Berlin 2025

Julia Loktev’s epic verité documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow dives headfirst into the lives of a remarkable group of journalists working for news channel TV Rain in Moscow. The documentary offers a portrait of the independent media in the period just before Putin's invasion of Ukraine began, 'the last months when it was possible to work and when people were still fighting from the inside,” Loktev tells BDE.

Debutant Philipp Döring tells BDE about his epic documentary that is catching the eye of many international festival directors, as well as German press and media. “The good thing was that I didn’t have anybody telling me it had to be shorter because I was the producer myself,” the director explains the film’s long running time. “I started editing. The first rough cut was 10 hours, the second was six and the third cut was around four hours. I got rid of everything that you don’t really need. What is left is worth seeing.”

A February 17 Doc Salon panel explored the making of Timestamp, the only documentary selected for the Berlinale’s main competition. The feature, helmed by Ukrainian filmmaker Kateryna Gornostai and produced by Olha Bregman and Zoya Lytvyn, delves into the experiences of educators and students living through the war in Ukraine.

Making his latest feature doc, Poland-based Indian filmmaker Arjun Talwar ventured no further than his own street in Warsaw, where he filmed its myriad inhabitants. The resulting work is both dark and playful. “That’s part of my personality, to look for humour and find the absurdities,” Talwar volunteers to BDE. “It was something important I wanted this film to possess, being able to laugh at life and at itself.”

On Feb 17, EFM hosted the Inventive Ambitions – Financing Non-Fiction panel, which saw the participation of Melanie Adernach (producer, Made in Germany), Emanuel Rotstein (Head of Docs, Icon Docs), Mascha Wilke (Head of EVZ Academy and EVZ Foundation), and Sylvia Grass (Senior Commissioning Editor, ARTE/Bayerischer Rundfunk). Together, they explored the challenges and opportunities of financing non-fiction projects in the current media landscape, which has been heavily shaken by geopolitical turmoil and economic hardship.

The Pluto Film boss is in Berlin with Circusboy in Generation, and two doc projects at EFM; The Jacket by Mathijs Poppe and The Underground Railroad, made by friends and fellow filmmakers, Martijn Blekendaal and Finbarr Wilbrink. Cölle tells BDE that she is looking to board documentaries as well as dramas at an earlier stage, with the “possibility to co-produce, to get into the funding [of documentary] and to offer a way to be part of the financial structure of projects.”

At Berlinale 2025 Ji.hlava IDFF presented the current cohort of professionals partaking in its Emerging Producers programme, and put out the call for the next programme that will run 2025 through 2026. Every year the festival selects 18 talented producers (17 European and one representing a guest country), to whom it provides educational, networking and promotional support. The applications deadline for the next programme is March 31.

In his debut documentary world-premiering in Berlin, Paraguayan Juanjo Pereira takes on a historical subject about which he could find very little archive at home , the dictatorship of Paraguayan General Alfredo Stroessner, who was finally toppled in 1989. His solution was to cast around the rest of the world - and to see how the Stroessner years were portrayed by foreign media outlets. Director Pereira talks to Business Doc Europe.

On 16 February, EFM hosted an intimate roundtable discussion titled "Non-Fiction Awards Campaigns," moderated by Matt Carey, Deadline’s Documentary Editor. Carey interviewed Salma Abdalla, recently appointed Head of Communications at the Austrian Film Institute and a seasoned sales professional, having formerly headed up Autlook. The core topic of the talk was award campaign strategies for documentaries.

On 15 February, the EFM hosted a panel titled “Encouraging Growth: The Journeys of Highly Acclaimed Documentaries,” moderated by Deadline’s Matt Carey. The event featured Mediawan’s Head of Doc Sales, Arianna Castoldi, and Les Films du Losange’s Head of Int’l Sales, Alice Lesort, who discussed the remarkable trajectories of Johan Grimonprez’s Oscar-nominated Soundtrack to a Coup d’État and Mati Diop’s Golden Bear winner Dahomey, two films that have resonated strongly with both audiences and critics worldwide.