2026 | Generation
Film Miniatures 2026
41 films form the line-up of Berlinale Generation 2026, here you can find 41 small texts from the programming team. They are not intended as plot summaries, but as subjective approaches to the short and feature films in the programme, inspiried by a love of details, singular moments, and idiosyncratic observations.
These personal miniatures are meant to spark curiosity, open up new perspectives, and hopefully, kindle excitement for the films.
Kplus Short Films
The pull of the light causes a frenzy. Orientation slips, balance falters. An animated film about an attraction that seduces, and about unexpected alliances in the chaos. Such adorable fly larvae might even soften an aversion to insects – and perhaps turn bats into vegetarians? After all, you’re allowed to dream in the cinema.
All that fits into a bus ride home from school: friendships and animosities, the threshold between childhood and adolescence, a society passing by outside the window that nonetheless affects what is going on inside. A chamber play on wheels, a bus ride that contains the world.
© Adyita Sharma
In times of climate change, we are very aware of the sun’s power on Earth. But there is also plenty of activity above the clouds. Even the children of Greek gods struggle with their gifts, and an uncontrolled radiance can be annoying. Myth meets everyday life: being different, belonging, finding a place in the world – all in flux at once. And the search for balance is not so divine after all.
A plot as spectacular as a maths competition. Between a bus station and a school’s sports hall, it becomes clear: this is about something that cannot be calculated. Observing gradual changes, both large and small. Talking about the working class without making it an issue. Illuminating inner conflicts with tender precision. That is the drama here.
© This and That Productions
Just staying home all the time and playing by the rulebook? How boring! Luckily, there is the Mushroom World: a safe space for big ideas. A film like an adventure playground where imagination drowns out reality and nobody tells you when to stop – until you work it out for yourself.
Set in the late eighties, feels suspiciously like today. A lightning-fast film that takes the belief in productivity at face value – and dissects it in true genre fashion. Output, efficiency, self-optimisation: it’s all there, and it’s all hollow. And right in the middle of it all is a girl who quickly realises that there is a lot of big talk going on here. Big-talkers included.
© Oh Jiin
School as a place full of major subplots: learning, yes, but also finding your place, asserting yourself, jointly dealing with something that is larger than one’s self. And, incidentally, overcoming a recorder trauma. Seriousness and silliness are not far apart; both are allowed to coexist. Two young people find each other and open a space that uplifts the heart – as light as a floating ping-pong ball.
A little boy, an even smaller marble, and lots of gigantic ideas. When sleep refuses to come, you simply go on a journey. “The Little Prince” briefly comes to mind – and is immediately sent back to space, because this film is headed somewhere else entirely. A bedtime story between dream and reality; cinema for young people with big questions.
© Ragnar Neljandi
A different way to tell a history of colonialism: Neza Bazi, a South Asian equestrian sport adopted by British imperial officers as “tent pegging”; a Pakistani-British community reviving the sport, under the sceptical gaze of gentlemen in tweed; and Jaleal, who loves horses and does his own thing anyway.
© Roopa Gogineni
White is the colour of the sheet that, until recently, was hung up in the classroom. White is the shroud that accompanies the dead on their final journey. White are other everyday objects that can be cheerfully repurposed. And then what? White is also the basis on which a collective dream can take shape, if everyone does their bit.
© Mergah Production
The goldfish jumping out of its bowl is obviously a bad thing, and it raises a few other questions as well. And, initially, the adults’ answers are just as puzzling. So, you set off on your own journey, even if you are only five. In the end, perhaps your very own story will emerge from the tales of the villagers and the inherited legends of the diaspora.
Under the Wave off Little Dragon
© Greg Oke
A whale singing at a frequency no one answers. An ageing man circling his grief. And a child who is (so far) lacking the words to say who they are. A shared language is at first created by those images that reach the spaces where words are failing – until everything starts to sing.
What can be imagined: aliens on Pluto, for example, or someone circumnavigating the world on a bicycle. What is harder to picture: a life without gravity, or finding your place in a world that organises everything according to rigid principles – what girls are like and what boys are like. But opposing forces actually do exist that make floating possible.
14plus Short Films
Camille wants to dance, for herself and for others. For joy of movement and expression, as a form of self-affirmation. When her being different is interpreted as a flaw, Agathe steps in: “That’s my sister!” This is both an assertion and a promise. Dancing, alone and together.
