Berlinale Programme
On this page you can find all the titles that have already been announced for the 2023 Berlinale programme. Further titles will be published here as they are revealed.
The entire Berlinale programme will be released here on February 7, 2023.
Forum
In 1908, Allensworth became the first self-administered African-American municipality in California. In lengthy shots, Benning surveys the buildings (school, church, library) of the now-abandoned town and looks for the traces of a Black cultural history.
Forum
“I am not the remains. I exist.” Three Jordanian women barely survived the violence inflicted on them by men. Çelik films them from as up close as possible in their flats, which they rarely leave, listening to them speak with the opaque logic of trauma.
Forum
This comedy of errors revolves around a hapless 30-year-old named Arturo. His penchant for indiscretions is as impossible to overlook as the finesse with which the film glides from March 2020 to the preceding decade and back again.
Forum Special Fiktionsbescheinigung
In exile in Berlin, Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta celebrates the end of the autocrats: Franco’s death, Idi Amin on the run, the fall of the Shah. Cheerful farewell rituals accompany others who had faced political persecution on their way to fly home.
Forum
Luke Fowler’s portrait of Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait takes its inspiration from her unrealised project about her home region of Orkney, drawing and riffing on her notes and footage to produce a blissful union of two artistic sensibilities.
Forum
Rwanda, 1997. Three years after the genocide against the Tutsi minority, Eva is kidnapped by a stranger and raped. Her aunts agree to a forced marriage. When Eva finds a confidante in the form of the man’s cousin, she discovers the family’s traumatic past.
Forum
When her mother dies, 40-year-old Helena now has time for herself after years of taking care of her family. She works at a film production company, dances boisterously, gets drunk. A quiet film about letting go morphs into a coming-of-middle-age story.
Forum
A Syrian family has lived in Canada for five years. As Farah tries to settle in with her community in Toronto, Rashid – an unlicensed doctor – struggles with the ruptures in his biography. A film about the everyday difficulties in a new country.
Forum
As a voice reads letters from a father to his daughter off camera, 20th century archival images from the Netherlands are shown. Fiona Tan touchingly explores what potential emerges when sound and image diverge.
Forum
How can cinema deal with complicity in crimes against humanity, extreme violence and state terror without conniving in it? De Facto finds answers to this question via two actors, a precisely compiled collage of texts and a deliberately reduced setting.
Forum
The name of Brazil’s biggest airport, Guarulhos, references the fact that it was built on Indigenous territory. In a blend of realistic and stylised scenes, the film follows a member of the ground staff as she seeks her roots beneath the runway.
Forum
Two neighbours, each as overwhelmed as the other: an ex-soldier grieves for his mother alone while a family father leads a criminal gang into a heist with fatal consequences. French genre cinema in the desaturated colours of a banlieue façade.
Forum
Meetings with readers, acquaintances and contemporaries of writer Uwe Johnson at the places where he lived. Volker Koepp, who is also from Pomerania, looks for Johnson’s sophisticated literary voice in the landscapes of the region they both stem from.
Forum Special Fiktionsbescheinigung
Indian director Gautam Bora documents the everyday work and life perspectives of a family of farmers from Brandenburg. An inverted ethnography on East German agriculture without romanticisation.
Forum
Narrations of parties and nightly lectures meet images of urinating horses and still lives in a country house. The soundtrack – from Lauryn Hill to Prince – is overshadowed only by Moyra Davey’s laconic voice.