Navigating a World in Turmoil: The 75th Berlin Film Festival

by: Hester Baer & Angelica Fenner , November 10, 2025

Founded in 1951 as a forum for cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, the Berlin Film Festival has maintained a sustained legacy of advancing democracy through the public dialogue that festivals enable. That role remained equally crucial as the festival celebrated its 75th anniversary in the final weeks of February 2025, following the second Trump inauguration and amid proliferating global conflicts. Newly installed Director of the Berlinale, Tricia Tuttle, formerly Head of Directing Fiction at the National Film and Television School in London, and before that Deputy Head of Festivals at the British Film Institute, is to be credited for charting a steady course amid a reduced budget necessitated by national austerity measures in the face of economic destabilisation.

This year’s festival featured several notable films by past festival favourites, such as Radu Jude, Richard Linklater, and Bong Joon Ho, along with a visible increase in storytelling featuring women, non-binary, and queer-identifying protagonists. Indeed, the call for 50% gender parity at the Berlinale, which was raised in 2015, has now paid off. Many among the organisers are visionary women, such as French-German executive Tanya Meissner, Director of Berlinale Pro (encompassing the European Film Market or EFM, Berlinale Co-Production Market, Berlinale Talents and World Fund initiatives) and Jacqueline Lyanga, Co-Director of Film Programming. They have drawn women into their wider teams and facilitated meaningful collaborations and networking. Half of the Berlinale Talents participants and half of the films screened in this year’s festival were directed by makers identifying as female, as were half of the projects concurrently pitched at the co-production market at the festival’s EFM.

Artificial Intelligence & Algorithmic Bias

Even amid progress in the broader film industry, exemplified also by the implementation of intimacy coordinators on set, other inequities are emerging, prompting the timely theme ‘From Unconscious Bias to Algorithmic Bias: How AI Reinforces Sexism and Discrimination in Images and Storytelling’ at the annual Global Forum for Women’s Film Organizations. The Forum was once again coordinated by the inimitable Barbara Rohm, Chairwoman of Power to Transform, and hosted at the Canadian Embassy on Potsdamer Platz on February 14. In her opening remarks, the representative of the Embassy Counsellor, Andrea Meyer, pointed out Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s endorsement—at an AI summit in Paris only a week before—of unlocking AI’s innovation and economic opportunities while also working in partnership with governmental, private and corporate sectors to develop these technologies safely. Machine learning is only possible through large data sets that are already in place, reflecting the status quo and reproducing existing inequalities. For this reason, all nations need to look toward developing and implementing AI responsibly, grounding it in international human rights law while considering economic, political, and security impacts, as well as questions of authorship and copyright.

Rohm shared slides with images produced by AI in response to prompts on social media asking for the ideal female body, as well as the ideal male body, according to Universal Pictures.

These images demonstrate that AI functions as a filter capable of amplifying certain underlying assumptions to the level of the grotesque, making it all the more important to understand where the sourced data originates. In addition to perpetuating misinformation, AI consumes large quantities of electricity, thereby intensifying the current climate crisis. We need to reflect on what we are using and how it is shaping the world, especially since large tech companies often remain unconcerned with misinformation and ecological impact as long as their short-term profits are served.

Moderated by Canadian Manori Ravindran, London Correspondent for the communications operation The Ankler, the Forum featured a roundtable of speakers offering a range of perspectives on AI. Tina-Marie Gulley is CEO of Ada Developers Academy in Washington, DC, which fosters a more diverse tech community by forging a pathway for marginalised and under skilled workers to become software developers. Ada Developers Academy—named after early nineteenth-century mathematician Ada Lovelace, who invented the prototypical computer—offers a six-month foundation in coding, Python, and generative AI. After this, trainees are matched with a corporate partner for hands-on experience, ongoing discussions on policy and ethics, and the pursuit of a capstone project.

