The Films
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Opening Night
The 14 Films
Film 1The MeltdownChile, 1992: in the snowy Andes, nine-year-old Inés spends her holidays at her grandparents' hotel, where they are busier with their guests than with the lonely child. Only Hanna, a young German skier, becomes a confidante. But Hanna vanishes without a trace. And so the wintry idyll turns into a labyrinth of insinuation and silence. When Hanna's mother Lina (Saskia Rosendahl) then arrives too, accusations suddenly fill the air that pose the question of guilt entirely anew.
Film 2If I Go Will They Miss MeTwelve-year-old Lil Ant waits longingly for his father Big Ant, who is returning after many years in prison to Watts, the troubled Los Angeles neighbourhood. The boy worships his father like a hero. In his eyes, even family members turn into figures from Greek mythology. The father becomes Poseidon, the mother Medusa, while above the houses of Watts boys float like ghosts. But Big Ant is no god, rather a man wrestling with his past. He fears Lil Ant could make the same mistakes he did, and can barely return his son's affection.
Film 3Tangles – DurcheinanderThe many Alzheimer's films of recent years only rarely found truly convincing images for the process of forgetting. “Tangles - Durcheinander” is quite different, perhaps because animation can be the most consistent medium for it: a line can be erased. A face can lose its contours long before the person disappears. For young, queer Sarah, who lives in San Francisco in the late 1990s, drawing is at first, however, the promise of a great future. Her first illustrations get noticed, and a new love grows with Donimo. But at her parents' home in Maine she notices that her mother Midge is no longer the same. The Alzheimer's diagnosis forces Sarah back into a family that deals with the incomprehensible in very different ways.
Film 4Nobody’s ViolenceThe Canadian auteur Denis Côté is one of the great loners of contemporary cinema. His films enter places of solitude where violence and despair can erupt at any moment. His new film “Nobody’s Violence”, shown in competition at Locarno and honoured with a special mention for actor Xavier Bergeron, takes this obsession this time to the outermost limit: to death.
Film 5La GradivaMay we present: the best and most important debut film of the year! And, quite incidentally, the birth of a sparkling directing talent! But first things first: a French class of school-leavers travels to Naples. In the shadow of Vesuvius lurk first love, wounded pride and the cruel game of winning recognition. Marine Atlan turns this seemingly harmless school trip into a modern Grand Tour through the abysses of growing up. Toni and James, friends and provocateurs, rule the social game of the group. And Suzanne, at first the shy outsider, watches them from a distance. But among the petrified bodies of Pompeii, the asserted certainties of the hormone-driven teenagers are thoroughly shaken.
Film 6All of a SuddenPerhaps listening is the most radical gesture of contemporary cinema. And nobody understands that better right now than the Japanese Oscar winner Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who in his latest stroke of genius creates a utopian new world over three brilliant hours full of conversations.
Film 7Objet aThe Berlin-based, Tel Aviv-born director Ann Oren is the great object fetishist of European auteur cinema. In her debut “Piaffe” she already had a woman grow a horse's tail and made transformation an erotic adventure. With “Objet A” she pushes this fantasy to the extreme. Ingeborg and Adam are hand surgeons who grow human skin with mushrooms. In private they live in a cosmos of rituals, power games and fetishes. Ingeborg steals objects, Adam wants to become an object himself. Only an accident and the encounter with Gaia shake their order. Even Ingeborg's new leg prosthesis suddenly becomes a coveted fetish, while climate change drives the earth into temperature extremes.
Film 8Fjord“For 20 years, Palme d'Or winner Cristian Mungiu (4 MONATE, 3 WOCHEN UND 2 TAGE) has been the leading voice of the New Romanian Cinema. With his sixth film as director, this exceptional filmmaker is at the height of his art: FJORD is an electrifying masterpiece in which Mungiu unfolds a multi-layered story against a majestic Norwegian backdrop, one that resists easy answers. For the first time he works with international film stars: the leads are played by Sebastian Stan, known as the Winter Soldier from the AVENGERS films, honoured at the Berlinale for his performance in A DIFFERENT MAN and Oscar-nominated for THE APPRENTICE, and Renate Reinsve, celebrated at Cannes for DER SCHLIMMSTE MENSCH DER WELT and SENTIMENTAL VALUE, for which she was Oscar-nominated and won the European Film Award. She is currently enjoying success in cinemas with BACKROOMS. FJORD was awarded the Palme d'Or for best film at the 79th Festival de Cannes.
