The Best Movies of the 2025 Berlin Film Festival
The 75th Berlin International Film Festival has wrapped its first year under new artistic director Tricia Tuttle. Along with programming directors Jacqueline Lyanga and Michael Stütz, Tuttle worked to curate a festival that would attract audiences, not just the industry, as the Berlinale is the largest public film festival in the world.
The awards this past Saturday were crowned by the Norwegian coming-of-age romantic drama, “Dreams (Sex Love),” the third in a trilogy of films by Dag Johan Haugerud, and one that raises fascinating questions about consent and authorship. The festival started off rockily, opening with Tom Tykwer’s roundly dismissed, Berlin-set, sanctimonious paean to white guilt, “The Light,” but the Berlinale soon rebounded with the rapturous receptions to films like Richard Linklater’s Lorenz Hart chamber tragicomedy “Blue Moon” and Bong Joon Ho’s satirical sci-fi spectacle “Mickey 17.”
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Deals out of the European Film Market, like what we saw at Sundance, have been slow to trickle out for North American expansions or releases for many Berlinale premieres. Streamers and studios are (supposedly) being more cost-savvy, which means a lot of the non-American movies at Berlinale will have to fight to find a home stateside.
IndieWire has rounded up the films we loved at the Berlin Film Festival this year, many of which are still seeking distribution. We’d recommend these to any distributor.
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