How far back in the Berlin Film Festival’s 75-year history do you have to go to find an edition as strong as this one? About a quarter-century, I reckon, to 2002, when “Bloody Sunday” and “Spirited Away” tied for the festival’s top prize.
As long as I can remember, Berlin held the distant-third spot in the so-called “Big Three” festivals, far behind Cannes and Venice in both prestige and its power to attract the caliber of movies that shape the conversation. It may never surpass its two older cousins (Cannes was established five years earlier, while Venice dates back to 1932), but for the first time in forever, under the direction of incoming festival chief Tricia Tuttle and her team, I felt a frisson of excitement bubbling up through the slippery ice and sub-zero temperatures.
Berlin has always felt like a slog, between the climate and the scandalously low hit-to-miss ratio in a sprawling lineup of nearly 200 films. Still, I hadn’t attended since 2020, the year Carlo Chatrian took over — the last major film gathering before the world went into lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic — and I was eager to see how the festival might had evolved under the leadership of Tuttle, who’d brought a populist sensibility to her years at BFI London Film Festival. I’m glad I was here to witness her inaugural edition (for which she’d tapped Jacqueline Lyanga and Variety’s own Jessica Kiang), as several improvements were immediately apparent.
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The festival is still centered in Potsdamer Platz, an eerie dead zone in the center of Berlin. In 2020, it had felt like a ghost town: The fest lost access to the cavernous Sony Center megaplex, and the three-story Arkaden shopping center was under renovation. Five years later, many of those screens still sit empty, but life has returned to the area. The fest’s main CinemaxX venue still feels state-of-the-art — a genuine movie theater, unlike the makeshift venues used by so many others fests — and a former Imax screen used by the Blue Man Group marks a nice addition. The festival even added a pop-up social meeting point, called HUB75, in front of the Palast, where journalists and festival guests could debate movies and network late into the evening.
As for the program, it should be said that to make sense of a lineup — especially one as big as Berlin — without seeing everything is no easy task. Like the parable of the blind men asked to describe an elephant, it’s bound to reflect whatever segment you’re personally inclined to sample, but not the whole beast. And so, for the first time, I committed myself to seeing all 19 of the films competing for the Golden Bear this year, plus a great many movies selected in other sections of the festival.
That’s as close as I’d ever gotten to sampling the entire elephant in Berlin, and a comfortable position from which to determine that the festival has turned a corner. The winning film, “Drømmer,” feels primed to play well with audiences around the world. The final entry in the “Dreams Sex Love” trilogy (which kicked off with “Sex” in Berlin’s Panorama sidebar last year) playfully uses the medium of cinema to capture the moment an adolescent girl discovers the power of both her emotions and her imagination. Where other filmmakers steer clear of voiceover narration, Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud leans into it, letting his teenage protagonist Johanne (Ella Øverbye) tell the story of her “awakening” — a crush on a female teacher (Selome Emnetu) that takes on a life of its own — even as other characters question the truthfulness of what we’re hearing.
In my past experience of Berlin, the festival skews toward challenging and quasi-experimental projects that seldom find distribution in the States. From a selection of almost 200 films, I’d wager that five, maybe six typically go on to make an impact with American audiences — easily double that this year. My track record of sniffing out the truffles amid so much dross has been fairly dismal, since I usually make the mistake of gravitating to established auteurs, ignoring the fact that if their projects were great, they probably would have been poached by Cannes.
Occasionally, the calendar works in Berlin’s favor — as it did in securing the premiere of Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” this year. But the rule of thumb is that the selection committee is stuck choosing from whatever is left after Venice and Cannes have cleared the table. (Berlin shares half a dozen or so films with Sundance, offering those films an international premiere, as it did with Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You.”)
This year, the Berlin competition lineup was unusual in that it boasted strong movies from two major directors, Richard Linklater (whose splendid “Blue Moon” reimagines the night “Oklahoma!” opened on Broadway, from the perspective of lyricist Lorenz Hart, bitterly looking on as his former songwriting partner Richard Rodgers basks in the show’s instant success) and Radu Jude (twisting the knife once again with “Kontinental ’25,” in which the suicide of an unhoused former celebrity sends a social worker into a self-questioning spiral).
So why did those films compete for the Golden Bear, rather than holding for a shot at the more prestigious Palme d’Or? In a freak twist, both directors are expected to have a second film ready in time for Cannes: Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” would be an ideal film to open the French fest, while Jude’s reportedly putting the finishing touches on his “Dracula Park.” For all we know, Berlin may have wound up with the better option.