Film 9Ben’ImanaIn 2012, Rwanda is still dealing with the wounds of the 1994 genocide: Vénéranda, who works as a mediator at the community-based Gacaca courts, stands before the man who murdered her relatives during the genocide, and she does something her own family can barely comprehend: she forgives him. But how is one to forgive when the truth is still being kept silent? Vénéranda therefore organises discussion circles for women who are to speak about the horror of those days. Yet while the mothers struggle for words, her daughter Tina wants at last to lead a different life: to fall in love without asking about her boyfriend's origins. But an unexpected pregnancy suddenly makes the contradictions burst open within her own family too.
Film 10Elephants in the FogAt night, villagers march through the Nepalese jungle with torches to drive away wild elephants. Pirati, too, sends her daughters out on patrol. She heads a community of Kinnar women who, as members of a third gender, are revered for their blessings but excluded in everyday life. Pirati dreams of leaving with her lover, although her community's vow of chastity forbids such a love. When her daughter Apsara does not return from a night patrol, she begins to search herself. But the local police show hardly any interest in the missing girl.
Film 11A Girl Unknown2026 is the year of bold debuts: directing voices that have yet to be discovered and yet already show astonishing mastery in their very first images. Among them is the Chinese filmmaker Zou Jing. Her film “A Girl Unknown” tells of Juan, who grows up in a coastal village in the 1980s, flies kites and likes to scrap with the boys. But when her widowed mother remarries and becomes pregnant, the state's one-child policy makes the girl a surplus child. Juan is sent to a strange family in the city, later to another. And as she changes surnames, Juan asks herself the simple question: who am I?
Film 12Nowhere to Lay My EyesSanghee has not seen her mother for ten years. Now the experimental filmmaker travels with her brother to the holiday island of Jeju, where their mother is leading a new life: with a guesthouse, a new husband and his daughter. The visit becomes a silent trial of strength. The mother wants to bring Sanghee into the family business; the daughter is more interested in her video camera. She wants to make images, not meet expectations. On walks and alcohol-soaked dinners the characters open up and make room for missed chances in life and bitter reproaches.
Film 13Look BackSometimes a few strokes are enough to create a whole world. Fujino draws manga for the school newspaper and enjoys her small fame, until the pictures of the reclusive Kyomoto appear next to hers: landscapes and spaces of a precision that awakens her ambition. Fujino practises until the hurt turns into pure obsession. When the girls finally meet, a friendship grows from it that deepens with every sheet of paper. They draw together, work, dream of a future as artists. Until reality breaks into this fragile world with a violence against which no pencil can do anything.
Film 14Let Us Through, Dear AncestorsA church is to grow out of the jungle. But the stones it is built from cost human lives. On a Philippine island in 1617, the Spanish priest Enciso rules, subjugating the native population in the name of Christ and sexually exploiting women. He sends his son Dungwen on a dangerous journey to fetch marble for the house of God. While bandits lurk in the jungle, a healer resists the forced Christianisation. The promise of salvation has become a system of violence and exploitation.
Iranian Night
Iranian NightRehearsals for a Revolution – Fragmente der FreiheitA revolution that fails is far from lost. Perhaps it was only the rehearsal for the next one. With this idea, as painful as it is hopeful, the Iranian actor and director Pegah Ahangarani looks back on four decades of her country's history. Her documentary feature debut “Rehearsals for a Revolution” weaves together five biographies from her closest circle with five uprisings that, from the Islamic Revolution of 1979 to the most recent protests, always ended in violence and disappointment. Her father fought in the Iran–Iraq War, Uncle Rashid believed in the power of words, the literature teacher in free thought. Ahangarani herself took to the streets in 2009, was later imprisoned and today lives in exile.
