Berlin Film Festival 2025 Dates
16.02.2024 - 20:35 / deadline.com
Everyone knows that hotels — preferably isolated, ideally with very few guests — make the best settings for horror films. All that sad anonymity, all that provisional space ready to be filled with something really nasty. In Cuckoo, Alpenplatz, run by the excessively friendly Mr Konig (Dan Stevens) totally fits the bill.
You never get a clear idea of its geography, apart from an enormous foyer fronted by a sort of supermarket where the odd disoriented guest wanders in to vomit into the freezer unit. “Oh yes, that happens sometimes,” says the flirty receptionist Trixie (Greta Fernandez), who has apparently just stepped out of one of Brigitte Bardot’s lesser movies. There are also some bungalows — how close to the main building is not clear either — including one painted pink that Konig calls “the love nest.” In horror, that has to be a bad sign.
So a hotel is a good start. Throw in a sinister hospital up the road reminiscent of one of David Cronenberg’s mysterious “institutes,” where nasty experiments are inevitably taking place; add some more pick’n’mix genre elements, including a pair of jealous sisters, a policeman operating under some kind of remote brain control, a couple of jealous step-sisters and a woman in a blonde wig who keeps emerging from the night to attack Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) the heroine and destined Final Girl.
Where are Gretchen’s parents when it matters? Once again, director-writer Tilman Singer has chosen from a reliably dog-eared horror-movie menu. Gretchen’s American mom has just died. Dad (Marton Csokas), long since remarried to a younger woman called Beth (Jessica Henwick). They have a peculiar little daughter, Alma (Mila Lieu) who, since they got to the forest hotel, is having increasingly
Berlin Film Festival 2025 Dates
Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who last week picked up the best documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival, has said he has received death threats and had to cancel his flight home after German officials and Israeli media described his acceptance speech as “anti-Semitic”.
Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The Berlin Film Festival said Monday that it has filed criminal charges following the hacking of its Panorama section’s Instagram social media site, which was used to post anti-Semitic messages. After a politically charged edition, festival organizers also attempted to distance the Berlinale management from the stances taken by some of the awards winners at Saturday’s closing ceremony. The organizers said that on Sunday, the day after the festival concluded, “The Instagram channel of the Berlinale Panorama section was briefly hacked and anti-Semitic image-text posts about the Middle East war with the Berlinale logo were posted on the channel.
Winners have been announced at the 74th Berlin Film Festival, with Dahomey by French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop scooping the coveted Golden Bear prize as the best film of the festival’s International Competition. Scroll down for the full list of winners, which were revealed Saturday evening at the Berlinale Palast.
Don’t get too hot and bothered over the title of the new Norwegian film Sex. The act itself in this first entry in a new trilogy from writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud is really only just talked about in this intriguing movie mostly dependent on leaning into its main characters’ words and descriptions, not a whole lot of visual information. Winner of the Europa Cinemas Label as Best European Film in the Panorama section of the current Berlin Film Festival, where it had its world premiere this week, Haugerud has announced this as this first of three films — Sex, Dreams, and then Love — featuring the same cast and dealing overall with themes of desire, identity and freedom, not to mention sexuality and the place of gender in our lives and society. This first stand-alone film also leans heavily into masculinity in ways it is not normally discussed by guys, but they do here in profound ways in this thought-provoking movie that also puts a spotlight on Norway’s signature city, Oslo.
It’s very easy to misread the title of Victor Kossakovsky’s latest documentary as “Architection,” since it is, in some ways, a detective story about the world we live in, albeit one in which it is very easy to figure out whodunit (spoiler: we did it to ourselves). The actual title, Architecton, is a Greek word that means “master builder,” and the film plays with the irony of what that may mean — pitting the “master builders” of yesteryear against the “master builders“ of today — from the very beginning, using a cryptic line from “L’aquilone,” a rumination on bygone times by Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912). “There is something new within the sun today, or rather ancient,” he writes. This fascinating, engrossing film interrogates the subtext of this seemingly paradoxical statement.
Martin Scorsese was at the Berlinale this week for the first time in a decade. His presence to collect an honorary Golden Bear was a reminder of the festival’s glories of yesteryear.
From his breakthrough work Family Viewing, which dates back to 1987, Atom Egoyan has been exploring the possibilities of different communication technologies by showing screens within screens, stories within other stories and the ways unconnected stories may merge with each other and with real life. Seven Veils is named for the Biblical character Salome, whose seductive dancing as she shed those veils earned her a grisly prize: the severed head of John the Baptist, the ascetic prophet who predicted the coming of Jesus Christ.
“Please make me a good wife to Wolf,” murmurs Agnes (Anja Plaschg) on her marriage night, head bowed in front of the crucifix she has already set up in the conjugal bedroom of the tumbledown stone farmhouse where she will live from now on. Wolf (David Scheid) is meanwhile carousing with his fellow villagers at the wedding celebration, in no hurry to join her. We are deep in the Austrian forest in the 1750s, where life is governed by the cruelties of each season and everything has its place. The point of a woman is to work and have children; anyone who fails in these conjoined vocations is simply a dead weight. Agnes will do her best, but her airy spirits are soon sinking.