A shirt is worth a thousand words: too proper, too prim, too Catholic. Alterable, thank goodness. And yes, smoking is bad for your health – yet it inevitably marks transitions. That moment when something finally fits? Priceless. Especially when you sense who you want to be. A film that understands that growing up often begins in the fabric of things.
© Perla Ascanio
Two boys, one day, plenty of time. Right there with them, without rushing, you just want to tag along: sitting, listening, laughing, keen to soak up everything. In between: breaks, detours pausing for a moment. Time stretches like it does on days when something is coming to an end. Friendship not as a big issue but a state of being – warm, full of small gestures and big stories. It’s not what’s coming next that counts, but what remains.
To escape the daily grind for once. To simply let go and be pampered. A dream come true. But behind the door to paradise, chasms open up, too. Touch, distance, solitude – in seven and a half minutes, the shortest film in the programme surveys social boundaries. You watch, marvel and become captivated. And despite all the unease, something like a feeling of blissful enjoyment arises.
A landscape like an open wound, where the pursuit of profit gouges the earth. The legacy of the ancestors, dance as a different way of relating to the world, and a young woman who longs for healing where injury prevails. Indigenous cinema that tells stories of resistance and finds a visual language to re-imagines the relationship between land, body and knowledge as an aesthetic of defiance.
© Juan Maglione
Uprising and state violence, and the images we have of them nowadays: vertical and blurry, circulating in fragments, removed from those they show, from those who made them. Here they are retold. Meaning is reconstructed, and the uncomfortable question is posed: Who are we when we see these images? And who are we when we create them in order to change the world?
© Mehraneh Salimian, Amin Pakparvar
Even in the most mundane daily routine, much is in flux. Family becomes a training ground: for friction, care, contradiction. At the heart of it, two siblings feel their way along the signposts of the world, forging their own path. A self-assured cinema of the in-between, where ‘half and half’ never adds up to one — but one and one do.
© BBC Films
Life: full of fleeting moments that later turn out to be significant. Barely a word spoken, and yet one encounter turns the familiar world upside down. A petrol station epic about navigating economic realities, family obligations and personal desires – and about discovering paths that seemed unimaginable just moments before. A quiet breakout through the front door.
© Wang Chenxu
Life begins somewhere between the chicken and the egg – or does it? In the slaughterhouse, this question takes on a new dimension. Conveyor belts organise bodies, time and the future. Amidst this systemic horror, a teenager disrupts the order, subverting a system that seems all too certain of where everything belongs. Is it really only chickens that lay eggs?
© Becky Chen
The world, a constant contradiction. Murder on the football pitch, reggaeton in the cemetery. The simultaneity of life and death, closely intertwined and mutually dependent, dictates the rhythm of everyday life. High above, over the rooftops of the dusty city, the sky cries out both doom and promise.
Kplus Feature-Length Films
To form an impression, to arrive at an image together: of school, of men and women, of being a child and no longer a child, of your own place in the world, and of what lies behind the visible. To step into the time machine and playfully reshape the world so the future one is different to that of the past. A triumph of the documentary over the world’s status quo.
© Eliza Capai
At first, there is just the attempt to sort out a odd pair of shoes. A boy’s journey towards this goal begins as a small errand but, with each touching encounter, each enchanting scene, takes on epic dimensions. A journey to a self that, even if it can’t make the world a little less odd, can at least assert itself within it in a different way.
© Razvan Marinescu
The ingredients for an epic adventure: a young boy who misses his best friend; a grumpy cat that becomes a loyal companion; a fountain that turns out to be a portal to another dimension; and a mysterious riddle in the clockwork of time itself – in a dazzling anime world that intertwines remembering and letting go.
Entotsumachi no Poupelle – Yakusoku no Tokeidai
© Akihiro Nishino / "Chimney Town: Frozen in Time" Production Committee
A film like a brain at age 13: yearning for a glance to be noticed while the world is on fire. For anger to be valid in a raging apocalypse. Wanting to be left utterly alone, chased by and chasing a mother who is also a person. Or maybe not wanting to be left alone at all. To whom it may concern: what is the most unnecessary thing you’ve ever apologised for?
Tegenwoordig heet iedereen Sorry
© De Mensen
Take possession of the ball, sprint, goal – pose! Rhinestones sparkle in the sunshine and glitter tattoos adorn the arms of the boy who brings his whole being onto the pitch. Grandma provides support off the field as well, so he can get through everything – until it’s not just about growing up, but also about growing old. A love letter to the person who is the home you always carry with you.
