Panorama
Jan 16, 2025
Crossing Borders, Highlighting Realities: Cinematic Strategies in Panorama 2025

Arjun Talwar in Listy z Wilczej (Letters from Wolf Street)
Welcome Home Baby by Andreas Prochaska is opening the 2025 Panorama which, this year, is presenting a total of 35 films from 28 countries. Genre cinema is mixing it up in the programme, multi-faceted German filmmaking will be catching the eye while queer cinema is once again making a strong showing well beyond the common clichés. New films by Sir Isaac Julien, Ina Weisse, Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay, Amalia Ulman, Jeanette Nordahl, Sébastien Betbeder and Fernando Eimbcke are all included. Additionally, a series is also featured this year: four episodes of Other People’s Money.
“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. “They reflect on sex, desire and perversion; they observe, interact and intervene, imagine, enact and recount. And, in doing so, they cross boundaries and create free spaces to bring these stories to the screen and share them with us.”
With Welcome Home Baby, Austrian director Andreas Prochaska styles the psychological homeland horror as a cinematic antithesis to the urban-rural dichotomy of the German-language cinema of repression of the 1950s. Genre elements can also be found elsewhere in the programme: from the satirical Norwegian body horror Den stygge stesøsteren (The Ugly Stepsister) to the Turkish political thriller Confidente (Confidante) and the gay Taiwanese gangster ballad Silent Sparks. 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 some breath-taking twists.
German cinema is well represented with a total of seven productions. Alongside Büyükatalay und Praunheim, five female directors will be presenting their work. Nele Mueller-Stöfen (Delicious) and Sarah Miro Fischer (Schwesterherz (The Good Sister)) are introducing their debut feature films, while Ina Weisse has made what is probably her most personal film to date, once again working with the great Nina Hoss (Zikaden (Cicadas)). In the documentaries, Martina Priessner and her crew accompany survivors of the racist arson attacks in Mölln, 1993, in Die Möllner Briefe (The Moelln Letters) while Luzia Schmid also chronicles recent German history on the screen, this time through the eyes of Hildegard Knef in Ich will alles. Hildegard Knef (I Want It All).
In the international documentaries, Panorama catches a glimpse of the faded but still present ghosts of a fallen dictatorship via archive footage in Bajo las banderas, el sol (Under the Flags, the Sun) while 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 with the young freerunner Ahmed and his friends in Gaza, director Areeb Zuaiter deals with memory, homesickness, living conditions and everyday life before the start of the current war.
In 2025, queer cinema bares its claws and reveals a sense of adventure. From the classic artist portrait of Monk in Pieces and the moody, sex-positive identity theft drama Queerpanorama to a genre mix full of desire, greed and fame set in the world of acting in Ato noturno (Night Stage). Two Berlinale veterans and TEDDY AWARD winners are bringing new films to Berlin this year: Sir Isaac Julien is presenting his legendary Looking for Langston (1989) in a double bill with its long-awaited sequel, Once Again... (Statues Never Die) and Ira Sachs is giving us a beautiful reflection on art, life and friendship in Peter Hujar’s Day.
The Berlinale’s queer film prize is on the verge of celebrating a big anniversary: on February 21, a three-person jury will be presenting the coveted TEDDY AWARD for the 39th time. As is tradition, queer cinema will be celebrated with a lavish party at Berlin’s Volksbühne. And none other than this year’s Jury President of the Berlinale, Todd Haynes, will be honoured with the 2025 SPECIAL TEDDY for his lifetime achievement.
A little younger, but no less coveted, the Panorama Audience Award, is presented on the final Sunday of the festival, the Berlinale’s Publikumstag, at the Zoo Palast. For the 27th time, Berlinale audiences will be voting for the most popular documentary and fiction feature film. As usual, the Audience Award is presented in cooperation with radioeins and the rbb television (Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg).
The films in the 2025 Panorama
(updated on January 27, 2025)
Press Office
January 16, 2025