What to See During Berlin International Film Festival 2025

James Benning, Little Boy (2025)

At 82, James Benning continues to produce work at an admirable clip. Just two years on from the observational double-patty of Allensworth and The United States of America (both 2022), the veteran minimalist returns to the Berlinale Forum (typically the festival’s more experimental thread) with Little Boy, a deceptively playful film about the state of the US and, perhaps, the end of the world. Benning’s work tends to comprise a series of static shots that, through audiovisual elements, gradually reveal a central theme. In Little Boy, these sections arrive as couplets: first a title card announcing the year, then a closeup of hands, delicately painting the pieces of an unconstructed model, set to a roughly contemporaneous pop song; then, a shot of the finished structure overlaid with a notable speech by a political figure from each advancing era. Somewhere amid these aspirational orations and uncannily detailed models, Benning suggests a gradually vanishing world and way of life. Viewed by the director as a companion piece to American Dreams (Lost and Found) (1984), Little Boy has been described by Benning as ‘a film looking at the past to warn about the future’. – Rory O’Connor

Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Hot Milk (2025)

Based on the novel of the same name by Deborah Levy, Hot Milk follows Rose (Fiona Shaw) and her daughter Sofia (Emma Mackey) as they travel to the sun-drenched Spanish city of Almería in an attempt to find a cure for Rose’s undiagnosed illness. As Sofia falls under the spell of a seductive stranger and begins to assert her independence from her controlling mother, tension builds to a dramatic climax. Although this is director and writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s first feature, she has plenty of experience adapting literary works for the screen. In 2017, she co-wrote the screenplay for the excellent Disobedience (2017), based on Naomi Alderman’s novel about two women raised in an Orthodox Jewish community, and just a year later she further proved her credentials by co-writing Colette (2018), a biopic of the celebrated French novelist featuring Keira Knightley. Given Lenkiewicz’s knack for writing complex women, not to mention the inclusion of veteran actor Shaw and promising talent Mackey, Hot Milk is undoubtedly one of the Berlinale’s most highly anticipated directorial debuts. – Chloe Stead

Richard Linklater, Blue Moon (2025)

Musical theatre fans impatient for Richard Linklater’s proposed 20-year production of Merrily We Roll Along (1981) – which he began shooting in 2021 year-by-year, à la Boyhood (2014) – can find some reprieve with his latest offering. Working with writer Robert Kaplow for the first time since Me and Orson Welles (2008), which focused on a 1937 production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) at Welles’s Mercury Theatre in New York, the director ducks behind the proscenium once again with Blue Moon, a film about famed Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) and his song-writing partner Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott). Taking place on the opening night of Oklahoma! in 1943 and set entirely at legendary Manhattan watering hole Sardi’s, the film, which is presented in real time, promises another of the director’s many experiments in temporal restraint. Margaret Qualley brings the star power as Hart’s protégé, Elisabeth, alongside two-time Olivier Award-winner Scott and Linklater fixture Hawke as the hangdog lead. With both his rom-com Hit Man (2023) and his animated Netflix movie Apollo 10 ½ (2022) receiving critical acclaim in recent years, and the upcoming Nouvelle Vague – a film about the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) – looking a likely bet for Cannes, the versatile director seems to be on a roll. – Rory O’Connor

Ameer Fakher Eldin, Yunan (2025)

Almost 50 years after her Best Actress win for The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), New German Cinema icon and Rainer Werner Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla returns to the Berlinale competition this year in Yunan. The film is the second feature by Ameer Fakher Eldin, a 33-year-old filmmaker born in Ukraine to parents from the Golan Heights, whose poetic debut, The Stranger (2021), won the Edipo Re Award at the Venice Film Festival. In Yunan, Munir (Georges Khabbaz), a Muslim writer based in Hamburg but yearning for home, travels to the remote Hallig Islands in the North Sea with the intention of ending his life. At a guesthouse, he meets Valeska (Schygulla), an older woman whose rugged warmth acts as a port to his storm. Filmed on location by Ronald Plante amid a high-water spell, when the landscape dramatically disappears below sea level, leaving visible only elevated farmhouses, Eldin imbues a deeply personal story with near-apocalyptic levels of pathetic fallacy. An international coproduction involving Germany and Palestine, the film is certain to become a talking point when it premieres next week at a festival still struggling to come to terms with the fallout from last year’s awards ceremony, when accusations of mistreatment of Arab filmmakers led some in the industry to boycott this year’s edition. With all that in mind, Yunan’s central sequence – in which Munir and Valeska share an unsentimental moment of solidarity as the waters rise – feels remarkably resonant. – Rory O’Connor

Liryc Dela Cruz, Where the Night Stands Still (2025)

The first major shakeup of new festival director Tricia Tuttle’s reign was to replace the adventurous if divisive ‘Encounters’ sidebar with ‘Perspectives’, a strand focused solely on narrative feature debuts. Ironically, Where the Night Stands Still, an elusive ghost story from Rome-based Filipino director Liryc Dela Cruz, would fit comfortably in either. Shot in startlingly crisp black and white, Dela Cruz’s film follows a day in the life of émigré housekeeper Rosa (Jenny Llanto Caringal). Cruz shows her tending to a stately country home before revealing that she is now the owner, having recently inherited it from her former employer. Some spice is added to the mix with the arrival of Rosa’s sister Lillia (Tess Magallanes) and brother Manny (Benjamin Vasquez Barcellano Jr.), neither of whom she’s seen in years. Over 75 minutes, Dela Cruz allows the sociological and personal implications of Rosa’s situation to germinate in the mind’s eye while an uncanny tension builds amongst the siblings. This is slow cinema with a dark sense of humour and a nasty bite. – Rory O’Connor

The 75th Berlin International Film Festival runs from 13–23 February 2025