Berlin 2025

A delightful feel-good movie about a circus family, filmed over the course of a year, as seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Santino, a boy who is yet to discover his special talent. Throughout, Circusboy manages to strike a delicate balance between reality and enchantment, and just like the circus itself it is an immersive and fun experience that makes you feel like you are part of a beautiful, different reality.

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.

In her new feature documentary Only on Earth (premiering in Berlin’s Generation Kplus and sold by Autlook), Danish director Robin Petré isn’t observing the wildfires in southern Galicia from a safe distance, zooming in with telephoto lenses. Not a bit of it - rather, she is at the heart of the inferno. “We are actually inside those fires,” the director extinguishes any idea that she and her team were staying back as the heat rose. She explains more to BDE.

In 2024 (2023) painter Stefan Hayn takes us on a journey inside his head. Through his paintings and through his cell phone recordings/musings he shows us how he sees the world. The film is a study in patience and attention, and even though Hayn's own comments or reflections are rare, it also offers a genuine sense of intimacy.

The darkest moments in Poland’s recent history hang heavily in this gently chilling psychological journey, which takes the viewer to various landscapes where Holocaust sites remain part of everyday life and where the business of how best to tackle memory and responsibility remain a vital part of modern reality.

Lviv in western Ukraine was Vitaly Mansky’s home town, before he left as a young man to study film in Moscow. When filming his Ukrainian protagonists, some of whom were gravediggers and members of a brass band who play at funerals, Mansky was wary how families who had lost their loved ones at the hands of the Russian army might react toward him. After a funeral, one of the fathers came up to him. He was frightened about what the man might do, but in the end the father thanked him “for being on our side.”

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.

This week has marked the 10th anniversary of German Films’ ‘Face To Face’ initiative. At the event, “outstanding talents from the German film landscape” are presented to international delegates at the Berlinale. The one figure from the documentary world participating this year was Mala Reinhardt, who is working on her new doc Mother/Tongue, which concerns the painful legacy of British colonial mistreatment of the Tamil people. Reinhardt talks to BDE.

Vibeke Løkkeberg’s feature doc, about the inaugural International Women’s Film Seminar in Berlin (1973), is set to become a multi-part TV series, announced Norwegian producer Anders Tangen of Viafilm February 14. The film opens this year’s Berlinale Forum (also Feb 14) where it is presents as a world premiere. “We still sit on a gold mine of material that we can use for a multi-part series of 30-minute episodes with different accents, allowing us to dig deeper and shine light on other topics,” says Tangen.

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.