Berlinale 2025: Wrap-Up, Award Winners & Highlights

I’ve been attending the Berlin International Film Festival in a semi-professional capacity for six years now, and if there’s one consistency it’s that I’m absolutely terrible at trying to predict the award winners. Of course, this will always be a more challenging scenario for accurate prognostication since every year there’s a new jury with different tastes and whatnot, but part of the Berlinale lore is that it tends to pick challenging, prickly movies that tilt toward the category of “statement film.” See recent winners such as Touch Me Not, Synonyms, There Is No Evil, Bad Luck Banging, or Looney Porn, and Dahomey.

That was emphatically not the case this year as the coveted Golden Bear went to a downright charming, heartwarming Norwegian comedy-drama by the name of Drømmer, or Dreams (Sex Love). (The parenthetical of the translation refers to the fact that it’s the third movie in a trilogy by director Dag Johan Haugerud, the other two being Sex and Love.) While Dreams was certainly an audience favorite, I’m not sure anyone would have predicted this story, about a teenager who falls in love with her English teacher and ends up writing a book about it, would end up conquering the festival.

And yet, I have to admit that Dreams was maybe the most pleasant surprise for me over the course of the ten day marathon of screenings. It starts out like a basic coming of age movie, but once it puts all the pieces in place, it keeps swerving and going to unexpected places. At one point, the girl’s mother and grandmother get into a conversation about the merits, or lack thereof, of the movie Flashdance, and it’s apparent that this is a far more unique and smarter movie than you were led to expect. Haugerud uses narration, which is often a crutch in movies, to excellent effect, as well as the repeated visual motif of staircases as an appealing metaphor for gaining valuable knowledge and experience in life. It may not be among my top five movies of the fest, but it’s hard to find anything wrong about it, either.

Like Cannes and other big fests, the idea of the awards ceremony at Berlinale is to spread the love around, with no one film getting more than one award. So this year the Silver Bear for Best Direction went to Huo Meng for Living the Land, a humane but unsentimental look at life in a small Chinese village in the 1990s. Meng fills the movie with impressively choreographed long-takes. But unlike the work of Bela Tarr, or other masters of the oner, these shots never build upon each other or lead us to a moment of transcendence. In fact, the ending is quite literally a moment of the movie spinning its wheels and not really going anywhere.

One of the valid complaints about Berlinale is that it is often a showcase for the slow cinema movement, which at times can be refreshing and in other cases can be an unpleasant test of one’s patience. Slow cinema thrives on long, unbroken takes, and at its best this technique can be absorbing – hypnotic even – putting you in an environment and a moment in a way that makes you feel what the characters are feeling. Other times, and in the case of Living the Land, I’m left wondering why the other tools of visual storytelling – the close-up, the insert shot, character perspectives – couldn’t be occasionally deployed. I can see why the award went to Meng, but I can also see how some different directorial decisions could have made the movie more impactful. The long-take wide shot is more often than not a tool for objective filmmaking, telling the viewer, this is how it is. But Living the Land is centered around a child protagonist that is begging for a more subjective visual approach, and is filled with emotional moments that are always being kept at a distance from the viewer. Living the Land is a fine film, but wouldn’t have been my pick for best direction.

I wouldn’t have given the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay to Radu Jude’s Kontinental ‘25, either, but that film is among the top 5 Competition titles I saw this year. Like other recent Jude films, including the aforementioned Bad Luck Banging, or Looney Porn and the fantastic ​​Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, it follows a woman in Romania as she tries to navigate her way through a personal crisis and a modern world that looks more and more like a technocratic dystopia. In this case, Orsolya (the wonderful Eszter Tompa) is a bailiff, who also happens to be Hungarian by birth, and is dealing with the emotional fallout of a suicide that occurred during the eviction a man from a building that is being turned into a boutique hotel.