Iranian NightFalling HouseThe bulldozers are already at the door, but Rashid refuses to budge. His modest house on the edge of Tehran has to make way for a new expressway. Inside, too, his world is crumbling: the prison guard is suspended from duty, and his eldest daughter Ensi is secretly planning to leave the country to work as a model in Turkey. For Rashid this is betrayal. He does everything in his power to stop Ensi from carrying out her decision. As the bulldozers draw ever closer, the tensions within the household escalate further.
German Debut Night
German Debut NightLovers Sleep AloneThose who sleep have no need to explain who they are. Perhaps that is why 33-year-old Iman watches the lorry drivers behind their windscreens at night: men who, for a moment, find the peace he himself lacks. Years ago he fled Iran, broke with his family and now lives in Berlin, between two jobs as an elderly care worker and a labourer at a lorry wash. In the park he meets a man for fleeting sex. By day he invents stories about his life. When his cousin Maneli comes to visit from Tehran, a crack opens in this carefully constructed loneliness. They talk, go swimming, sleep in the forest – a closeness that asks for nothing.
German Debut NightI’ll Be Gone in JuneFor many, the United States of America was and is a great promise. So it is for 16-year-old Franny. An exchange student from Brandenburg, she lands in New Mexico in 2001, far from the glittering cities of her dreams. The barren roads lose themselves in the dusty desert landscape. Franny looks at this strange world through the viewfinder of her small camera and falls in love with the taciturn Elliott. Then come the attacks of 9/11. Suddenly American confidence turns into suspicion, patriotism becomes a duty, and even the teenagers' carefree days carry a heavy shadow.
Special Documentary
Homage Rami Malek
Homage Javier Bardem
Homage Asia Argento
German Premiere
German PremiereThe Echo ChamberIn his light-filled London flat, Leo (Luca Marinelli) has built himself a world in which he produces music and numbs his body's chronic pain with medication. When the physiotherapist Anne enters his life, the search for relief soon turns into a passionate love story. Yet the intimacy between them also has something destructive about it. Affection here readily turns into dependence. After an overdose, Leo returns from rehab. Anne has disappeared, but her presence seems to have lodged itself in the rooms. Memories overlay reality, voices echo through the flat, among them that of a mysterious singer, Ava. And little by little it becomes uncertain what of this love was actually lived and what exists only in Leo's imagination.
German PremiereCameron Winter at Carnegie HallAnyone who has heard Cameron Winter sing once does not forget that voice: it sounds as if a twenty-three-year-old already had several lives behind him. As frontman of the New York band Geese he became a sensation of American indie rock; with his solo album “Heavy Metal” he discovered an entirely different, almost old-fashioned intimacy. In December 2025, Winter stepped onto the stage of Carnegie Hall, all alone with a grand piano and songs that sit somewhere between gospel and the abysses of American pop music.
German PremiereEin langer WinterWinter is drawing near, and in the mountains of Colorado there is a stillness that has nothing peaceful about it. On a remote farm, Lester raises rabbits and chickens while his wife Louise dreams of another life. Their son Mike would like nothing more than for everything to stay as it is. But when the younger brother leaves for the Korean War and Louise vanishes into the gathering cold after an argument, the order so laboriously preserved collapses. Father and son search for her in vain. Then begins the long wait for the thaw.
German PremierePaper TigerThe American director James Gray needs no kings to tell tragedies of operatic scale. Two brothers, a kitchen in Queens and the empty shell of the American dream are enough for him. It all begins in New York. It is 1986, Reagan's hollowing-out of the welfare state is slowly starting to bear fruit, and even Irwin Pearl can feel it. The engineer and father of two counts every dollar twice. His wife Hester dreams of an easier life. Then Gary appears, Irwin's older brother: ex-cop, charming, swaggering, with a Mercedes and a business that is supposed to make them both rich. But behind the redevelopment project stands the Russian mafia. And suddenly the hope of rising in the world turns into a story of absolute ruin.
