famous with her Nazi propaganda film TRIUMPH OF THE WILL but kept denying any closer ties to the regime.Leni Riefenstahl is considered one of the most controversial women of the 20th century as an artist and a Nazi propagandist. Her films TRIUMPH OF THE WILL and OLYMPIA stand for perfectly staged body worship and the celebration of the superior and victorious. At the same time, these images project contempt for the imperfect and weak. Riefenstahl’s aesthetics are more present than ever today - but is that also true for their implied message? The film examines this question using documents from Riefenstahl's estate, including private films, photos, recordings and letters. It uncovers fragments of her biography and places them in an extended historical context. How could Riefenstahl become the Reich's preeminent filmmaker and keep denying any closer ties to Hitler and Goebbels? During her long life after the fall of Nazism, she remained unapologetic, managing to control and shape her legacy. In personal documents, she mourns her "murdered ideals". Riefenstahl represents many postwar Germans who, in letters and recorded telephone calls from her estate, dream of an organizing hand that will finally clean up the "shit-hole state". Then, her work would also experience a renaissance, in a generation or two this time could come - what if they are right?

Germany 2024, 89 min
by Jörg Adolph, Edgar Reitz

In 1968, a classroom in a girls’ high school in Munich is transformed into a film studio under the direction of the young Edgar Reitz. The film lesson begins: the first documented attempt in cinema history to teach film aesthetics as a stand-alone subject. In 2023, Edgar Reitz, now world-famous as the director of the film epic Heimat, is approached by an elderly woman who identifies herself as one of his pupils from 1968. The two arrange a class reunion. Compiled from a documentary made about the project at the time, the Super 8 films shot by the pupils and the filmed reunion in 2023, a kind of long exposure of the last 55 years of film history is created. Are the personalities of the pupils already evident in the exercise films? And what do the women have to say now about contemporary film culture? Filmstunde_23 is a declaration of love for filmmaking.[74 BERLINALE]

Germany 2024, 102 min
by Philipp Fussenegger, Judy Landkammer

Capturing Peaches' transformative journey on 'The Teaches of Peaches Anniversary Tour' in 2022, this documentary blends exclusive archival gems with dynamic tour footage. From stage show inception to riveting performances, it offers an intimate look at the inner workings of feminist icon Peaches, a fearless force challenging gender norms for over two decades. Her biting wit advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights and confronts societal stereotypes, leaving an indelible mark on popular culture.With: Peaches, Black Cracker, Bláthin, Tif 'Teddy' Lamson, Federica Dauri, Natasha Vergilio, Hilary Fox, Bryan Schall, Olivia Oyama, Ixa, Mignon, Leslie Feist, Chilly Gonzales, Shirley Manson, Charlie Le Mindu

Switzerland, Germany 2024, 89 min
by Heidi Specogna

Claudia Andujar escaped the Holocaust as a child and became a multiple award-winning photographer. She travelled the Amazon since the 1960s, and developed a profound relationship with the Yanomami people. From Claudia, they learned to fight against the exploitation of the rainforest and their extermination. Former victims are now activists.

France, Germany 2024, 87 min
by Orkhan Aghazadeh

Since losing his son in an occupational accident, Samid has been struggling with feelings of loneliness and melancholy. Bringing his village cinema back to life becomes an obsession, an endeavour in which he has no trouble encouraging the young and brilliant Ayaz to join him. Together, they must climb hills to find signal and order a bulb, convince the village to build and sew a screen, weld old video recorders, get past the censorship committee and ignore the rumours surrounding the project, all while trying not to become disheartened. Samid passes on his craft, patience and knowledge as a projectionist, while Ayaz, a budding filmmaker, provides a link with the modern world, that of social networks and a different relationship to images. One is progressing through his life, the other through his grief. This charming story moves with the seasons, reminding us that here, as in Sym, this small Azeri village, cinema – resilient, collective, and magical – is truly a part of history. [55 VdR, Anne Delseth]

Germany 2024, 108 min
by Marie-Lou Sellem

Five drama students haven’t seen each other in 36 years. Now reunited, these women share their stories. What experiences have they had? What have they accomplished? What would they rather not have done? Including young female students in their conversation makes this a contemplative cross-generational work. [41 FILMFEST MÜNCHEN]With: Cornelia Felden, Jacqueline Kornmüller, Karoline Eichhorn, Katharina Linder, Kerstin Weiss

Germany, Italy 2024, 90 min
by Reiner Holzemer

The definitive story of American superstar designer Thom Browne, known for his reconceptualization of the classic men's suit and highly conceptual runway presentations. Featuring exclusive access to Browne's personal archives and collection.Thom Browne’s iconic fashion line has garnered A-list celebrity fans across sports, politics, fashion, film and music including LeBron James, Michelle Obama, David Bowie, Billie Eilish, Zendaya and many more. THOM BROWNE: THE MAN WHO TAILORS DREAMS features Cardi B, Bella Hadid, Diane Keaton, Janet Jackson, Anna Wintour, Whoopi Goldberg, Johnny Suh, Amy Fine Collins, Michelle Lamy, Lindsey Vonn, Ayo Edebiri, Tim Blanks, Janelle Monae and Lee Pace.

