Berlin 2025: Screen’s guide to the Generation, Forum and Panorama Documentary titles

Generation highlights

Opening Generation 14Plus is Christy (sold by Charades), the debut of Irish filmmaker Brendan Canty that sees two estranged brothers living under the same roof after separate childhoods in the care system.

Egyptian filmmaker Karim El Shenawy is also concerned with family ties in The Tale Of Daye’s Family, which follows an albino boy travelling to Cairo with his parents to take part in a singing competition. The film premiered at Red Sea in December.

In Greek filmmaker Vasilis Kekatos’s feature debut Our Wildest Days (Kinology), a teenage girl leaves her family behind to embark on a life-changing journey across Greece; while Alissa Jung’s Paternal Leave (The Match Factory) sees its teenage protagonist travel to the coast of north Italy to finally meet her biological father.

The young gymnast protagonist of Filipina director Antoinette Jadaone’s Sunshine also faces challenges, when she finds she is pregnant. And in Maja-Ajmia Yde Zellama’s Belgian drama Tetes Brûlées (MAD Solutions) a 12-year-old girl must come to terms with the death of her beloved brother.

Generation KPlus opener The Nature Of Invisible Things (The Open Reel), from Brazilian filmmaker Rafaela Camelo, sees two 10-year-old girls form an unexpected bond in hospital over the course of a summer.

In Yi Jing’s drama The Botanist (Magnify), a lonely Kazakh boy living in a remote village in Xinjiang, China finds unexpected solace in plants. Also living an unconventional life is Santino, the subject of Julia Lemke and Anna Koch’s German documentary Circusboy (Pluto Film), who travels around the country with his family’s circus.

Danish filmmaker Robin Petré follows up her 2021 festival title From The Wild Sea, which looked at the relationship between humans and ocean animals, with Only On Earth (Autlook), where she ventures to southern Galicia, an area prone to wildfires.

Animation abounds in Generation KPlus. Celebrated French director Michel Gondry presents Maya, Give Me A Title (Indie Sales), a stop-motion love letter to his daughter, while Li Wenyu’s A Story About Fire draws on the Chinese legend of Ran Bi Wa, a monkey raised by humans who sets off to the Holy Mountain to steal fire for humankind. And Eric San —better known as Canadian music artist Kid Koala — makes his filmmaking debut with Space Cadet (Urban Sales), a drama about a young astronaut and her guardian robot.

Forum highlights 

Several of Forum’s world premieres hail from Germany, including Janine Moves To The Country, director Jan Eilhardt’s expansion of his 2022 short film in which a transgender woman causes a stir when she moves from the city to the country. Elmar Imanov’s magical realist The Kiss Of The Grasshopper also centres on a character struggling to find their place — a lonely man attempting to cope with his father’s illness.

Germany is also well represented in non-fiction titles. Stefan Hayn’s mobile phone-shot 2024 (2023) navigates between urban Berlin and rural Bavaria, while Philipp Döring’s Palliative Care Unit spends a summer at Berlin’s Franziskus hospital. And in When Lightning Flashes Over The Sea, Eva Neymann returns to her hometown of Odessa, Ukraine to discover how the city has been affected by the conflict.

Ukraine is also at the heart of Vitaly Mansky’s Latvian documentary Time To The Target, in which he spends a year with soldiers on the frontline. It follows his 2023 Encounters title Eastern Front, in which he documented the first six months of the war.

Politics take centre stage in Georgian doc Inner Blooming Springs, as director Tiku Kobiashvili follows the 2024 protests in Tbilisi against the Foreign Agents Law, and Austria’s Scars Of A Putsch (Belgian Docs), Nathalie Borgers’ attempt to track down the people involved in Turkey’s military putsch of September 12, 1980.

Also from Austria is Marie Luise Lehner’s debut If You Are Afraid You Put Your Heart Into Your Mouth And Smile, a coming-of-age drama about a young girl who lives with her deaf mother.

Norway serves up documentary The Long Road To The Director’s Chair, in which director Vibeke Lokkeberg is reunited with her lost footage from the First International Women’s Film Seminar, held at Berlin’s Arsenal Cinema in 1973. Women are at the heart of several Forum titles, including frank Uzbekistan documentary Nudity, from Sabina Bakaeva, and Rwandan drama Minimals In A Titanic World, from Philbert Aimé Mbabazi Sharangabo, which follows a young woman adjusting to post-prison life.

There are several titles from Asia, including Taiwan’s The Trio Hall, a satire from Su Hui-yu, which plays on 1970s Taiwanese culture; Malaysian documentary Queer As Punk, which profiles the country’s LGBTQ+ community; and crime drama Tiger’s Pond, from Indian filmmaker Natesh Hegde, about the shady manipulation of a local election. And from Hong Kong’s Cao Yiwen comes the timely What Next?, a dialogue-free animated film made with the help of an AI image generator that dreams up a hallucinatory world before and after the arrival of evil.

Panorama Documentary highlights

Poland is at the heart of two of this year’s Panorama documentaries. The first, Kinga Michalska’s Bedrock (sold by Canada-based sales agent Filmoption), looks at modern Poles living on sites of Holocaust atrocities. Poland-based director Arjun Talwar is also concerned with the past and present of the country, his debut Letters From Wolf Street turning a Warsaw street into a microcosm of Polish society.

Fresh from its Sundance premiere comes Khartoum (Filmotor), made by a collective of five directors, which follows the impact on ordinary citizens in the titular city when civil war breaks out in Sudan.

Palestinian director Areeb Zuaiter also explores the impact of conflict in Yalla Parkour — which premiered at last year’s Doc NYC before playing Red Sea — through her burgeoning online friendship with Ahmed, a parkour athlete in Gaza. Zuaiter, now living in the US, uses her bond with Ahmed to explore her feelings for her home country.

Innovative US composer and multi-disciplinary artist Meredith Monk is the subject of Monk In Pieces, Billy Shebar’s exploration of her 70-year career. The film sees 82-year-old Monk reflect on her achievements, and ponder how her work can continue without her.

Local audiences should welcome I Want It All, Luzia Schmid’s portrait of German actress, singer and writer Hildegard Knef told through archive footage amassed over six decades. Also playing on home soil is The Satanic Sow from 82-year-old director Rosa von Praunheim, recipient of the 2013 Berlinale Camera. According to the festival, audiences can expect “a poetic compendium of life and death with pushy fans, the Good Lord, lovers and Rosa’s horrified mother”.

Martina Priessner follows up her 2020 festival title The Guardian with The Mölln Letters, which follows a survivor of the 1992 Mölln racist attacks as he uncovers hundreds of forgotten letters of solidarity, and attempts to foster a new culture of remembrance.

Finally, Denis Côté’s Paul follows the titular Canadian man who found solace from depression in cleaning homes and sharing his routines online. Côté is no stranger to the Berlinale, having played in Competition four times and winning Encounter’s best director for 2021 feature Social Hygiene.

• Read profiles for the other Berlin 2025 titles here