For its 75th anniversary, the Berlin Film Festival gave us glittering moments, black ice and bitter cold. Stars like Tilda Swinton, Robert Pattinson, Jessica Chastain and Ethan Hawke shivered on the red carpet. Just in time for the opening night, the city was covered in snow and temperatures dropped below minus 10 degrees at night, which reduced the glamour factor to a minimum. When they arrived at the Berlinale Palace, almost everyone looked like polar explorers in their thick down jackets and woolen hats - except for Timothée Chalamet, who posed in a sleeveless fine rib shirt at the premiere of his biopic A Complete Unknown about Bob Dylan.

Today the Bear Trophies were awarded for the best film directing and acting performances. Here is my personal hit list:

Double Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17

Mickey 17 is a perfect fit for the freezing cold of Berlin. The new film by Korean director Bong Joon Ho is set on the icy planet Mars. A strange group of space settlers want to build a colony there. The Earth is run down, and people are queuing up for a ticket to outer space. Among them is Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), who applies for a special mission without reading the small print first. So he becomes an "Expandable", a human lab rat. He has to take on dangerous repair jobs, breathe poisonous air for testing purposes and do other dirty jobs. If he dies, he is reprinted using a 3D printer as an identical version of Mickey. The way Pattinson rolls off the assembly line, reborn again and again, is crazy enough. But then something goes wrong: Mickey 18 has already been printed, when Mickey 17, who was thought to be dead, suddenly reappears. The settlers are also threatened by intelligent woodlice, some as big as VW Beetles. And the head of the Mars mission, a narcissistic, authoritarian politician like Trump with a lack of impulse control, brilliantly played by Mark Ruffalo, absolutely wants war. The film is a terrific science fiction satire with pointed dialogues and a captivating Robert Pattinson, who plays his own doppelganger with laconic wit.

Butterflies with Memory Gaps

Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski's film debut La memoria de las mariposas is not about winged insects, but about fleeting memories. The Peruvian filmmaker has gone looking for clues in former rubber plantations in the Amazon region. In archives she comes across photographs of two indigenous boys, Omarino and Aredomi, who were forced to work there and were put on display in London in 1911 as "savages". The documentary tentatively approaches the events. The images are jerky, scratched, and abruptly break off. The filmmaker mixes found footage with her own recordings and weaves everything into a vague, dreamlike fabric. The filmmaker also brings her own biography into play. One of her ancestors was a rubber trader. This is why she asks herself to what extent she is also responsible for the injustice against the indigenous people. Such thoughts meander through the narrative, flashing up and then disappearing again – like butterflies.

Fairytale Body Horror: The Ugly Stepsister

Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt shows how well Grimm's fairy tales are suited to the horror film genre. She has taken on the Cinderella story, but tells it not as a sugary-sweet Cindarella story, but as a horror drama from the perspective of the ugly stepsister who resorts to extreme means of self-optimization in order to win the prince's favor. In the opulent fairytale castle setting, it's not just the silk dresses that rustle, noses are straightened with a chisel, toes are amputated with a butcher's axe, all in the best Spatter tradition with analogue tricks and a tongue-in-cheek nod to David Cronenberg. Yes, it's bloody, but also great fun for fans of feminist-tinged body horror. The Substance as a fairytale film.

Best Performance: Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon

Director Richard Linklater has once again written a dream role for his favorite actor Ethan Hawke. In Blue Moon he plays the washed-up New York musical and songwriter Laurenz Hart - a historical figure from New York show business. Hart was a celebrated playwright whose frank, sexually suggestive style is no longer in demand in the increasingly bourgeois America of the 1940s. Hawke plays this eloquent artist as a flamboyant, witty, constant talker with an alcohol problem. The setting is the legendary theater Sardi's in New York, where Hart stirs up the premiere party of his long-time composer partner Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott), adores Margaret Qualley and makes a passionate, if futile, plea for diversity, beauty and audacity in art.

 

Important long-term documentary: Das Deutsche Volk

Marcin Wierzchowki's documentary tells the story of the racist murders in Hanau in 2020. At that time, a right-wing extremist perpetrator deliberately shot people he thought were foreigners. For four years, Wierzchowki documented the aftermath of the attack with his camera. He attended funerals, crime scene visits, demonstrations, memorial services, investigative committees. He filmed powerlessness, despair, tears and anger, half-hearted sympathy and genuine dismay. And also the deep rift that has run through society since the attack. With his sensitive, closely observed long-term documentary, he gives the victims' relatives a voice. Worn-out parents, marked by pain, who bounce off the cold wall of bureaucracy. Hard-working citizens who believed they were well integrated until the attack, only to then realize that they did not belong to the "German people" after all. There is no need to emphasize how important, how necessary this film is right now. One look at the news is enough to see that it seems to only be about dangerous foreigners, illegal immigration, and faster deportations. And not enough is reported about where this dehumanizing ideology of hate leads. The German people are reminding us of this very forcefully. Das Deutsche Volk erinnert sehr eindringlich daran.

Bonus Track: Hildegard Knef wants it all!

Her bronze star on Berlin's "Boulevard of Stars" is pretty scratched, but Hildegard Knef's spirit still wanders through the city. With I Want Everything, Swiss director Luzia Schmid is now trying to get closer to the idiosyncratic Berlin actress. She lets Knef speak for herself. Her documentary mainly uses archive material. First, Berlin in Ruins, 1946, where the 19-year-old played the lead role in Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are Among Us, becoming the first film star of post-war history overnight. Then Hollywood and later the church called for a boycott of her film The Sinner, and not just because Knef is briefly seen naked in it. She went to New York, conquered Broadway in a Cole Porter musical, reinvented herself as a chanson singer and topped the Spiegel bestseller lists as a writer. The film is always most fascinating when we can watch Knef think and talk. How calmly and intelligently she speaks, how casually she presents herself, how emancipated she seems. And how contemporary her lyrics still sound today: “When I was 16, I said quietly, I want / I don’t want to submit / I can’t be satisfied / I want everything or nothing / I want red roses to rain down on me…”  

And the winner is…

Here is the list of all the winners: https://www.berlinale.de/media/de/download/preise-jurys/berlinale-preise-2025.pdf