Paulina Bietz, a creative producer and prompt architect with Wiedemann and Berg Films, extensively uses generative AI for brainstorming, preparing images for storyboards, logline analysis, screenplay analysis, and set design. She authored the script for the experimental documentary AI Manifesto, in which industry personnel came together to forge recommendations and rules for working with AI in the German film industry, which include using an identifier in the credits that reads ‘This film contains images and sound elements created with AI. These elements are marked’. Whereas traditional AI does one task intelligently to solve a specific problem, as exemplified by a chess robot that knows what to do based on traditional chess rules, generative AI draws from input that includes text, image, voice, sound, and code to find patterns in training data and calculate probabilities with which to create something entirely new. Prompting is the foundation of human-AI interaction and should be based on a solid grasp of the tools and syntax associated with good writing. This ensures that the input generates output that advances beyond the realm of the generic to the creative, and beyond the random to the precise. However, Bietz cautions, we should not expect to lean back and let AI do our work for us. Prompting entails responsibility because we cannot trust AI’s results and should always follow up with research to determine the veracity of the output. Given how much AI reflects, among other things, the so-called ‘male gaze’ inherent in most widely available data, especially on the internet, we need to 1) control and curate training data, 2) become conscious of existing biases, including our own, 3) educate ourselves on how to detect bias, and 4) learn how to prompt in such a manner as to avoid perpetuating stereotypes and bias.

As an advocate and consultant for AI justice at the Racism and Technology Centre in the Netherlands, computer programmer Robin Aïsha Pocornie recounted for the Global Forum the experience that led her to become the first citizen in the Netherlands to prove the connection between AI bias and discrimination, after the AI facial recognition technology (Proctorio) used to monitor students writing exams online during the pandemic was unable to detect her face because the technology had been trained on white complexions. The Human Rights Institute helped her to build a legal case to bring this bias to the public’s attention and force change. Pocornie has experience designing models and validating processes that produce AI results in accordance with human rights guidelines. Her clients include technology departments, insurance companies, and Dutch broadcasters.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin, artist and Associate Professor of AI and the Arts at the Digital Worlds Institute (University of Florida) and a member of the Seneca Nation in Oklahoma, spoke compellingly on the topic of morals and computer coding, also with an eye to industry rights and sustainability for cultural creatives like herself. Having worked with emerging technologies since 1998, she began integrating AI and Augmented Reality into her art in 2006, which has screened at installations and film festivals worldwide. Decentralisation, she professed, remains the hope for many of her generation, who saw the internet in its early days as a real promise for empowerment and self-sufficiency, for changing the world from behind our screens. The promise was that information would be free, but instead, our data is now harvested. Another promise was democratised media, yet instead the media threatens democracy. We aspired to a ‘new economy,’ but what we got was the gig economy with even more precarity and inequality. In short, the internet has lost its ideals. Bearskin developed an award-winning podcast called ‘Wampum Codes,’ which advocates for an ethical framework for software development based on the principles of co-creation as understood by the people of the Seneca Nation. She argues that we can incrementally and algorithmically change the conditions for AI through a decentralised code that guards against harm to people and the environment.

While it was not necessarily evident which films at the Berlinale benefited from the use of AI, many seemed preoccupied with the breakdown of social behaviour in the face of economic, emotional, and political precarities pervading societies across disparate regions of the world, and induced by neoliberal policy and biopolitical governmentality. This focus was echoed by the 2025 retrospective, “Wild, Weird, Bloody. German Genre Films of the 1970s,” which looked back at the oddballs, outsiders, and otherworldly characters that populated an array of little-known, mostly B-movies produced in East and West Germany at the height of both the Cold War and the splintering countercultures that were soon swallowed up by the neoliberal turn of the 1980s. In other festival sections, recent films from Germany and elsewhere grappled with the legacies of those countercultures—formed in the crucible of 1968—but also with genealogies of right-wing violence and conservatism, a testament to the polarised moment in which the 75^th festival took place.

