Sustaining Heterotopic Spaces & Screens: The 74th Berlin Film Festival

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

If a film festival can be said to enact a veritable heterotopia—in Michel Foucault’s words ‘juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’[1]—then the 74^th Berlinale, which took place from 15 to 25 February 2024, certainly embodied this, in keeping with an already lively history since its founding at the peak of the Cold War in 1950. Just when the waning of the pandemic seemed to augur calmer times for festival coordination, the intensification of geopolitical crises conspired with growing financial challenges to complicate the task of the Berlinale’s management team. For one, national politics were cause for turbulence when representatives from the far-right nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) were first invited, as is customary for elected representatives from all German political parties. They were then uninvited following vigorous dissent and pressure from culture workers and political activists. The question of to what extent a festival is and should remain a place for open dialogue and disagreement was also brought to a head by the war in Gaza. Three filmmakers who had been invited to screen their work at the Berlinale —Suneil Sanzgiri, Ayo Tsalithaba, and John Greyson—chose to withdraw in protest at the lack of an explicit stance taken by the festival management. At the same time, distinguished jury member Christian Petzold reminded everyone that ‘we’re here to watch films.’

Infrastructural challenges were also in evidence, as economic austerity, induced not least by the war in Ukraine, resulted in a nearly 30% reduction in the number of films screened, from 400 in the final 2019 program overseen by former director Dieter Kosslick, down to 243 in 2024, when Carlo Chatrian and Mariëtte Rissenbeek ended their term as co-directors. To manage this reduced programming, the longstanding section Perspektive Deutsches Kino, traditionally such an important venue for showcasing new and emerging films produced in Germany, was dissolved, along with the section Berlinale Series. New talent was integrated into existing sections such as Competition, Encounters, Panorama, Generation, and Forum, while work produced in the series format appeared in Berlinale Special. In 2019, the festival already lost one of its central screening venues with the closing of the CineStar multiplex at Potsdamer Platz. Further vacancies loom on the horizon, as other central pillars of German film culture in Berlin—the Arsenal Kino, the Deutsche Kinemathek and its affiliated film library, and the DFFB (Berlin School of Film and Television)—have all lost their leases at the Sony Centre amid a speculative real estate market, and will be forced by early 2025 to disperse to new locations scattered across the city. What the ensuing iterations of the Berlinale will look like and how viewers will navigate it remains up in the air.

Yet for this year’s festival programmers, austerity measures also inspired ingenious solutions: for instance, the choice to open the vaults of the Kinemathek in the year of that institution’s 60^th anniversary, to share with the public 20 wonderful treasures produced between 1960 and 2000. Gathered under the banner ‘Das andere Kino: Aus dem Archiv der Deutschen Kinemathek’ (An Alternate Cinema: From the Deutsche Kinemathek Archives), the retrospective focused on independent German films characterised by wilful protagonists, innovations in film language, and unconventional terms of production. Viewed anew from the vantage point of 2024, these films—many of them authored by unsung filmmakers—offered an opportunity to reflect on what has been excluded from the dominant narrative of film history and to reconsider the cinematic prehistory of a range of contemporary concerns, including feminist and queer emancipation, the portrayal of minoritised groups and migrants on screen, as well as the concomitant search for new modes of narration and representation.

Post-Heroic Storytelling

The ongoing search for new modes of storytelling likewise formed the matrix for the 2024 gathering of women’s film organisations convened by the feminist think tank Power to Transform! in advance of the festival. As presented by Barbara Rohm, co-chair of the organisation with Yvonne de Andrés, the event’s theme of ‘Post-Heroic Storytelling’ was chosen to reflect the quest for narratives that embrace relationality and connection rather than exclusion and exploitation. Bringing together representatives of more than 60 feminist organisations from 31 countries under the banner Power for Change, the global forum offered networking, mentoring, and sharing of best practices among activists working across a broad range of international contexts. Building on the momentum of Power to Transform!’s 2023 global forum, this year’s event was again sponsored by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, together with the Embassy of Canada, which also hosted a vibrant group of in-person participants for the second year in a row.

In her welcome speech, Canadian Minister-Counsellor Patricia Elliott invoked Canada’s feminist foreign policy, which strives for transformational change in the areas of human rights and gender equity and seeks to break down barriers that reinforce discrimination. Elliott hailed cultural diplomacy—including through film—as a key pillar of Canada’s engagement with the world. Her message was echoed by the introductory remarks of Lisa Paus, Germany’s Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, who emphasised in no uncertain terms that structural inequality leads to impoverished portrayals of women on screen, stressing the need, in turn, for a firm intersectional feminist cultural and film policy to achieve more visibility for women and more diverse forms of aesthetic and political representation. Paus stressed her own ministry’s focus on the ‘three R’s’ of resources, rights, and representation. In terms of resources, a key goal is closing the persistent gender pay gap: in Germany, women earn 32% less than men. Women should receive half of every pie, Paus insisted, but pay and funding equity must go hand in hand with the right to protection from violence, abuse of power, and sexism. Given that 44% of women experience sexist attacks in their daily lives, a new alliance has been formed that brings together 550 organisations, companies, and institutions, along with the Federal Cabinet of Germany, to combat sexism and sexual violence across all spheres of society. For Paus, representation—and not least cinematic representation—is also a key landmark on the ‘road to gender equality,’ and one that a new G7 dashboard on gender gaps, the first joint monitoring effort of the G7 nations, will work to track. Quotas do help, as do professorships at film universities and membership in key committees that are responsible for resource allocation. Paus specifically referenced the vital work being undertaken by the MaLisa Foundation, founded in 2016 by the German physician, actor, and producer Maria Furtwängler, along with her daughter Elisabeth Furtwängler, to promote social equity.

Berlinale co-director Mariëtte Rissenbeek picked up on the theme of post-heroic storytelling in her remarks, noting that, whereas many people seem to be looking for heroes right now, the binary worldview that the typical heroic narrative foments is a dangerous one. She emphasised that women perform much of the labour that sustains film festivals, which in turn offer a prominent venue for disseminating non-male perspectives on the world. For Rissenbeek, a non-heroic vision entails finding empowerment in assuming the mantle of a ‘second position,’ being unafraid to make mistakes, and believing in oneself, imperfections and all, a standpoint that also seemed to reference her own abbreviated term as co-director of the festival, plagued as it has more recently been with a series of challenges and critiques.

The general air of solidarity tipped into pure excitement as the global forum’s keynote speaker, filmmaker and showrunner Joey Soloway, arrived in the room. Soloway, best known for the series Transparent (2014-19) and for co-founding the feminist initiative 50/50 by 2020, offered a humorous look back on their talk, ‘The Female Gaze,’ held in 2016 at the Toronto International Film Festival, in which they had advocated for bringing the female gaze—which they defined as a form of audiovisual representation that initiates the viewer into how women feel—to the forefront of film, art, and culture. From their current vantage point as a nonbinary creator, Soloway complicated the picture conjured in their previous talk under the tagline ‘Whither/wither the female gaze!’ Touching on the history of the ‘male gaze’ since feminist theorist Laura Mulvey’s coinage of the term in the 1970s, Soloway now proposed the ‘Other gaze’ (‘not great, but it’s all we have right now’), which they defined as a prism of seeing-feeling for anyone who is othered, in particular QTPOC (Queer Trans People of Colour), among those most excluded from access to the means of audiovisual production.

Soloway’s rousing talk was followed by a panel discussion that offered a welcome pivot from institutional perspectives on post-heroic storytelling to those of practitioners themselves. Chaired by Manori Ravindran, Senior Contributing Editor for Screen International, the panel gave voice to fresh takes by Minenhle Luthuli, from South Africa, writer and director of the short films Heart Attack (2021) and Get Ready with Me (2022); Indigenous Canadian actor and filmmaker Gail Maurice, writer and director of the comedy Rosie (2022); and Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints, writer and director of the 2023 international hit documentary film Smoke Sauna Sisterhood.

Luthuli defined post-heroic storytelling as the narratives that emerge when filmmakers seize the opportunity to tell the stories they want and self-determine what their ‘heroes’ look like. Rather than consciously aiming to combat stereotypes with her films, she instead seeks to tell stories that resonate with her own experience. Get Ready with Me, for instance, shows a young Black woman as she gets ready to go out with friends, trying on different outfits, hairstyles, and makeup. The film portrays the protagonist as she wrestles with beauty standards and norms of mainstream femininity, offering both a humorous take on Black female visibility in the era of social media and an introspective narrative about the toll on Black women of the mandate to conform.

For Maurice, a fluent speaker of the language of her Cree/Métis community, filmmaking offers the opportunity to tell stories about her own heroes, including the grandmother who raised her in a small village of 700 people, to feature her language (now spoken by only 1000 people), and to thereby break down stereotypes about Indigenous people. These include stereotypes about gender, a concept that doesn’t exist as such in her native tongue, spurring her own depiction of characters whose gender can’t be pinned down. Garnering the funding and concomitant creative freedom to make Rosie (her first feature) enabled Maurice to create an inclusive set and to mentor the queer, women, and Indigenous members of her cast and crew. Focusing on a young protagonist was likewise important to Maurice as a way of broadcasting to a broad audience of young people that they should take pride in their culture and identity and that the world wants to hear Indigenous stories.

For Hints, it is crucial to remember that the camera is never objective. In her own search for a way to develop a non-sexualised yet intimate gaze at women’s naked bodies for Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, she did screen tests with the cinematographer on her own body first. She showed these images of herself nude to the other women she planned to include before beginning to film them. After production was finished, she allowed all the women she had filmed to see how they were portrayed before asking them to sign licensing agreements (rather than doing so, as is customary, before filming began). Hints notes that many viewers have seen the film multiple times because they want to re-enter the safe space of the sauna and feel part of the sisterhood that developed there.

Reframing the Picture

At a press conference with an ensuing roundtable convened on 20 February under the title ‘Reframing the Picture: Gender Equity Policies in Film Policies,’ researchers from Germany, Canada, and the UK delivered the latest statistics on gendered representation in front of and behind the camera, including recommendations for policy design and future research. To determine which policies can deliver fundamental shifts in norms, structures, and practices to improve women’s participation in global screen industries, they compared policies, undertook statistical modelling, analysed networks, examined financial and economic data, and interviewed stakeholders. The team, which included Professors Skadi Loist (Babelsberg), Elizabeth Prommer (Rostock), Doris Ruth Eikhof (Glasgow), and Deb Verhoeven (Alberta), observed that a film like Barbie may create the illusion that independent women directors can break into the blockbuster market. In fact, the statistics still contradict this. Out of 2023’s top 100 films, only 30% featured a female lead or co-lead, the lowest figure since 2014 and a significant drop from the record high in 2022 of 44%. And among those same 100 films, only 16% were directed by a woman.

AI tools have been able to measure how long women’s faces are visible on screen, revealing them to be present half as often and half as long as those of men. While this ratio has the effect of naturalising imbalances, the quality of representation is also at stake. Now we have Barbie on screen, but as one speaker pointed out, ‘Who is Barbie? Barbie is not me!’

While quotas limit the freedom of funding organisations, which often have their own way of doing things, they are highly effective; when quotas were implemented in the UK parliament, 50/50 representation was quickly achieved. The quota system was thereupon abandoned under the assumption that the problem was resolved, causing the number of women in Parliament to drop promptly to 30% and demonstrating that quotas do matter. In Austria, as soon as a discussion of quotas was launched, women started to gain more funding simply because they felt empowered to ask for it, even before the quotas were implemented. In Scotland, diversity standards require production teams to identify how they will change their approach to achieve more diversity, which has incentivised the building of less homogenous teams.

Actress, producer, and co-founder of the MaLisa Foundation, Maria Furtwängler, observed that in the German context, men seem to have closed networks, making it difficult for women to join them, and they also struggle to build their own. Prommer pointed out that this is because women have a harder time gaining the funding to produce their second film, which would otherwise provide them a foothold to help other women into the system.

Ultimately, the team’s research found that gender equity policies designed to improve the representation of women and gender minorities in the film and media industry have increased in number over the past decade, but progress toward equity is slow. (As the report notes, ‘At the current rate of progress, gender equity, where men occupy 50 per cent of key creative positions, will only be achieved in the year 2215 in Canada (i.e. in nearly 200 years), in 2085 in the UK (in more than 60 years), and 2041 in Germany (nearly 20 years).’[2] Real improvement will only be achieved through policies that enable women and gender minorities to gain positions of power in the industry, interventions that offer them the ability to realise more projects (especially the second project), and the implementation of compliance mechanisms that ensure follow-through on policy decisions.

An Alternate Cinema: Now & Then

Chatrian and Rissenbeek took over as co-directors of the Berlinale following a decade (the 2010s) that saw the rise of activist campaigns—including #MeToo, #TimesUp, and a variety of pro-quota initiatives—to combat the underrepresentation of women and gender minorities as well as the widespread sexism in the global film and media industries. As a result, their tenure has been characterised by renewed and ongoing attention to questions of diversity and equity. This is evident, for example, in the selection of jury members and in programming choices, as they have sought to foster a more inclusive festival. Attention to inclusivity continues to filter into cinematic narratives, which are (slowly and sometimes unevenly) bringing representation to groups historically excluded from the screen.

Among the contemporary films we attended this year, many featured multi-dimensional women protagonists who were not necessarily conceived as classical heroines yet navigated complex social circumstances and featured a wider age range than is typically visible. French director Claire Burger’s competition film Langue Étrangère and German filmmaker Asli Özarslan’s well-received adaptation of Fatma Aydemir’s prizewinning novel Ellbogen (Elbow), a German-French-Turkish co-production, both depict troubled teen girls navigating linguistic and cultural differences in close friendships. German filmmaker Eva Trobisch’s Ivo, about a palliative care worker, and Austrian Anja Salomonowitz’s biopic about the non-conforming painter and filmmaker Maria Lassnig, Mit einem Tiger Schlafen (Sleeping with a Tiger), both implemented haptic camera techniques to home in on middle-aged women devoted to their work yet juggling economic and emotional precarity while attempting to uphold a degree of relational autonomy. Two festival favourites, Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun and Julia von Heinz’s Treasure, were the first English-language features by successful German directors seeking a wider audience. They adapted women’s memoirs and worked with globally recognised actors. The gorgeously shot The Outrun, adapted from Amy Liptrot’s bestseller, stars Saoirse Ronan as a young woman who confronts her addiction by retreating to the Orkney Islands, where she finds renewal through a close connection with nature. In Treasure, adapted from Lily Brett’s autobiographical novel Too Many Men and set in 1991, Lena Dunham plays a New York photojournalist who accompanies her father, Auschwitz survivor Edek, on an emotionally charged return trip to his native Poland.

It was notable to observe that unconventional female-identified protagonists appeared not only in films by women but also in new work by male directors with longstanding records of depicting notable female characters. Take, for example, German stalwart Andreas Dresen’s most recent historical film, In Liebe, Eure Hilde (From Hilde, With Love), which follows the true story of Hilde Coppi, who was executed by the Nazis for her work in the resistance movement Rote Kapelle and is embodied here in a remarkable and devastating performance by Liv Lisa Fries. Swedish filmmaker Levan Akin’s Crossing secured the Teddy Jury Award for its depiction of a trio of deeply imagined characters: retired teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) hires a wily young man (Lucas Kankava) to assist in fulfilling a promise made to her recently deceased sister to locate her estranged daughter, Tekla, who vanished years before after being ostracised by the family. Together, they travel from Georgia to Istanbul, where they meet Evrim (Deniz Numanli), a lawyer fighting for trans rights who helps in their search. With the heist film Verbrannte Erde (Scorched Earth), the second instalment of an intended trilogy, Berlin School veteran Thomas Arslan revived the character Trojan (Mišel Matičević) from his 2010 film Im Schatten (In the Shadows), while deviating from the genre’s traditional gender assignations by casting women as the crime boss (Marie-Lou Sellem) and the getaway car driver (Marie Leuenberger). Austrian Josef Haider’s dark, tragicomedy Andrea lässt sich scheiden (Andrea Gets a Divorce) stars the inimitable Birgit Minichmayr as a policewoman who is thrust into a moral quandary when she accidentally runs over her ex, from whom she is not yet officially divorced.

This year, women also excelled in connecting colonial histories in African countries back to the European continent. Agnes Wegner and Cece Mlay collaborated on the documentary Das leere Grab (The Empty Grave), which follows Tanzanian John Mbano on his search to recover the remains of his great-grandfather Songea Mbano, who was executed by the German colonial army. His remains were then shipped to Germany for research. Similarly, Mati Diop’s Dahomey foregrounded the return of 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey, now the present-day Republic of Benin, following their plundering by French colonial troops in 1892. Her film marks the second consecutive year in which a French documentary was awarded the Golden Bear.

Among other noteworthy documentaries, the recent production trend of examining educational institutions and structures was evident in Austrian Ruth Beckermann’s longitudinal study Favoriten, which follows charismatic and devoted primary school teacher Ilkay Idiskut, herself a second-generation immigrant, working in a multicultural district of Vienna, where she balances the mandate for integration with the necessity of caring for her students’ basic needs. Film Stunde_23, assembled by the 92-year-old Edgar Reitz together with Jörg Adolph, centres on the former students who enrolled in an experimental film class taught by Reitz at a girls’ high school in Munich back in 1968, when he was an avatar of the emergent New German Cinema. By intercutting extracts of their Super 8 student films with recent interviews of women now in their 70s, a layered portrait emerges. It captures both a pioneering moment of women’s democratic access to film production and the unique cinematic visions the technology inspired, even in novice cinéastes.

Reitz’s return to this utopian moment of access and imagination was echoed in many of the films on view in the retrospective. Although some detractors found the theme of ‘an alternate cinema’ vague and the selection of films quirky or even eccentric, the retrospective nevertheless opened up discussions about film historiography, archival practice, and canonicity. It also offered an opportunity for directors, producers, and actors to screen films that have been exhibited infrequently, and in many cases never before, at the Berlinale in front of a live audience. Actors Eva Mattes and Charly Wierzejewski, still teenagers when they starred as sex workers in Roland Klick’s Supermarkt (Supermarket, 1974), were celebrated for their remarkable performances in this action thriller, set in the streets of Hamburg, that casts a sharp eye on class, gender, and sexual dynamics in West Germany after 1968. Outgoing director of the Akademie der Künste Jeanine Meerapfel, herself born in Argentina as the child of refugees from Nazi Germany, presented her 1981 documentary Im Land meiner Eltern (In the Country of My Parents), in which she interviewed Jews of her generation living in West Berlin about their experiences of post-Holocaust Germany. Renowned feminist filmmaker Helke Sander was on hand for the screening of her mockumentary Die Deutschen und ihre Männer – ein Bericht aus Bonn (The Germans and Their Men, 1989), which investigates the state of masculinity in West Germany in the 1980s. Although vastly different in tone and style, these films all reflect an interest in understanding how multiple and intersecting forms of inequality operate in tandem, paired with a commitment to rethinking norms of cinematic representation.

An ensemble of radical, speculative feminist features by women directors Ingemo Engström, Elfi Mikesch, and Pia Frankenberg offered a testament to the flourishing of feminist filmmaking in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. Completed as her diploma film for the Munich Academy of Film and Television, Engström’s Dark Spring (1970) presents a snapshot of second-wave feminism at its inception, charting the forms of resistance and possibility it pursued. In this hybrid film, a newly divorced Munich doctor sets out on a quest to talk to women she knows about their lived experiences and utopian ideals of love; these conversations with actual feminist activists (including documentary filmmaker Katrin Seybold, actor Edda Köchl, and Marxist pedagogue Ilona Schult) are interspersed with the film’s fictional narrative. In Mikesch’s experimental genre film Macumba (1982), a derelict West Berlin building serves as the setting for an epistemological and aesthetic quest into alternative, queer-feminist modes of love, lust, and pleasure for a diverse group of protagonists (played by fellow filmmakers Heinz Emigholz, Magdalena Montezuma, and Frank Ripploh, among others). Frankenberg’s self-reflective Nicht nichts ohne dich (Ain’t Nothing Without You, 1985), a riff on the screwball comedy, considers the legacy of 1968 amidst the socioeconomic transformations of the 1980s through the relationship between yuppie filmmaker Martha—who struggles to balance success with political commitments—and neurotic hippie architecture student Alfred.

If authoritarian rule and extractionist policies and methods pursued in many regions of the planet have imposed dystopic realities from which few people and places now remain unscathed, this year’s Berlinale programming has endeavoured to and in many regards succeeded in upholding a heterotopic space within which to envision worlds wherein these realities can also unfold otherwise and to converse on possible solutions to the present aporia.

Acknowledgement: 

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

Notes: 

[1] Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 1986), p. 25.

[2] Skadi Loist, Deb Verhoeven, Doris Ruth Eikhof, Elizabeth Prommer, Martha E. Ehrich, Pete Jones, Kevin Guyan, Amanda Coles, Sophie Radziwill & Aresh Dadlani, Re-Framing the Picture: An International Comparative Assessment of Gender Equity Policies in the Film Sector, Full Report Gender Equity Policy (GEP) Analysis Project (Potsdam: Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, 2024), p. 5. https://doi. org/10.60529/390 (last accessed 10 May 2025).