Kontinental ‘25 is inspired by Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51, where Isabella Rossellini plays a woman who is so overcome with guilt after the death of her son that she devotes herself to activism and helping the poor. Orsolya is likewise wracked with guilt, but Jude is having a lot of fun playing with the different kinds of guilt that loom over the situation, liberal guilt over the nature of the eviction she was carrying out, historical guilt over Hungary’s past land grabs from Romania, and of course the ever-present spectre of religious guilt. It’s a bitter, absurdist dark comedy that shows how, even with the best intentions at heart, trying to do the right thing in today’s socio-economic landscape can be a Kafkaesque proposition. With his past few films, Jude has proven himself to be a master at walking a tonal tightrope, delivering films that are both a lot of fun to watch, even though the message is a bummer of existential proportions.

What’s doubly impressive is how prolific Jude is these days. Kontinental ‘25 was shot directly on the heels of his upcoming Dracula movie. It was filmed on an iPhone over the course of about 10 days and yet here it is getting feted at Berlinale. You can make a case that the screenplay is the strongest part of the film, but I was most impressed with the performances and the fact that this smartphone film looks as good as it does. There are some low-light shots where you can see the auto-focus struggling, but strangely enough, it doesn’t detract from the film – strangely enough, it somehow just makes it more impressive. It adds to the sense of finely orchestrated chaos that Jude’s films often excel at.

As for the acting awards, Rose Byrne won the lead performance trophy for Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and the supporting nod went to Andrew Scott for his turn as Richard Rogers in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon (read more about that one here). Both performances are absolutely tremendous, and even though I had problems with the lack of any real story in Bronstein’s movie, Byrne’s work –  as a woman who’s found herself squeezed so tight by the demands of her life that the fabric of reality is literally crumbling apart around her – is undeniable.

But let me wrap up this wrap-up with a few awards of my own. Without a doubt, the best directorial effort I experienced in this year’s Berlinale came from Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani and the extraordinary Reflection in a Dead Diamond. I was familiar with the names of Cattet and Forzani from their previous works, including 2009’s Amer and 2017’s Let the Corpses Tan, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how gloriously, playfully psychedelic an experience Reflection in a Dead Diamond is. The movie was part of the Competition lineup this year, which made it a pleasant surprise, because it would easily fit into the midnight movie category of another festival.

The simplest way to describe what is a fairly indescribable movie is to pitch it as a metafictional what-if spy movie. What if James Bond had retired to the French Riveria, when one day a mysterious death presents itself? But, what if, given the spy’s advanced age, we’re never really sure if what’s happening isn’t just an example of dementia. In any event, something about the current mystery has the spy flashing back to his old escapades in the 60s, when he had to face one of his greatest foes, the Serpentik, a masked villain in the mold of Irma Vep – a mysterious and deadly woman in a black latex cat-suit.  

While the spy in Reflection in a Dead Diamond is played by legendary Italian actor, Fabio Testi, who bears a striking resemblance to an old Sean Connery, the style of the movie is less evocative of Bond movies and more like the freewheeling, off-brand Eurospy knock-offs that proliferated in the 1960s. It’s less Goldfinger and more like Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. It’s filled with optical art infused special effects – a non-stop bonanza of the kind of old-school, in-camera magic would make Georges Méliès proud. This movie is catnip for anyone with a fondness for practical cinematic trickery.

On top of being a stylistic tour-de-force, Reflection is also a fascinating exploration of the life of pop culture characters like Bond, who move through different mediums, different actors, and different eras. By the time the movie is over, it’s like you’ve been on a headtrip of Charlie Kaufman proportions, filtered through the kind of go-for-broke inventiveness of Michel Gondry at his most surreal. None of the other movies I caught at Berlinale were as boldly directed as this, so my hat is off to Cattet and Forzani, who have really topped themselves this time around.

Speaking of Gondry, I’m giving him a special award for the Best Comedy at Berlinale. It’s been over ten years since I’ve last seen a feature from this beloved director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. After the mild enthusiasm that surrounded The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind, and the outright disinterest that came with The Green Hornet, Gondry’s presence on the American film scene became quite scarce. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be changing, since his big-screen musical Golden, built around the childhood of Pharrell Williams, has been permanently canned in post-production. If you’ve seen Gondry’s music videos for The Chemical Brothers, Bjork, Radiohead, or the dozens of other bands he’s collaborated with over the years, you know this is tragic news. The man has a gift for choreographing images to music. 

