75th Berlinale, February 13 --23, 2025
Berlin's Yearly Film Festival
By: Angelika Jansen - Feb 24, 2025
75th Berlinale, 2025 - Berlin's yearly film festival just ended.
Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, is, once more, the center of the 75th Berlinale, as it has been for many years. It is cold in the city, but the area around the film festival is crowded with spectators, press people and the arrival and departure of the film elite from all over the world. Happy and exciting times are here again, as always during the festival times, this year from February 13 – 23, 2025.
Tricia Tuttle is the new head of this international festival, American born but living in London. She wants to bring the focus back to personal issues and not so much on political statements. 243 films were shown, with 19 of them hoping at the Competition (Wettbewerb) for the main prices, the Golden and Silver Bears.
This year the selection committee for this section was shared by the US director Todd Haynes. The Golden Honorary Bear had already been presented to Tilda Swinton, famous British actress and avid Berlinale participant. Nobody has so consistently attended this festival. She has been seen here in 26 films since 1986 -- amazing!!!
Judging from the selection for the Competition films, the traditional flag ship of the festival, the focus for the 75th edition was indeed centerd at interpersonal issues, based on emotional reactions of individuals to their surrounding. It almost seemed to have been a competition of long dialogues in many of the films in this series.
Outstanding among others is the film by US director Richard Linklater BlueMoon. Here the song texter Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) espouses his likes and dislikes on film and theatre greats at New York's famed artist spot Sardi's. It is quite enjoyable. The Romanian/Hungarian/German co-production Kontinental by Radu Jude, on the contrary, is very tedious. Orsolya (Eszter Tompa) tortures herself troughout the film about her guilt for not saving a homeless man from killing himself. Equally soul-searching but impressive is Johanna Moder's Mother's Baby, where the conductor Julia (Maria Leuenberger) questions herself for the lack of empathy after she, finally, has a child but cannot find joy in it.
An unusually heart-warming contribution is Ameer Fakher Eldin's movie Yunan. Munir (Georges Khabbaz) searches for solace on a lonely island in the North Sea. Here he encounters rejection in general but also warmth as the hotel owner Valeska (Hanna Schygulla) slowly warms towards him and thus gives him the courage to go on. Although it ends with the notion that "we all will be forgotten" it leaves good vibes and hopes for people finding each other.
These mixed sensations of hope, although dimmed by circumstances, seem to pervade the entire festival, although there was mostly time to go to the films of the Competition. But the opening film Das Licht (The Light) by famed German filmmaker Tom Tykwer was part of the Berlinale Special program. Rightfully so, since it plays entirely in Berlin, Germany. It constantly rains there, a statement in itself, and it follows the lives of the Engel family (Nicolette Krebnitz as mother and Lars Eidinger as father) with 17-year old twins and their Syrian housekeeper Farrah (Tala Al-Den).
Although many of the offerings were realistic with traces of surreal patterns at most, the movie Mickey 17 by Bong Joan Ho dared to differ. It ran in the series "Berlinale Special" and is a co-production by the US and South Korea and deals with Micky Barnes (Robert Pattinson) having to constantly repeat a role where he is dying. It is quite hilarious to watch it in this ludicrous pattern.
It was, in general, a festival of personal accounts of normal lives. Not too exciting but solidly filmed, as it was reflected in the main series, the Competition. The winners of the bears account for the celebration of life as it is. The Golden Bear went to Drommer by the Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud. It dealt with the crush of the love stricken schoolgirl Johanne (Ella Overbye) on her female teacher. The Silver Bear was reaped by the Portuguese director Gabriel Mascaro for O Ultimo Azul (The Blue Trail). Here the 77-year old Tereza (Denise Weinberg) refuses to go to an old age home and sets out on a trip through the Amazon.
All in all, the 75th Berlinale seemed to have been an account-taking of personal issues, definitely in the main section, the Competition. It was a winter tale of normalcy. Perhaps next year it will add contributions that will ask questions and show new directions. Perhaps, perhaps.