It didn’t start out very well. Reading the program of the 76e edition of the Berlin International Film Festival, which takes place from Thursday February 12 to Sunday February 22, revealed the almost total absence of names of great filmmakers, or particularly anticipated films.
We noted the very low representation of cinematographies traditionally providing a significant part of creativity: hardly any French and Italian films, nor American ones, on the studio or independent side. Nothing recognized from Asia either, except the South Korean Hong Sang-soo (four Silver Bears during the last six editions of the Berlinale), strangely relegated to the Panorama section.
No one known from Latin America either? Very well, there remained the hope of discoveries, the hypothesis of getting to know authors who were little or not identified, of exploring less marked territories.
It continued even worse, with the prelude to the jury president Wim Wenders declaring, during a press conference on February 12, that cinema should “stay out of politics” –at least when it comes to Palestine, a subject which is the subject of extremely violent censorship in Germany against all protests concerning this Palestinian question and the ongoing genocide.
While she was supposed to present a restored version of the film In Which Annie Gives It Those Onesfor which she wrote the screenplay in 1989, Indian writer Arundathi Roy declared that she was “mouth agape” faced with the intervention of the octogenarian German filmmaker, whom she considered “staggering”. The next day, she canceled her appearance at the Berlin festival, condemning this “way to close the discussion on a crime against humanity». Then on Tuesday February 17, more than 80 personalities from the world of cinema expressed their “deep disagreement” in the face of Wim Wenders’ statement, in an open letter.
The “Berlinale films”, alas
Then came the films. There is a particular category that we could call “Berlinale films”. Not that this has the exclusivity, but the German festival has become particularly fond of these concentrates of political correction based on a mechanism as simplistic as it is painful. This concerns a character, almost always a woman, living in a country or a society where Western morals do not have both the force of law and the commonly shared force of habit.
In these films, the character seems to be unaware of the functioning of the society from which he comes and displays a scandalized stupor when his environment does not behave in accordance with his desires. Such behavior is easily explained: these characters are projections of Western spectators, for whom the film is obviously intended.
The three main sections of the Berlinale each opened with films of this type, respectively set in Afghanistan for the festival as a whole (No Good Menby Shahrbanoo Sadat), in Tunisia for the competition (In a low voiceby Leyla Bouzid) and in Lebanon for the Panorama section (Only the rebelsby Danielle Arbid).
Three films by women, three denunciations of patriarchy in Muslim societies: everything was in order for a consensus which did not risk arousing reluctance. But in a space that was until now considered one of the three biggest film festivals in the world, with the Cannes Film Festival (in May) and the Venice Film Festival (in September), it would also be necessary to worry about the staging.
A fresco between Africa and Europe
In this landscape without much relief, we will still note a few happy exceptions. The first, the most important, is a monumental work signed by the Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis, Daowhich was among the films in competition.
With an impressive sense of composition, the director of Felicity (2017) braids together two great collective festivities, one in France (a wedding), the other in Africa, about a deceased ancestor. And with the same momentum, that of a fresco both intimate and on the scale of two continents, two cosmos, it accompanies the journeys and affects of a multitude of protagonists, plays on the resources of documentary and sitcom, comedy and fantasy, multiplies romantic revelations and moments of realistic attention.
Dao is perhaps the first major film to take into account the complex reality of generations of Africans faced with exile and diasporic situations without having completely broken with their world of origin. The film, whose release is announced for April 29, 2026, invents exciting cinematic responses to the multiplicity of situations and behaviors that this mode of existence gives rise to.
From Africa again, the Forum – the most daring section of the Berlinale – will have made it possible to discover the epic film by one of the founding figures of cinema on this continent, the Ethiopian Haïlé Gerima. The ten hours of Black Lions – Roman Wolves retrace with a very creative montage of period archives the aggression of fascist Italy against its country (1935-1936) and the mass murders against civilian populations. Is it necessary to add that these visions find cruel echoes in the current era?
We will still be watching for a possible third memorable offer from the same continent, Soumsoum, the night of the stars (in competition), which marks the return of the Chadian Mahamat Saleh Haroun, twenty years later Daratt (Dry season) and sixteen years later A man who screams. In the meantime, it is from another region, obviously well represented in Berlin, but often without much relief, the German-speaking world, that two works attracting attention have come.
With Pink (in competition), Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer succeeds in a tense and embodied story, magnified by the use of black and white and the very inhabited acting of Sandra Hüller. In a Germanic countryside in the 17th centurye century, this feminist variation on the schema of Return of Martin Guerre who remembers Robert Bresson’s Joan of Arc undoubtedly stands out from the crowd.
And what can we say about the wonderful singularity of Angela Schanelec’s new film,
My wife is crying? Each shot is an unexpected joy and delicate precision. Three years later MusicAgathe Bonitzer finds with a fragile and firm grace the director of I was at home but…awarded at the Berlinale in 2019. But it was not the same Berlinale.
Without seeming to care, the German filmmaker’s film, presented in competition, underlines the platitude of most productions, often contaminated by a rather depressing “TV series” syndrome, whether they come from Flanders or Singapore, the east coast of the United States or Finland.
Still a few nuggets here and there
All sections combined, the Berlinale presents hundreds of films, so there are bound to be some gems there. We will return on the occasion of its release – March 11, 2026 – to the documentary First namesby Franco-Israeli filmmaker Nurith Aviv (presented in the Forum section). But we will immediately be delighted to have encountered the very unique first film by the young Chinese actress Agnis Shen Zhongmin, Shanghai Daughter (Panorama section), which explores with finesse the real and imaginary universe of a rural region in the far south of its country.
Likewise, Everybody Digs Bill Evans (in competition), the first “fiction” feature film by British director Grant Gee – very inspired by a real situation – opens with an impressive sequence reconstituting a legendary recording in the history of jazz, before accompanying the inner drift of American pianist Bill Evans, after the death of his double bassist friend Scott LaFaro, in 1961.
The use of deliberately dated black and white and the editing combining several registers are part of an attempt in direct disharmony with the artistic experience and the personal tumult invoked by the film around the musician.
We will also not regret having moved away from the festival halls to discover, in the Berlin contemporary art venue Silent Green, which hosts the Forum Expanded section, the moving and rich in little-known information Casting for a Film, Ihsan’s Diaryby the Lebanese artist and filmmaker Lamia Joreige, around a film project on a young soldier, in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 20th centurye century.
But two-thirds of the way through, the Berlinale leaves us with a worrying assessment, beyond a still possible economic weakness. A major event on the festival circuit, it is one of the pillars of the global cinema ecosystem. If, for reasons relating to its date, its programming or political pressures, its aura were to weaken permanently, it is the life of the films which would suffer, everywhere and throughout the year.
