The Berlinale has always been the most politically self-conscious of the major festivals — more so than Cannes, which prefers to aestheticise its politics, and Venice, which tends to ignore them — and the 75th edition, held from 13 to 23 February 2025, was no exception. The opening film, the closing film, and several of the competition entries addressed questions of war, displacement, and the failure of European institutions with a directness that felt less like programming intent than like the natural result of where filmmakers are right now.
The Golden Bear: Totem
The Golden Bear went to Lili Anvàri’s Totem — an Iranian-French production about a woman returning to Tehran after years in Paris, navigating the space between the person she became abroad and the person her family remembers. The jury, chaired by Todd Haynes, cited its “formal rigour and emotional generosity” — not wrong, though it undersells the film’s intelligence about the specific psychology of diaspora return.
Several competition films that felt stronger did not win. Tomás Guérra’s Portuguese entry, a two-hour film conducted almost entirely in close-up, divided the press corps violently; it won nothing and deserved more attention. A Danish documentary in the main competition — a rarity, and programmed with evident intention — won the Silver Bear Jury Prize.
The New Berlin
This was the second Berlinale under the leadership of Tricia Tuttle, who took over from Carlo Chatrian in 2024. Tuttle, previously head of the BFI London Film Festival, has made her priorities clear: more attention to documentary, more Anglophone cinema in competition (a departure from Chatrian’s European emphasis), and a renewed focus on the Panorama and Forum sidebars as spaces for risk-taking.
The reaction has been mixed. Critics who valued Chatrian’s curatorial rigour find the new programming eclectic in ways that occasionally feel arbitrary. Others argue that the festival was too insular under his tenure and that opening it outward is both commercially and artistically necessary. Both positions contain truth.
“What remains constant, and what distinguishes Berlin from its competitors, is the audience. Berlin’s public attends the festival seriously — buying tickets, queuing, engaging with difficult work — in a way that neither Cannes nor Venice can quite replicate.”
What to Watch For
Several Berlinale 2025 films are in distribution or seeking it as of writing. The Iranian entry in Forum — a quietly devastating film about a school in Tehran, made by a first-time director — is the one I most want to see reach a wider audience. The Danish documentary, whose UK and Benelux distribution rights sold during the market, should reach streaming platforms by autumn 2025.
Berlin remains the festival most likely to surface films that matter politically before they matter critically. That is its specific value, and the 75th edition preserved it.