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2025 | Meet the Sections | Berlinale Special

Pleasures and Intellectual Provocations

© Wolfgang Ennenbach / One Two Films

The 2025 Berlinale Special films

Berlinale Special is one of the most exciting and diverse sections of the festival. With its selection it takes a great deal of care in thinking about different audiences. This year the programme will include Red Carpet Galas that harness the star power and charisma of well-known talents, late-night genre films and cinema that highlights extraordinary talent.

Additionally the programme will feature documentaries and fiction films that invite dialogue on issues such as the global health care crisis, the fragility of democracy and domestic abuse as well as films that ask us to reflect on the importance of memory as a guard against violence and hate, and the emotional toil of exile. Berlinale Special is an invitation to the diverse Berlinale audiences to experience the many pleasures and intellectual provocations that cinema can offer.

On the Red Carpet. The cast of TÁR as former guest of Berlinale Special in 2023.

Films screening as Berlinale Special Galas this year include the long awaited new film from the award-winning writer/director of Parasite, Bong Joon Ho and his next dazzling cinematic experience, Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattinson and the beautiful medley in A Complete Unknown of James Mangold’s vision and Timothée Chalamet’s performance as the legendary Bob Dylan.

The late-night Berlinale Specials include the genius genre mash-up Honey Bunch from Canadian co-directors Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli and the smashing South Korean vengeance-thriller Pa-gwa (The Old Woman with the Knife) from director Min Kyu-dong. Justin Kurzel brings his new dramatic series to the Berlinale Special Gala section with an adaption of Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which stars Jacob Elordi.

The Berlinale Special invites dialogue with “talking-point films”: Beloved Brazilian director Anna Muylaert returns to the Berlinale with A melhor mãe do mundo (The Best Mother in the World), starring Shirley Cruz and Seu Jorge. It is a beautifully intimate film about a hard-working mother fighting for self-determination and the safety of her young children. Another Berlinale alum, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, presents his new Lesotho-set poetic documentary meditation on cinema and exile, Ancestral Visions of the Future; American-Russian director Julia Loktev looks at a generation of young liberal intellectuals on the brink of being driven into exile after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow; and Marcin Wierzchowski takes an intimate observational approach with his documentary Das Deutsche Volk about the families and survivors of the racist shootings in Hanau in 2020. This reflection on the importance of memory as a guard against violence and hate is echoed in Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah, and co-producer Dominique Lanzmann and director Guillaume Ribot’s Je n’avais que le néant (All I Had was Nothingness).

Head to the full programme of Berlinale Special 2025