Germany, Great Britain 2024, 111 min
by Thomas Riedelsheimer

Tracing Light explores the most fascinating and significant of natural phenomena – light, with leading artists and physicists and with nature itself, as they develop artworks through which the ineffable nature of light is made tangible to our senses.A film is time, sound and light. I have made a film about time, Rivers and Tides – Andy Goldsworthy working with Time and about sound, Touch the Sound – a Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie. Now comes Tracing Light. Light is everywhere. Without light there is no life. But light is much more; it is a language only visible when in communication with matter, which in turn, changes it. The information gained, transported by light, is how we understand the origin of the universe, the quantum world. Light is beautiful, magic – and totally incomprehensible. In contemplating light with physicists and artists, we are set in place in a universe much greater than ourselves.After two years of research and filming, I am still fascinated. Sometimes, when listening to the physicists my head wants to explode, and when watching a thin bright white line reflected at the horizon of the sea my heart wants to jump. I don´t want to explain light with this film; one can only fail with such an agenda. I want us to consider and talk about the incredible magic of the world we are living in – its beauty and its mystery, which are, by far, greater than we are. The three storylines are unique, each with its own focus; each looks and feels different. As different as the stories, are the characters – Joe and Ruth being very scientific in their approach, Julie with a great intuition and feel for the light around her and Johannes and Raimund with a deeply human approach and hint of humour. We will not only see the protagonists working on their own art, but also in dialogue and in contact with other artists and their work. And we will see not only their world but also my world as director and cameraman. The way I see light over the two years is part of the project. My camera is my eye and like a fourth level or storyline. It will augment, clarify, confuse, animate. The process of seeing an image and projecting it will also be questioned and seen in a new way. The audience in a cinema will be led to reflect on what is actually happening in the room and on the screen. Light plays. The old German word for cinema is: Lichtspielhaus : Light Play House. Tracing Light will be a mesmerising experience when it goes out in Autumn of 2024.

Germany 2023, 35 min
by Maja Classen

While Puck dares to do wild things, such as queer post porn and wrestling, her creator artist is often insecure and vulnerable. Puck is often misunderstood, judged, fetishized. As a proud Black performer artist, Puck stages herself in images and phantasies that bodies like hers have been banished from. Through the collaboration between director Maja Classen and Puck A BODY LIKE MINE delivers refreshing and unconventional perspectives on current discussions about race and gender.

Germany 2023, 52 min
by Rabi Yansané, Emmanuelle Wagner, Rolf Lambert

The future of fashion is made in Africa. African designers are winning awards and appearing at fashion shows throughout the western world. A diverse and confident scene focused on new codes and social change.For a long time, designers from Africa or with African roots were rarely presented on the catwalks of the western fashion world. But today, they are enjoying considerable critical acclaim in Paris, London and New York. Whether streetwear or haute couture, they are redefining traditional African fabrics and textile techniques with avantgarde designs, using socially and ecologically sustainable production techniques and representing a modern, confident Africa. Politically, they are attuned to the spirit of our times. Demands for equal rights for people of colour, which have grown louder all over the world not just since the Black Lives Matter movement, are also echoed in fashion. Lagos-based Adebayo Oke-Lawal challenges gender roles with his Orange Culture label, Senegalese designer Selly Raby Kane blurs borders between fashion and art, while in Cape Town, Lukhanyo Mdingi's fashion brand focuses on social responsibility. The designers want to create local, economically sustainable structures. It's all about jobs and education. In Dakar, fashion designer Sophie Nzinga has opened West Africa's first school for fashion design. Until recently, most creative people have been self-taught.

Germany 2023, 83 min
by Joerg Steineck

Sam, a sick and struggling country/folk musician leaves Los Angeles behind to revisit his past and his estranged father in Louisiana for the last time. His journey leads him through the fading soul of a country that lived through better days. With the coarseness of a gritty street poem the film reflects the inner struggle of processing non-recognition, loss, failure and the correlation between sensitivity and self-destructiveness.