Neo-Fascist Resurgences

The institutional racism perpetuated by government and corporate entities past and present formed the concerted focus of several important nonfiction films calling attention to the way such institutions have failed to sustain democracy in the past, thereby laying the groundwork for the resurgence of authoritarianism in the present. Martina Priessner’s revelatory documentary Die Möllner Briefe/The Mölln Letters revisits the 1992 arson attacks carried out by neo-Nazis on two buildings in the city of Mölln where migrant families were living. Three people died in the attack, including the grandmother, sister, and cousin of Ibrahim Arslan, the protagonist of Priessner’s film, who was among the survivors. Growing up in the hostile environment of Mölln in the aftermath of the attack, Arslan and his remaining family members found various coping mechanisms for dealing with the trauma, including the creation of a culture of remembrance around the attack that often left them at odds with the city government. It came as an absolute shock to Arslan when, decades later, a graduate student pursuing research in the Mölln City Archives stumbled upon a trove of thousands of letters sent in 1992 to the Arslan family and other victims—letters that were never delivered to the survivors. Writers from all over Germany expressed solidarity and empathy with the victims, and shame, grief, and outrage at the racist motivations of the attackers. Priessner follows Arslan as he searches out and meets with the authors of some of the most poignant letters, finding a belated kinship with people whose words and sentiments might have comforted him in the years following the attacks. Arslan also meets with representatives of the city government and the archivist who dutifully filed away the letters, seeking in vain for an explanation as to why Mölln violated laws governing the privacy of correspondence; confiscated donations of money intended to help the victims who had lost their homes and property; and perpetuated the isolation and ostracisation of Arslan and the other victims by denying them even the knowledge of the remarkable outpouring of community support contained in the letters.

Preissner’s careful illustration of the personal impact of institutional structures of violence is echoed in other films chosen for exhibition at the festival. Das deutsche Volk, Marcin Wierzchowski’s documentary about the 2020 racist shooting in Hanau that left nine people dead, explores the consequences of the attack for surviving family members, with a focus on the failures of police and city government leading up to the shooting and in its aftermath, including during the investigation as well as in official commemorations of the attack. In turn, US-based filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt’s stunning essay film Evidence examines the pernicious legacies of the Olin Corporation—the American munitions and chemical company for which her own father worked—not only on the landscapes and communities contaminated by the company’s environmental pollution, but also on the rise of the new conservative movement that it helped to found and sustain through dark money provided by its ideological wing, the John F. Olin Foundation. Made during the Covid-19 pandemic, Evidence juxtaposes static long takes of natural landscapes polluted by Olin, many of them in historically Black communities in the rural south, with images of the filmmaker’s studio and garden—beautiful but claustral quarantine spaces that serve as both counterpoints to the lands spoiled by Olin and metaphors for our entrapment by its political influence—as well as of her own hands paging through books promoting sexist and racist ideologies as she grapples with the Foundation’s palpable impact on contemporary developments in the US and elsewhere.

Genealogies of present-day conservatism and right-wing violence also formed a focal point for narrative films at the festival, whose concluding day coincided with the 2025 German federal election in which the neo-fascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party won a whopping 20.4% of the vote, placing second overall only to the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU). Constanze Klaue’s directorial debut Mit der Faust in die Welt schlagen/Punching the World, adapted from the novel by Lukas Rietzschel, offers a timely portrayal of the radicalisation of boys growing up in rural eastern Germany in the early 2000s, suggesting that the collapse of institutions and infrastructures, the failed promise of privatisation, and the increasing precariousness that followed, played a strong role in the appeal of neo-Nazism for the disenfranchised youth who grew up to vote for the AfD.

Screening Feminist Ethics of Care

Coping with the collapse of social provisions and the intensification of precarity formed a common theme of many of the festival’s most successful and intriguing films. Petra Volpe’s hospital drama Heldin/Late Shift, a Swiss-German co-production, follows Floria, played by the incomparable Leonie Benesch, a nurse on an understaffed oncology ward. Shot by the accomplished cinematographer Judith Kaufmann and unfolding with the tense pacing of a thriller, Late Shift keeps viewers on the edge of their seats as they follow Floria’s seemingly Sisyphean struggle to care for her patients over the course of one twelve-hour shift. With increasing pressures from private clients and demanding family members and minimal support from colleagues who are all as overworked as she is, Floria’s nursing is portrayed as an individualised, personal responsibility rather than a contribution to the collective teamwork of a robust institution.

