Cinematic Strategies that Cross Borders and Highlight Realities

The Panorama provides a unique look at contemporary international cinema that combines artistic quality with social relevance. The section seeks films that evoke a direct emotional response, not shying away from films with an activist heart. Panorama presents a broad spectrum of film forms, looking for thrilling and exciting independent filmmaking from all around the globe. Queer works have been a vital part of the section's profile over the years, while feminist perspectives and documentary forms make up about a third of the selection each year.

“The filmmakers in this year’s Panorama programme have developed diverse cinematic strategies to address the unspoken and capture the unimaginable or forgotten. They tell stories of societal fractures, battered bodies, and precarious health systems. They depict shaky democracies and social terror, while simultaneously focusing on humanity and solidarity,” notes section head Michael Stütz.

The Rise of Genre

Genre cinema plays a prominent role in this year’s programme, with the psychological homeland horror of Welcome Home Baby by Andreas Prochaska - the Panorama opening film - and the satirical Norwegian body horror Den stygge stesøsteren (The Ugly Stepsister) by Emilie Blichfeldt. Çağla Zenzirci & Guillaume Giovanetti's Turkish political thriller Confidente (Confidante) keeps us on edge, while the gay Taiwanese gangster ballad Silent Sparks by Ping Chu presents a post-prison romance under threat. Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay’s German conspiracy thriller Hysteria is ambiguous and provocative, embracing the film-within-a-film motif and enriching it with political subject matter and breathtaking twists.

Global Documentary Cinema

With the international documentaries, Panorama offers a glimpse of the faded but still-present ghosts of a fallen dictatorship via archival footage in Bajo las banderas, el sol (Under the Flags, the Sun) by Juanjo Pereira, while Kinga Michalskas Bedrock looks at ten Holocaust memorials and reflects on the power of remembering and the threat posed by forgetting. Likewise set in Poland, Listy z Wilczej (Letters from Wolf Street) observes personal and political developments on the titular Wilcza Street in Warsaw through the lens of director Arjun Talwar. In her documentary collaboration Yalla Parkour, director Areeb Zuaiter follows young freerunner Ahmed and his friends in Gaza, addressing themes of memory, homesickness, living conditions, and everyday life before the start of the current war.

Queer Cinema with Claws

Queer cinema bares its claws and reveals a sense of adventure with the moody, sex-positive identity theft drama Queerpanorama from Jun Li, to a genre mix full of desire, greed and fame set in the world of acting in Ato noturno (Night Stage) from Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher. We travel through America with the queer black femme road movie Dreams in Nightmares from Shatara Michelle Ford, and hop aboard a problematic ship in the intergalactic journey Lesbian Space Princess from Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese.

These are just three of the threads the Panorama invites the audience to discover.

The 2025 Panorama programme

Advisory Selection Committee Panorama 2025:

Jürgen Brüning, Ana David, Azin Feizabadi, Berke Göl, Djamila Grandits, Pol Merchan, Anna Mielikova, Sirkka Möller, Reem Saleh, Bartholomew Sammut, Dorothee Wenner, Gerrit Woltemath, Jenni Zylka