Gondry has made a few French films since The Green Hornet debacle, but somehow they’ve all quietly passed me by. So I was excited to see his name pop up in the Berlinale program this year, attached to the curious project entitled Maya, Give Me a Title. This is another French language affair, but this time Gondry is going fully back to his roots as an animator and putting together a collection of short stop-motion films he’s made for his daughter Maya over the years. As it’s presented, Maya would provide him with the title of a story, and Gondry would proceed to go off on the nugget of an idea in his trademark inventively whimsical style.

While I still dream of seeing Gondry one day make a full-on Busby Berkeley-style musical extravaganza, watching Maya, Give Me a Title was a joyous reminder of why I feel compelled to go back to his music videos on YouTube every year or so. Stitching together a handful of short films is a perfect vehicle for letting his hyperactive imagination bounce around freely. This one will surely test people’s tolerance for tweeness, but it comes with a 61-minute runtime, so even if your tolerance levels aren’t high, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Personally, I was completely won over by these elaborate, handmade love letters to his daughter, and the brilliantly absurdist imagination on display. I hope it’s able to find its way to theaters or streaming platforms. If you’ve got a kid with a quirky sense of humor who doesn’t mind reading adorable handmade subtitles, this might be their new favorite thing.

Lastly, my award for Best Film has to go to Peter Hujar’s Day, the latest film from Ira Sachs. Oddly enough, what happened at the 2024 Berlinale happened to me again this year. One of the first press screenings for the Panorama section delivered a movie that set the bar so high, nothing in the Competition section ever topped it. Last year it was Annie Baker’s Janet Planet. This year it’s Peter Hujar’s Day, an endearingly odd movie with only two actors and (more or less) one location. But those actors are Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, and the location is a small New York apartment, beautifully shot on warmly lit 16mm film.

There’s actually quite a bit in common between Peter Hujar’s Day and my second favorite film of the festival, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. Both films are essentially people talking to each other in a single setting, and both scripts came from unusual sources. Blue Moon’s screenplay was inspired by the real-life correspondence between Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland, two characters in the film played by Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley. Peter Hujar’s Day is inspired by the transcript of a 1974 recording made by Linda Rosencrantz (Hall), of a single interview she had with the photographer Peter Hujar (Whishaw). Rosencrantz was working on a book where she’d talk to her artist friends about whatever it was they did yesterday. 

And that’s the so-called plot of the movie, Peter Hujar simply talking to his friend about what happened in his life yesterday. It’s interesting partly because Hujar is an inherently interesting figure, his day involved getting an early morning call from Susan Sontag and photographing Alan Ginsberg for the New York Times. But if you’re like me and can’t get enough of podcasts that simply involve two artists talking about their lives and their craft, then you’ll likely find this movie to be incredibly comforting in the same way.

It’s greatly helped by Ira Sachs’ own craft, with very purposeful edits that punctuate the conversation and provide pauses and elliptical moments in a way that feels almost experimental. But mostly it’s the writing and the performances. Like another great film from this year’s festival, Hong Sang-soo’s What Does That Nature Say to You, the dialog builds upon itself in a gentle way. What at first may feel insignificant eventually starts to feel like a conversation about the meaning of life itself, why we do what we do, how we can learn from today, and why we strive to go about doing it a little better tomorrow. Certainly, it showcases the serious real-world value of simply talking to a friend, being a good listener, and caring about the details. 

It’s made all the more meaningful when you know the tragic story about Hujar, and how his life was tragically cut short during the AIDS crisis. He may not have been able to realize all of his dreams, but his work continues to gain recognition and overdue praise, and the documentation that Sachs accomplishes with this movie will only add that legacy and serve as more inspiration to people who strive to capture beauty in the everyday moments of our mundane lives.