The Danish drama Hjem kaere hjem/Home Sweet Home, written and directed by Frelle Petersen, follows a plot similar to that of Late Shift, focusing on the divorced, single mother Sofie, who embarks on a new career as a home care attendant for ageing patients. Gifted at her job, Sofie nevertheless struggles in the pressure-laden environment created by the care agency, which imposes increasingly strict requirements on its workers, who must labour under time constraints and limit personal interactions with their patients. Shot in a rural area of Denmark with mostly nonprofessional actors, Home Sweet Home depicts not only the undervalued work of home care but also the loneliness and melancholy experienced by the ageing in an increasingly hostile world.

While Late Shift and Home Sweet Home portray the pressures faced by care workers (and the suffering of their patients) in the context of neoliberal downsizing and the casualisation of labour, Phillip Döring’s remarkable four-hour documentary Palliativstation/Palliative Care Unit offers an extended look into the humane model of care practiced by the team of doctors and nurses who run the palliative care ward at Berlin’s Franziskus Hospital. Döring gained remarkable access to both the health care workers and the patients in the ward, filming at close proximity with a static, observational camera, the wide-ranging conversations, varied pain management practices, and complex decision-making processes of patients salvaging life in the face of deep suffering and terminal diagnoses.

Care workers of various kinds populated many of the festival’s selections across an array of genres and styles. In the family drama Zikaden/Cicadas, written and directed by Ina Weisse, Isabell (Nina Hoss) juggles her professional life, her strained marriage, and the demands of caring for her ageing parents. The thriller Mother’s Baby, written and directed by Johanna Moder, portrays the struggles of successful conductor Julia (Marie Leuenberger) to bond with her baby, conceived with the help of fertility treatments and born in a private clinic, whom she suspects has been switched at birth. The Netflix production Delicious, written and directed by Nele Mueller-Stöfen, is a genre mix that verges into horror, following the conflicts that ensue after Teodora (Carla Diaz) is hired as a maid by a wealthy German family on vacation in the South of France. In the festival opener, prominent German director Tom Tykwer’s much-anticipated Das Licht/The Light—his first feature film in ten years and the follow-up to the blockbuster streaming series Babylon Berlin, for which he served as one of the showrunners—a housekeeper who has migrated to Berlin from Syria becomes the conveyance through which a white German family processes narcissistic feelings of shame and guilt about their own privilege.

These and other films attend with various degrees of nuance to the ethical dilemmas faced by individuals confronted with crime and violence. Does silence equal complicity, and in what circumstances must one speak out? Sarah Miro Fischer’s debut film Schwesterherz/ The Good Sister, an especially insightful example of this tendency, follows Rose (Marie Bloching), who may have been an unwitting witness to a rape committed by her brother, with whom she shares an especially close bond. Using sound and gesture in subtle ways, the film shifts the representation of sexual violence on screen to focus on perpetrators and the complex perspectives, roles, and responsibilities of their friends and relations in the face of their crimes.

Several documentaries shown at the festival reflected a focus on strong, self-determined female characters like Rose, who speak up and refuse complicity with patriarchal norms. Gerd Kroske’s outstanding Stolz & Eigensinn/Pride & Attitude draws on footage from the early-1990s Leipzig-based pirate television station Kanal X of female industrial labourers working in male-dominated professions in East Germany. This archival footage documented the situation of the women just after unification, when the West German takeover or shutdown of factories, mines, and other infrastructures of the GDR industry threatened their jobs. Following Kroske’s discovery of the original footage, his production team tracked down many of the women featured there. Pride & Attitude excavates the remarkable history of women’s labour, mostly foreclosed upon by post-industrial, post-unification society. It documents the unique roles of women in the GDR and in the aftermath of its demise, as well as their views about the possibilities and limitations of female emancipation under state socialism and neoliberal capitalism.