© Jamille Queiroz
School can be a creepy enough place as it is, and this one is even said to be haunted. It takes the unflappable nature of a ten-year-old girl to figure out whether the haunting is a jinn, or something else entirely. An enlightened exorcism that retains its own unique magic.
© Zamarin Wahdat
Being uprooted from your familiar urban environment and dumped in the countryside brings its own share of inconveniences. But saying goodbye to cherished habits can also bring about a change in perspective: on the people around you, on trees and animals. Beyond the need for heroism, quite uneventfully, it’s great training for perceiving the world.
© Aditya Varma
To once experience the world from a plant’s perspective. Where is that possible if not in the cinema? In shimmering colours and dancing shapes – stirringly accompanied by music – a kind of nature comes to life on the big screen that, without any finger-wagging, offers a message or two about how we’re treating the world. A world that, with a tiny seed leading the way, is rising up in rebellion.
© Priscilla Kellen
14plus Feature-Length Films
A girls’ boarding school in South Africa. Falling in love with a classmate was definitely not Luthando’s plan. Between unwritten rules of coolness in the microcosm of the school, a mother who warns of sin, pregnancy and the Illuminati, teachers with questionable projections and a friendship that redefines itself, the complex reality of first love unfolds.
Generation
© Urucu Media
One family, one separation, two siblings. Two ways of navigating the world and finding meaning; two truths that don’t correspond; two truths that don’t cancel each other out. And one film in which both find a place; in which both find an expression; in which two become three – and that is the love that endures.
© Jasper Wolf
Flashing lights, a glittering party night. The morning after: no words can be found, until painful clarity can not be reversed. The tarot card says everything will be okay. The best friend says everything will be okay. The body is floating between water surface and the summer heat, while fathers and brothers become allies and heaviness cautiously recedes into lightness.
© Rosa Hadit Hernández, Colectivo Colmena
To pay for an abortion, one girl nicks the money the other has made by touting vapes. What unfolds is, not least, the complex and emotionally nuanced story of the friendship between two young women navigating a world rife with power and gender hierarchies, where allies are hard to come by. Least of all among the adults.
A punk, imbued with unexpected powers by an obscure, alcoholic concoction, takes on the world’s status quo in shimmering, grainy black-and-white images that are sometimes overpainted with colour. A superhero movie as a wild, joyfully furious punk manifesto.
Films have largely stopped mercilessly killing off homosexual characters or even making them suffer. It’s about time to revisit this much-discussed trope of film history and to re-examine it, deeply rooted in a coming-of-age story. Despite bloody horror scenes and campy gore, and not least the explicit warning in the film’s title, confronting your own truth is unavoidable.
© Jamie Guerra
Four young Black women escaping slavery; four white women joining them to escape something else that is ultimately the same. Images that expose the fault lines of race, class and gender. A historical drama that sheds new light on the past in order to speak differently about the present.
© Cris Lucena
Cancer: nasty. Parents: unbearable. Summer camp: idiotic. Camp counsellor: embarrassing. But then there are others who it’s good to have around. Complicity and connection, perhaps even love. In any case, it becomes clear that surviving doesn’t necessarily mean living. And the things you can’t talk about? You can dance about them instead.
© Colin J Smith, SUNNY DANCER Distribution Limited
A view from the margins; the city as it is lived and rarely shown. A focus on overlooked lives, a glimpse of the transitions between necessity and desire, between periphery and centre, between life and death. Modern ghosts, a slipping away from the world and a clinging onto it. A light that is so very special, at the limits of the visible, and that ultimately shines, cinematically bright.
© Tom Otte, VajdaFilm
Two stories about dying, two stories about surviving. A documentary film as an invitation: to mourn together, to remember the creativity, the achievements and the individuals who did not escape suicide. Through collages, music and uncompromising gentleness, the film captures what society still often denies trans communities: the protection to thrive and a perspective ahead.
Selection Committees Generation 76th Berlinale
Feature Film
Ygor Gama, Qila Gill, Susana Borges Gomes, Carmen Gray, Ina Karkani, Seggen Mikael, Natascha Noack, Carlos Pereira, Anas Sareen, Canan Turan
Short Film
David Assmann, Monica Koshka-Stein, Parand Laghai, Marija Milovanović, Sarah Claire Wray