Berlin Film Festival 2025 Dates; Cannes Official Selection Presser; ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Actor Tatanka Means Joins Neo-Western; Screen Scotland Sets New Strategy — Global Briefs

Lise Pedersen Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel has unveiled the program for its 55th edition, which includes 10 first films out of 15 in the main international competition, cementing its reputation as a springboard for emerging talent. The official selection includes 165 films from 50 countries, with gender parity for the second-year running, and no fewer than 88 world premieres, making VdR the place to be in April on the international non-fiction film calendar.

Roll up, roll up for part two of our Cannes preview, this time with a focus on international, mainly non-English language fare. If you didn’t catch Andreas’ English-language focused part one, check it out here.

The 96th Academy Awards ceremony should be known as the Cannes Oscars, argues Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux.

Marc Malkin Senior Editor, Culture and Events As Hollywood gets ready to gives its final bow of awards season, parties and events fill the days and nights leading up to the 96th Oscars. From Zendaya and Cate Blanchett at the Green Carpet Fashion Awards and Essence celebrating Danielle Brooks and Halle Bailey to Elton John holding court at his annual viewing dinner, here’s a look at this year’s Oscar party calendar. March 4 South Asians at the Oscars PartyCo-hosted by Kal Penn, Lilly Singh, Hannah Simone, Tan France, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Rupi Kaur, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Anita Chatterjee, Shruti Ganguly, and Archana Misra Jain, with a musical performance by Ankur Tewari.Paramount Pictures Studios, Los Angeles7-10 p.m.

Outgoing Berlinale head Carlo Chatrian has distanced himself from the criticism made of the fest’s closing ceremony speeches earlier this week.

Ellise Shafer Outgoing Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian has spoken out about the political discourse surrounding the festival’s closing ceremony this year. As the Berlinale handed out prizes on Saturday night, several winning filmmakers took the opportunity in their acceptance speeches to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Roll up, roll up: it’s Cannes prognostication time.

Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who last week picked up the best documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival, has said he has received death threats and had to cancel his flight home after German officials and Israeli media described his acceptance speech as “anti-Semitic”.

It’s very easy to misread the title of Victor Kossakovsky’s latest documentary as “Architection,” since it is, in some ways, a detective story about the world we live in, albeit one in which it is very easy to figure out whodunit (spoiler: we did it to ourselves). The actual title, Architecton, is a Greek word that means “master builder,” and the film plays with the irony of what that may mean — pitting the “master builders” of yesteryear against the “master builders“ of today — from the very beginning, using a cryptic line from “L’aquilone,” a rumination on bygone times by Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912). “There is something new within the sun today, or rather ancient,” he writes. This fascinating, engrossing film interrogates the subtext of this seemingly paradoxical statement.

Martin Scorsese was at the Berlinale this week for the first time in a decade. His presence to collect an honorary Golden Bear was a reminder of the festival’s glories of yesteryear.

“Please make me a good wife to Wolf,” murmurs Agnes (Anja Plaschg) on her marriage night, head bowed in front of the crucifix she has already set up in the conjugal bedroom of the tumbledown stone farmhouse where she will live from now on. Wolf (David Scheid) is meanwhile carousing with his fellow villagers at the wedding celebration, in no hurry to join her. We are deep in the Austrian forest in the 1750s, where life is governed by the cruelties of each season and everything has its place. The point of a woman is to work and have children; anyone who fails in these conjoined vocations is simply a dead weight. Agnes will do her best, but her airy spirits are soon sinking.

It’s not often that a doc about the transformative power of cinema will deliberately use bad clips of the movies it’s talking about, but that’s part of the point of this insightful, sprawling film, corralled by director David Hinton. Though the masterpieces made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger at the height of their big-screen, Technicolor powers were visually impeccable, their subversive emotional power could still pack a punch through a 16-inch TV screen, even from the most scratched, butchered, and washed-out black-and-white prints.

Ellise Shafer Martin Scorsese was lauded with the Berlin Film Festival‘s honorary Golden Bear on Tuesday night, celebrating a lifetime of achievement in cinema. As he accepted the award, Scorsese — whose most recent film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is currently up for 10 Oscars — reflected on his career thus far and even teased a return to the festival “in a couple years.” Scorsese was introduced by German director Wim Wenders, who is also Oscar-nominated for his latest feature, “Perfect Days.” Wenders told a hilarious story, complete with a photo slideshow, about one of his earliest interactions with Scorsese at the Telluride Film Festival in 1978, where he came upon the director and his then-girlfriend Isabella Rossellini on the side of the road with a flat tire.

EXCLUSIVE: Beloved French actor Omar Sy stars in the debut feature from longtime producer Brandt Andersen in The Strangers’ Case, a searing and international ensemble that is world premiering at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday. Watch an exclusive clip above.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor The Berlin Film Festival hosted the 10 young European actors selected for the Shooting Stars program, run by European Film Promotion, at a gala event Monday. The presentation of the Shooting Stars took place prior to the screening of Claire Burger’s “Langue Étrangère,” which plays in competition.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Kirsten Niehuus, head of German film fund Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, is confident that the changes to film funding proposed by the German government recently will have a “very positive effect on the production scene in Berlin-Brandenburg.” The proposed changes to the funding system were presented last week to German lawmakers in the Bundestag by commissioner for culture and media Claudia Roth (see here). Speaking to Variety Saturday at a party Medienboard hosted at Berlin’s Holzmarkt, Niehuus said the changes “will mean that we would have a tax system in place that could compete, for instance, with Budapest or Prague, so that not so many German productions would go and shoot somewhere else, and more foreign productions would come and shoot in Germany.” Looking at the media landscape across Germany she notes that one major challenge is the decision by high-end outlets such as Paramount+, HBO and Sky to cancel local productions, and she noted “the streamers are not such reliable partners anymore.” She added: “So I think producers are having a really hard time at the moment.” On a happier note, the Berlin government raised Medienboard’s budget by Euros 6 million over the next two years, which will be targeted at the exhibition sector in the region, allowing for the upgrading of facilities at movie theaters.

EXCLUSIVE: Martin Scorsese is returning to the Berlin Film Festival tomorrow for the first time in a decade. The cinema legend, currently on the awards circuit with latest epic Killers Of The Flower Moon, will be feted with the Berlinale‘s highest honor, its lifetime achievement Golden Bear.

A youthful crowd of industry professionals filed into a bustling room at the Gropius Bau Saturday afternoon for the inaugural AfroBerlin symposium here at the Berlin Film Festival. 

The first-ever edition of AfroBerlin put Africa in the spotlight at the Berlin Film Festival and in one key session asked how festivals, streamers, and the wider industry can — and should — support films and filmmakers from the continent.

Christopher Vourlias Africa’s growing screen industries are making their mark on the global stage, with three titles in the main competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, but how to unlock the continent’s still-untapped potential was a question on the minds of many at a conference hosted on Saturday by the European Film Market. A partnership between EFM and Prudence Kolong’s Stockholm-based consulting firm Yanibes, AfroBerlin was launched to give a platform to filmmakers from Africa and the diaspora and “to find a place where they can share stories and experiences and be heard,” said Kolong, who also organizes the Cannes Film Festival’s AfroCannes industry showcase.