Also based on archival footage previously lost and fortuitously rediscovered in a Norwegian state library, Vibeke Løkkeberg’s The Long Road to the Director’s Chair reconstructs a documentary intended initially for television that Løkkeberg shot in 1973, at the First International Women’s Film Seminar organised by German filmmakers Claudia von Alemann and Helke Sander in West Berlin. Considered one of the first feminist film festivals ever convened as well as a catalysing event for the feminist film movement, the Seminar brought together women directors from Europe and North America to foster women’s participation in filmmaking. Løkkeberg was invited to the Seminar to screen her 1972 drama Abortion, which followed a young girl’s discovery of her pregnancy and application to terminate it. The footage that she shot there, with the assistance of a film crew who accompanied her from Norway, documents the participants’ conversations about the form and content of dominant cinema, their aspirations for a feminist counter-cinema, and the obstacles they faced to occupying the director’s chair—conversations that still resonate more than fifty years later. Many of the women featured in the original footage—including Løkkeberg, von Alemann, Sander, and American filmmaker and co-founder of Women Make Movies Ariel Dougherty—were present for the premiere of The Long Road at the Berlinale. Their post-screening discussion reflected on both the many accomplishments of the feminist film movement and the dispiriting sense of history repeating itself, as bodily autonomy, choices about reproduction, sexual violence, as well as the access of minoritised groups to the means of audiovisual representation continue to be sites of struggle.

Queer Pasts & Futures

Yet the Berlinale, whose jury this year was overseen by queer film pioneer Todd Haynes [Fig. 5], was also a testament to the flourishing of diverse representation on screen, further celebrated in the honorary Golden Bear awarded to Tilda Swinton, an actor with a legacy of strikingly androgynous character roles.

Marie Luise Lehner’s debut film, the queer coming-of-age drama Wenn du Angst hast nimmst du dein Herz in den Mund und lächelst/If You Are Afraid You Put Your Heart In Your Mouth and Smile, is a tour-de-force of intersectional feminist representation. The film focuses on 12-year-old Anna, the hearing daughter of a deaf single mother, who live together in a tiny apartment in the working-class district of Floridsdorf in Vienna. While Anna initially aspires to conform to her wealthier school peers, she eventually finds solidarity with Mara, the queer daughter of a trans*parent, whose nonconformism helps Anna embrace her own differences and reconcile with her mother.

In Janine zieht aufs Land/Janine Moves to the Country, director Jan Eilhardt processes his provincial past by casting himself in the lead role from his script, which tells the story of Janine, who moves from Berlin back to the countryside with her asthmatic partner. The queer couple encounter the distrustful gazes of villagers, including the family next door, whose teen son gradually draws inspiration from the new neighbours to explore his own coming out. Working with a camp aesthetic that embraces the abject, absurd, and surreal, the film displays both social satire and moments of sincerity that humanise diverse forms of difference and disability.

Joy Gharoro Akpojoto similarly authored the script for her British drama, Dreamers, about two women held at Hatchworth Removal Centre while awaiting the processing of their asylum requests. Staged exclusively within the walls of this carceral space, the film captures the hierarchies perpetuated between inmates and staff, as well as the fleeting gestures, words, and glances of sympathy and solidarity that also traverse differences. Isio has been living illegally in the UK for two years after her previous asylum requests were rejected due to the difficulty of proving the threat to her life in Nigeria after her relationship with another woman was discovered. Her Hatchworth roommate, Farah, meanwhile, plots a prison escape that forces Isio to choose between following her newfound love and the cruel optimism of legally achieving asylum.

A sensibility attuned to neurodiversity characterises Valentine Cadic’s unpretentious debut feature Le rendez-vous de l’été/That Summer in Paris about an introverted young woman, the aptly named Blandine, travelling from Normandy with tickets to the swimming competition of the Paris Olympics. Nothing goes according to plan: the distant cousin, whose cramped apartment she stays in, argues incessantly on her cell with an alienated boyfriend and is more interested in exploiting Blandine as a babysitter for the daughter for whom she herself has no time. When Blandine is barred from entering the Olympic stadium due to a seemingly simple and resolvable technical glitch in her electronic ticket, she still makes a fleeting but sincere conversational connection with a temporary security guard there. Despite enjoying the company of her niece and feeling intrigued by the young man she met, these and other encounters also help her to recognise and embrace her own disposition as one incompatible with the twin pressures of hyperconnectivity and hyper-consumerism, prompting her, in the closing scene, to return with quiet grace to adopt her lifestyle of solitude as a woman happily single in a rural village in Normandy.