Meanwhile, another major auteur, Mexican director Michel Franco, debuted his latest provocation, “Dreams,” in Berlin. It’s another divisive work from an uncompromising artist — this one about the power dynamics between an opportunistic American philanthropist (Jessica Chastain) and a passionate dancer (Isaac Hernández) from her Mexico City-based nonprofit, whose decision to cross the border upsets the balance of their relationship. Franco’s previous film, “Memory,” made its premiere at Venice, after Cannes denied it a competition slot. While that could make Franco’s decision to play Berlin look like taking the bird-in-hand option, the director told me it was his belief in Tuttle’s vision for the fest that convinced him.
Tuttle took over last year for Chatrian, the former Locarno fest head who had brought a kind of aesthetic consistency to a festival which, under longtime previous chief Dieter Kosslick, had traded rigorous curation for political considerations. The trouble with Chatrian’s taste is that it tilted toward the experimental and avant-garde — a tendency already well represented in Berlin by the Forum and Panorama sections. His leadership might well have elevated those sections, but to stock the main competition (and new Encounters competitive section) with the same rule-bending auteurs was to rob Berlin of its most vital dimension: a populist connection with German locals.
Berlin is by far the largest European film festival, but it’s also different from most in that the public is its primary audience. The industry still comes in great numbers, thanks to the presence of the European Film Market, a massive co-production and business-dealing event that runs alongside the first half of the event. But it could hardly be more different from Cannes, with its more exclusive cachet and chic black-tie vibe.
I’ve been attending Berlin off and on since 2011, when Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” won the Golden Bear from a lineup that included “Margin Call,” Miranda July’s “The Future” and Béla Tarr’s final film, “The Turin Horse.” In retrospect, that was a more-than-decent edition. Still, a competition lineup shouldn’t be judged by its best films, but the strength of the entire selection — which is where Tuttle and her team could really assert their values, embracing a diversity of visions and voices, without ever losing sight of her audience.
Where some festivals turn their noses up at genre cinema, or else relegate it to midnight slots, Berlin welcomed a high-concept situation comedy with Frédéric Hambalek’s “What Marielle Knows,” in which a young girl develops the power to read her parents’ thoughts; a preposterous psychological thriller called “Mother’s Baby,” mostly redeemed by Marie Leuenberger’s lead turn; and new eye-tickling works from Lucile Hadžihalilović (“The Ice Tower”) and French directing couple Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. The latter pair’s stunning (if hollow) op-art showcase “Reflection in a Dead Diamond” featured some of the festival’s most dazzling visuals — trick shots and sight gags — all in service of a schlocky homage to ’60s-era James Bond knockoffs.
Of the 19 films in competition, only a couple left me wondering why they’d been picked. Argentine director Iván Fund’s black-and-white “The Message” features an adorable young “pet psychic,” peddling quack seances with sick and departed animals. It didn’t add up to much for me, but won the Jury Prize, which means at least seven people saw something in it that eluded me. And apart from featuring Michel Blanc’s final performance, “The Safe House” felt like an embarrassing inclusion.
No fewer than seven of the 20 directors in competition were women, and though only Hadžihalilović from among them won a prize, it’s clear that Tuttle and her team are continuing Berlin’s tradition of seeking something closer to gender parity (the figure ties 2017’s record, where more than one-third of the directors vying for the Golden Bear were women). Their example puts the pressure on Cannes to do better in that regard.
While plenty of movies were not to my taste — and experience has taught me to steer clear of the more esoteric Forum section — the only real turkey I found in the lineup was the opening night film, Tom Tykwer’s “The Light.” With Tuttle coming in from abroad, it’s easy to understand why she might feel pressured to put a big German movie in that slot, although I would’ve loved to see her pick Jan-Ole Gerster’s “Islands” instead. While that film — a standout of the non-competing Berlinale Special section — may not be in the German language, Gerster is a native son whom the festival previously overlooked (his debut, “A Coffee in Berlin,” premiered in Karlovy Vary and went on to win six Lolas).
That brings me to my favorite innovation under Tuttle: the creation of the Perspectives section, dedicated to first features. Uncovering and properly spotlighting promising new voices is the hardest and most essential work a festival selection committee can do, and the half-dozen debuts I caught in Perspectives — including Kahlil Joseph’s astonishing, essential “BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions” — all represented directors who, thanks to this platform, have been launched by “A Category” festival status. That means we’ll likely see their next projects selected by the likes of Venice, Cannes and Toronto. And when that happens, we’ll remember where we saw them first.