Berlinale Documentary Award and Jury
For many years now, the Berlin International Film Festival has been committed to the diversity of documentary forms. A distinct award for the best documentary film was launched in 2017.
The Berlinale Documentary Award is endowed with 40,000 euros in prize money. The prize money is split between the winning film’s director and producer. Winning the award also entitles a film to take part in the competition for the Oscar® for Best Documentary Feature.
In 2025, 16 documentary forms from the sections Competition, Berlinale Special, Panorama, Forum and Generation are nominated for the Berlinale Documentary Award. The prize money will be shared by the director and the producer of the winning film.
Jury Berlinale Documentary Award 2025
Petra Costa (Brazil)
For more than a decade, Petra Costa has been telling stories at the intersection of the personal and the political, often with a focus on her native Brazil. Her most recent documentary film Apocalypse in the Tropics celebrated its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2024. Previously, The Edge of Democracy (2019) earned her an Oscar nomination as well as the Peabody and the Independent Spirit Award. Costa's first film Elena became the most-watched documentary in Brazil after a world premiere at IDFA 2013 and was honoured at various festivals. She also co-directed the film Olmo & the Seagull (2015) with Lea Glob and was involved as a producer in films such as Ecstasy (2020) and Beba (2021).
Lea Glob (Denmark)
Lea Glob, born in Mariager, Denmark, studied documentary film at the National Film School of Denmark, where she graduated in 2011 with Meeting my Father Kasper Tophat. After her first short films, she co-directed the film Olmo & the Seagull with Petra Costa, which won an award in Locarno in 2015 and was shown at the IDFA. Venus, a collaboration with Mette Carla Albrechtsen, also celebrated its world premiere in Amsterdam in 2016. Glob's film Apolonia, Apolonia won the main prize at IDFA in 2022, received awards at festivals in Gothenburg, Hong Kong and Sofia as well as at CPH:DOX and was nominated for the European Film Award and made it onto the documentary shortlist at the Academy Awards.
Kazuhiro Sōda (Japan)
Born in Ashikaga, Japan, in 1970, Kazuhiro Soda studied directing at the School of Visual Arts in New York. From Campaign (2007) and Mental (2009) to Inland Sea (2018) and Zero (2020) and most recently The Cats of Gokogu Shrine (2024), a large number of his eleven documentaries to date have been shown at the Berlinale. In addition to the Ecumenical Jury Prize in the Forum for Zero, he has already been honoured with the Peabody Award, the Marek Nowicki Award from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights and prizes at the festivals in Busan and Hong Kong. His book 'Why I Make Documentaries' has been published in Japan, as well as in English, Korean and Chinese.
The following films are nominated for the Berlinale Documentary Award:
Competition
Strichka chasu (Timestamp) by Kateryna Gornostai
Berlinale Special
Ancestral Visions of the Future by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
Das Deutsche Volk by Marcin Wierzchowski
Panorama
Bajo las banderas, el sol (Under the Flags, the Sun) by Juanjo Pereira
Bedrock by Kinga Michalska
Ich will alles. Hildegard Knef (I Want It All) by Luzia Schmid
Listy z Wilczej (Letters from Wolf Street) by Arjun Talwar
Paul by Denis Côté
Forum
Canone effimero by Gianluca De Serio, Massimiliano De Serio
Chas pidlotu (Time to the Target) by Vitaly Mansky
Holding Liat by Brandon Kramer
La memoria de las mariposas (The Memory of Butterflies) by Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski
Queer as Punk by Yihwen Chen
Unsere Zeit wird kommen (Our Time Will Come) by Ivette Löcker
Generation
Hora do recreio (Playtime) by Lucia Murat
Only on Earth by Robin Petré