Sergio Rigoletto looks back at the 75th Berlinale, sharing his views on the stand-out films, the politics and the protests at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.
Hit by calls for boycott in response to its poor handling of last year’s appeals for a ceasefire in Gaza, the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival was an unusually—if predictably—gloomy edition, with the new director Tricia Tuttle forced to deal with a drastically reduced budget and with discontent over the festival’s recent stance on free speech.
It is not just that this year’s film selection felt depoliticised and cautiously assembled to avoid polarisation. More striking was the palpable sense of hostility against dissent that seems to have taken hold of Germany these days. Especially troubling was the withdrawal of an invitation to the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, at an event at the Free University, scheduled to coincide with the Berlinale, following pressure on the university administration from Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wagner.
Equally disturbing was the furore around a statement expressing solidarity with Palestinians read during a festival screening of Queerpanorama by Hong Kong director Jun Li on behalf of Iranian actor Erfan Shekarriz, who had decided to boycott the festival. The statement was met with booing from some audience members and led to the opening of a criminal investigation by the police. It was another concerning incident after last year’s shocking accusations of antisemitism against Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham and Palestinian director Basel Adra (No Other Land), and the laughable U-turn of German minister of culture Claudia Roth caught applauding their speech, only to declare later that her applause was directed exclusively to Abraham.
Queerpanorama
One of the high points of this year’s Berlinale came when Tilda Swinton accepted the Honorary Golden Bear Award for life achievement. In her fiery speech, Swinton acknowledged her debt to the festival that helped launch her acting career almost 45 years earlier (1986), when she first appeared in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio. Recognising the powerlessness many feel today, Swinton’s speech was infused with a vigorous commitment to internationalist solidarity, one that the British actress described as embedded within the history of cinema and the cinematic medium itself. It was a speech meant to unite, which nevertheless hit hard on recent instances of ‘state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder’.
While the jury led by Todd Haynes made the unexpected decision to award the Golden Bear to the Norwegian coming-of-age film Drømmer/Dreams (Sex Love), some of the most remarkable films seen this year in Berlin came from Latin America. Among them, my personal favourite was El mensaje/The Message, an enchanting Argentinian road movie directed by Iván Fund, which went on to win the Jury Prize.
El mensaje follows a girl (Anika) and an older couple as they travel around rural Argentina. This is the kind of enigmatic film that gradually invites viewers into its world, keeping you wondering for a while who these people are and what their relationship to each other might be. Anika appears to possess an extraordinary gift—the ability to communicate with animals, channelling messages to their owners in times of illness or existential malaise. At first, it is hard to shake the suspicion that the older couple may be simply exploiting both the girl and the impressionable animals’ owners. The beauty of the film is that it gently insinuates the possibility that things might be more complex. Could it be that this girl is, in fact, able to listen to animals? The film treats the pet owners with respect and compassion. Silently, the camera registers the everyday routines of the protagonist trio, the tenderness with which the two guardians take care of Anika, inevitably complicating our initial feeling that they may be simply exploiting her.
Beautifully shot in black and white, El mensaje conjures the ghost of Fellini by presenting a gentler version of La strada, one in which faith in what cannot be explained rationally lingers as an inexhaustible source of wonder and as an alternative way of being in the world. The film’s journey to completion was anything but easy. Struck by the Milei government’s dismantling of Argentina’s Film Fund, it was finished thanks to the financial contributions of its cast and crew members.
The Blue Trail
The Grand Jury Prize winner, The Blue Trail, by Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro, was probably the title of the main competition that resonated most with the current rise of authoritarianism worldwide. Set in a dystopian near-future, the film imagines a Brazil where a business-driven government, obsessed with maximising economic productivity, has created resettlement camps where elderly Brazilians are forced to move. At the heart of this haunting yet luminous story is Tereza, a 77-year-old woman who feels she is not ready to join this colony—not until her dream of flying on a plane remains unfulfilled. Set against the lush backdrop of the Amazon, The Blue Trail is a road movie of sorts, though here, the road is a river. Determined to find someone who will help her realise her dream to fly, Tereza embark on a boat trip along the tributaries of the Amazon River, encountering other outcasts who have found a way of ‘working the system’.
The title refers to the iridescent slime of a rare snail—a substance that, once dropped onto one’s eyes, grants visions of the future. Yet, for Tereza, the real revelation comes not from these visions but from the journey itself. Reaching its peak in a scene of tender, joyful intimacy between Tereza and another elderly woman, The Blue Trail ends up being an ode to the pleasures that only acts of defiance make accessible, especially in the face of the repressive systems that force on people the mantra of economic success and efficiency at the expense of life itself.
The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box) was another excellent work seen this year in Berlin. An impressive debut film by Mexican director Ernesto Martínez Bucio, it took home the inaugural Perspective Competition Award for first feature. A sinister yet unexpectedly tender tale, the film unfolds almost entirely within the walls of a family home in Mexico City, where five siblings and their grandmother inhabit a space suspended between childhood play and quiet dread. The children’s mother has run away under unclear circumstances. Their father has left in search of her. They may never come back—we are invited to think. Their grandmother lives in her room, warning their grandchildren that the devil is close by and may soon infiltrate their home. Is she crazy? Maybe. And yet, when social services come knocking, she seems quite clear-minded, putting up a show together with her grandchildren to convince the social workers that this is an ordinary household, with the children’s parents merely vacationing in Cancun.
While something is undoubtedly off with this family, they also seem to function quite well together, their home a strange Neverland where radical freedom and domestic responsibilities coexist. Scenarios and characters’ relations appear only sketched out in this film. Flashbacks in the form of home videos suggest that, once, this was a happy, normal family and that things at some point took a wrong turn. The Devil Smokes is both elusive and disorientating: here, the devil may be another way of calling that creeping feeling that things have fallen apart without a reason we can fully grasp.
Ari
Other strong offerings at the Berlinale were Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, Meng Huo’s Sheng xi zhi di/Living the Land and Léonor Serraille’s Ari. Radu Jude’s satire Kontinental ’25 won the award for best screenplay, Rose Byrne won the award for best performance in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, and Andrew Scott received the supporting performance prize for Blue Moon. Compared to the last edition, this year’s awards ceremony seemed determined to project an impression that it was all about the movies. A comforting feeling to some, perhaps. Or an act of self-preservation in the face of mounting political pressure, particularly after the recent threats of Berlin’s CDU parliamentary group leader, Dirk Stettner, who suggested cutting state funding for the Berlinale for giving a platform to ‘antisemites hiding under the guise of freedom of art and freedom of speech’.
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