For a time, it seemed like an auteur war was about to break out over Adam Sandler, with some of America’s most revered directors vying to find the right role for the comedian. It was rumored, but never confirmed, that Quentin Tarantino imagined him a key role while writing Inglourious Basterds, although this might have been wishful thinking from critics who saw the talented Sandler heading in the same direction as John Travolta until Pulp Fiction saved him from a lifetime of Look Who’s Talking movies. In the end, Paul Thomas Anderson got there first, with Punch Drunk Love (2002), although the glow of a bona fide arthouse hit didn’t last long, and Jack and Jill still happened less than ten years later.
It’s not often that a doc about the transformative power of cinema will deliberately use bad clips of the movies it’s talking about, but that’s part of the point of this insightful, sprawling film, corralled by director David Hinton. Though the masterpieces made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger at the height of their big-screen, Technicolor powers were visually impeccable, their subversive emotional power could still pack a punch through a 16-inch TV screen, even from the most scratched, butchered, and washed-out black-and-white prints.
Mahin’s friend Pouran likes talking about her ailments, real and imagined. More than that, she has something on her phone she is keen to show the ladies gathered for one of their regular lunches at Mahin’s place: the film she made of her colonoscopy. “That’s disgusting,” snorts Mahin (Lily Farhadpour). “I told her to marry! You wouldn’t be like this if you had!” Another of their wrinkly gang chips in. “What joy did our dead husbands ever bring us?” They all laugh, companionably.
Ellise Shafer Martin Scorsese was lauded with the Berlin Film Festival‘s honorary Golden Bear on Tuesday night, celebrating a lifetime of achievement in cinema. As he accepted the award, Scorsese — whose most recent film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is currently up for 10 Oscars — reflected on his career thus far and even teased a return to the festival “in a couple years.” Scorsese was introduced by German director Wim Wenders, who is also Oscar-nominated for his latest feature, “Perfect Days.” Wenders told a hilarious story, complete with a photo slideshow, about one of his earliest interactions with Scorsese at the Telluride Film Festival in 1978, where he came upon the director and his then-girlfriend Isabella Rossellini on the side of the road with a flat tire.
EXCLUSIVE: Beloved French actor Omar Sy stars in the debut feature from longtime producer Brandt Andersen in The Strangers’ Case, a searing and international ensemble that is world premiering at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday. Watch an exclusive clip above.
Korean director Hong Sang-soo is such a Berlinale favorite that his film in competition, featuring Isabelle Huppert as an apparently penniless tourist trying to scrape together a living in Seoul, is his sixth film to be invited to the festival since 2020 — remarkably, that’s not even his entire output over that time. He hits this pace by keeping things simple, shooting each film in just a couple of weeks with very few crew and small casts, most of whom have been his collaborators for years, and covering many of the key technical jobs himself.
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Berlin Film Festival hosted the 10 young European actors selected for the Shooting Stars program, run by European Film Promotion, at a gala event Monday. The presentation of the Shooting Stars took place prior to the screening of Claire Burger’s “Langue Étrangère,” which plays in competition.
Somebody — or something — is speaking from inside a timber crate. “It’s so dark in here… a night so deep and opaque” read the subtitles; the voice is speaking in Fon, the local language of the West African country that was once called Dahomey and is now Benin. As the slats are nailed down, the voice is increasingly muffled; we are outside, but we are inside too, watching the light disappear.
Christopher Vourlias Africa’s growing screen industries are making their mark on the global stage, with three titles in the main competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, but how to unlock the continent’s still-untapped potential was a question on the minds of many at a conference hosted on Saturday by the European Film Market. A partnership between EFM and Prudence Kolong’s Stockholm-based consulting firm Yanibes, AfroBerlin was launched to give a platform to filmmakers from Africa and the diaspora and “to find a place where they can share stories and experiences and be heard,” said Kolong, who also organizes the Cannes Film Festival’s AfroCannes industry showcase.
There is a sense of a running gag in Hors du Temps (renamed Suspended Time for the English-language market). In his complex, autofictional 2022 TV series Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas cast as the director of a film called Irma Vep — a film he had, in fact, made in real life 20 years earlier — the actor Vincent Macaigne, who cheekily developed a version of Assayas that not only picked up on his distinctively reedy voice, but also nobbled his quirky irritability and sensitivities.
When Australian writer Lily Brett published her novel Too Many Men in 2001, critics marvelled at the light, comic tone she had managed to strike in a novel about the lasting impact of the Holocaust, passed down from one generation to the next. Families have their customary jokes; they squabble over the dinner table; they may be funny characters but, underneath it all, there is a consciousness of pain. That’s not an easy balance to strike, as a writer or as an actor.