Voices of Resistance & Inspiration

Compelling critiques of neoliberalism, including its harnessing to nationalism and religious extremism, were present in films originating from disparate geographical regions. Confidante, the fourth film by Turkish-French directing duo Çagla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanatti, secured the Panorama Audience Award for its brilliant dramaturgical conceit: spectators are simultaneously eavesdroppers onto one end of the profane conversations addressed into the headset worn by 40-year-old single mother Sabiha, who works under the pseudonym Arzu at an erotic call centre. The plot thickens in this intimate chamber piece shot almost exclusively in one room in the course of a single evening, as Arzu becomes inadvertently embroiled in a relay of phone conversations that include loose-lipped high-ranking politicians, criminals, and a young man trapped under a building during an earthquake that same night. In the story’s denouement, Sabiha loses her patience with the corrupt schemes and hypocritical morality spouted by her male callers. She unleashes a heated verbal tirade, whose lines the film’s directors later revealed in the audience Q&A actually originate from a speech delivered by a young female university student at a political demonstration in 1993.

Women’s dissidence is also central to Holding Liat, which won Best Documentary and the Ecumenical Jury Prize for its portrayal of one father’s effort to have his daughter Liat Atzili and her husband Aviv Atzili released after both were kidnapped during the October 7 attack on their kibbutz. Filmmaker and distant relative Brandon Kramer documents the challenges that Liat’s parents, Yehuda and Chaya, face as they seek to rally politicians in the US and Israel to help bring their adult daughter and son-in-law home. Cognizant that their daughter worked tirelessly for peaceful reconciliation between Israel and Palestine, Yehuda steadfastly resists the efforts of other interest groups to politicise this situation for their own causes. His crusade is only partially vindicated; Liat is finally freed and released to her jubilant extended family while her husband is returned home in a coffin, having succumbed to gunshot wounds during the original attack.

In Ich will Alles: Hildegard Knef/I Want It All, Austrian director Luzia Schmid lets the highly articulate, politically astute, and ethically self-reflexive film star and singer speak for herself to the maximum extent possible through clips from her films, photographs overlaid by early radio interviews, and footage from television interviews conducted across a fulsome career extending to the millennium. What emerges is a complex biographical portrait of this both charismatic and controversial figure. Born in 1925, she came of age amid aerial bombings and food shortages, only to be catapulted into stardom through her performances in two of the first feature films to emerge from postwar Germany. Schmid also shot contemporary conversations with Knef’s only child, Christina Antonia Gardiner-Palastanga, on her mother’s struggles to balance family life with her unrelenting career productivity and creativity.

Billy Shebar’s Monk in Pieces similarly develops a multi-faceted understanding of the visionary singer, composer, and performer Meredith Monk. Born in 1942 in New York City from a maternal lineage of Jewish musicians, Monk began generating wildly original performances in the 1960s. She redefined the voice as both an instrument and a language in and of itself, incorporating this into landscapes of sound and unleashing otherworldly feelings and energies in her audiences. Recurring excerpts from archival footage document her practices and performances over the decades within the changing décor of her Tribeca loft, where she has lived, danced, and sung since 1972. In more recent interviews with Shebar, Monk also explains the steps she is taking to train others to continue the artistry she has pioneered, ensuring that ensuing generations may draw inspiration from her unrelenting creativity. The fearlessness of these two remarkable performers, from opposite sides of the Atlantic, in navigating turbulent times over a half-century, serves as an inspiration for present-day audiences facing the turmoil of the polycrisis.

Acknowledgement: 

Research for this report was enabled through funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada.