The lowdown on the Berlin Film Festival 2025 titles

Artistic director Tricia Tuttle’s inaugural Berlin Film Festival (February 13-23) opens with Tom Tykwer’s The Light and features a host of arthouse stalwarts alongside new discoveries.

19 titles are set to play in its official Competition, including new films from Richard Linklater, Hong Sangsoo, Michel Franco and Radu Jude. US director Todd Haynes will preside over the jury for the festival.

Scroll down for profiles

Eight competition films are directed or co-directed by women – up from six last year – and nine filmmakers have screened their films in the Berlinale previously.

This year also sees the launch of the new competitive Perspectives strand for international fiction feature debuts, which replaces the Encounters strand, and comes with a €50,000 prize. 

Screen International profiles the titles making their world or international premieres in Competition, Special and Special Gala, Panorama and Perspectives, and picks out highlights from the Generation, Forum and Panorama Documentary strands.

Click on the links to each section for the profiles.

Competition

• Ari (Léonor Serraille)
• Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
• The Blue Trail (Gabriel Mascaro )
• Dreams (Michel Franco)
• Dreams (Sex Love) (Dag Johan Haugerud)
• Girls On Wire (Vivian Qu)
• Hot Milk (Rebecca Lenkiewicz)
• The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadzihalilovic)
• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
• Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude)
• Living The Land (Huo Meng)
• The Message (Ivan Fund)
• Mother’s Baby (Johanna Moder)
• Reflection In A Dead Diamond (Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani)
• The Safe House (Lionel Baier)
• Timestamp (Kateryna Gornostai)
• What Does That Nature Say To You (Hong Sangsoo)
• What Marielle Knows (Frédéric Hambalek)
• Yunan (Ameer Fakher Eldin)

Perspectives

• BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph)
• The Devil Smokes (And Saves The Burnt Matches In The Same Box) (Ernesto Martinez Bucio)
• Eel (Chu Chun-Teng)
• Growing Down (Balint Daniel Sos)
• How To Be Normal And The Oddness Of The Other World (Florian Pochlatko)
• Little Trouble Girls (Urska Djukic)
• Mad Bills To Pay (Or Destiny, Dile Que No Soy Malo) (Joel Alfonso Vargas)
• Punching The World (Constanze Klaue)
• The Settlement (Mohamed Rashad)
• Shadowbox (Tanushree Das, Saumyananda Sahi)
• That Summer In Paris (Valentine Cadic)
• Two Times Joao Liberada (Paula Tomas Marques)
• We Believe You (Arnaud Dufeys, Charlotte Devillers)
• Where The Night Stands Still (Liryc Dela Cruz)

Special Gala

• After This Death (Lucio Castro)
• Islands (Jan-Ole Gerster)
• Köln 75 (Ido Fluk)
• Late Shift (Petra Volpe)
• The Light (Tom Tykwer)
• Lurker (Alex Russell)
• Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho)
• The Narrow Road To The Deep North (Justin Kurzel)
• The Thing With Feathers (Dylan Southern)

Special

• All I Had Was Nothingness (Guillaume Ribot)
• Ancestral Visions Of The Future (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese)
• The Best Mother In The World (Anna Muylaert)
• Das Deutsche Volk (Marcin Wierzchowski)
• Honey Bunch (Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Dusty Mancinelli)
• Leibniz — Chronicle Of A Lost Painting (Edgar Reitz, Anatol Schuster)
• A Letter To David (Tom Shoval)
• My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air In Moscow (Julia Loktev)
• No Beast. So Fierce (Burhan Qurbani)
• The Old Woman With The Knife (Min Kyu-dong)

Panorama

• 1001 Frames (Mehrnoush Alia)
• Beginnings (Jeanette Nordahl)
• Cicadas (Ina Weisse)
• Confidante (Cagla Zencirci, Guillaume Giovanetti)
• Deaf (Eva Libertad)
• Delicious (Nele Mueller-Stöfen)
• Dreamers (Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor)
• Dreams In Nightmares (Shatara Michelle Ford)
• The Good Sister (Sarah Miro Fischer)
• The Heart Is A Muscle (Imran Hamdulay)
• Home Sweet Home (Frelle Petersen)
• Hysteria (Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay)
• The Incredible Snow Woman (Sébastien Betbeder)
• Lesbian Space Princess (Emma Hough Hobbs, Leela Varghese)
• The Longing (Toshizo Fujiwara)
• Magic Farm (Amalia Ulman)
• Night Stage (Filipe Matzembacher, Marcio Reolon)
• Olmo (Fernando Eimbcke)
• Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (Isaac Julien)
• Other People’s Money (Jan Schomburg, Dustin Loose, Kaspar Munk)
• Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs)
• Queerpanorama (Jun Li)
• Silent Sparks (Chu Ping)
• The Ugly Stepsister (Emilie Blichfeldt)
• Welcome Home Baby (Andreas Prochaska)

Generation highlights

Forum highlights

Panorama Documentary highlights

Profiles by: Flore Boitel, Ellie Calnan, Ben Dalton, Tim Dams, Elaine Guerini, Jeremy Kay, Rebecca Leffler, Orlando Parfitt, Michael Rosser, Matt Schley, Mona Tabbara, Silvia Wong