Knockouts: 5 discoveries from Berlin Film Festival 2025

Director: Christine Haroutounian

Maybe it helped that I watched Christine Haroutounian’s stunning debut feature literally after dreaming, having promptly fallen asleep as it started and then woken again, defences down to its hypnagogic spell. I’ve watched it again since to confirm the impression that the Armenian-American filmmaker has made the most transfixing, formally experimental first feature I’ve seen in an age, a nonlinear romance and road trip that unfolds against a landscape haunted by Armenia’s ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan.

Haroutounian’s film begins in the aftermath of a killing and follows an Armenian soldier, Atom (Davit Beybutyan), who is tasked with escorting the dead man’s teenage daughter, Claudette (Veronika Poghosyan), to safer territory. But it’s a journey that proceeds in dreamlike fashion, the images by cinematographer Evgeny Rodin blurring and bleeding at the edges in a manner that recalls the smudgy transcendentalism of Alexander Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997). The sense of time is similarly amorphous, at one point slipping forward to the couple’s wedding and capturing the trance-like rhythms of the local band in a mesmerising, focus-shifting 15-minute take. Carlos Reygadas (Japón, 2002; Silent Light, 2007) serves as exec producer here, and After Dreaming shares some of his genius for ecstatic realism.

– Sam Wigley

Director: Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay

The Hesse-born Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay is a founding member of one of the most exciting film collectives in German cinema today, responsible for the 2022 documentary hit Love, Deutschmarks and Death, about the music scene that emerged in the wake of the Turkish migration to Germany in the 1960s. Hysteria is Büyükatalay’s second directorial effort and is radically different in tone and scope to both Deutschmarks, which he co-wrote and produced, and the scorching domestic drama Oray (2019), his directorial debut.

It’s a nail-biting Hitchcockian thriller in which the discovery of a burnt Quran in a movie production directed by a German of Turkish descent prompts the disappearance of the related film stock. The ensuing drama investigates some of the most pertinent questions facing contemporary European cinema. Who owns the immigrant narrative? Who are these films catering for and why? Is the artist’s racial background sufficient to dismantle their ingrained white gaze?

Unabashedly harkening back to Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Hidden (there’s one hilarious scene in which a gigantic Haneke book is used as a doorstop), Hysteria is superlative political entertainment: a bold, intelligent picture that explores the complex and often contradictory relationship of second-generation Germans to their Islamic heritage, but also a brilliantly constructed whodunnit that touches upon class privilege, the moral price of artistic integrity, and the hypocrisy of German cinema’s self-serving diversity policies. For me, it was the standout German film of Berlinale 2025 by a considerable margin.

– Joseph Fahim

Director: Urška Djukić

Slovenian director Urška Djukić’s engaging drama about the sexual awakening of 16-year-old Lucia is among the more interesting coming-of-age features of recent years. In her first feature performance Jara Sofija Ostan plays Lucia, a newbie at her all-girl Catholic school choir in Ljubljana who befriends lively third-year Ana-Maria (Mina Švajger) and breaks ever-so-slightly bad when the choir head to a rural convent for a few days of rehearsal. 

Djukić, scripting with Maria Bohr with whom she wrote the animated short Granny’s Sexual Life (2021), has a careful lightness of touch alongside a bold choice of shot and setting that recalls the early work of Lucrecia Martel and proves just as impactful. Little Trouble Girls sits at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from Tár (2022) but shares its detailed depiction of a slightly esoteric musical milieu. Here the nuances of choral vocal harmonies, and even how to use the correct breathing routines and body parts while singing, are imbued with the urgency of a thriller, with aural adornments stitched across the soundtrack intelligently by sound designer Julij Zornik. When Sonic Youth’s almost eponymous ‘Little Trouble Girl’ ushers in the end credits before 90 minutes are up, it’s hard not to wish things went on a little longer.

– Lou Thomas

Director: Eva Libertad

In recent years, the Berlinale has premiered a series of subtly impressive Spanish films, generally realist woman-centred family dramas, from Álvaro Gago’s Matria (2023) to Alauda Ruiz de Azúa’s Cinco lobitos (released in the UK as Lullaby) to Carla Simón’s Catalan-set Golden Bear winner Alcarràs (both 2022). This streak of consistently excellent low-key heartbreakers means that whenever I start feeling in need of a good cry at the festival (depending on energy levels, this can be as early as the first weekend), I look to Spain, to see who might be able to deliver a satisfyingly cleansing weep-fest.

This year it was Eva Libertad’s Sorda (Deaf) that delivered the goods. Told in a mixture of spoken Spanish and sign language, this tender drama follows Ángela (played by Libertad’s sister, the deaf artist Miriam Garlo) and her hearing partner Héctor (Álvaro Cervantes) as they embark on parenthood for the first time. Libertad developed the film collaboratively with Garlo, as well as drawing on the testimonies of other deaf mothers, and the result is a deeply empathetic film which explores, with great complexity, the experience of raising a child while deaf in a hearing world. 

Both the central performances are extraordinary, especially Garlo, in a many-layered turn which moves far beyond sentimental clichés. Having teetered on the brink of tears for most of the running time, it was a deceptively simple scene set in a kindergarten close to the film’s conclusion that finally tipped me over the edge. Plenty of other people in the auditorium clearly felt the same as I did – Sorda was this year’s winner of the Panorama Audience Award.

– Rachel Pronger

Director: Paula Tomás Marques

After a few impressive shorts (including 2023’s Dildotectonics), Portuguese filmmaker Paula Tomás Marques spread her wings in long-form with her debut feature Two Times João Liberada, a treasure in Berlinale’s Perspectives section. Marques is a visual storyteller – her previous credits include cinematography on Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me – who uses all the means at her disposal, precisely and inventively. The director co-wrote the script with main actor June João, who plays, well, a trans feminine actor named João starring in an independent period film about the gender-nonconforming Liberada persecuted by the Inquisition; it’s not that complicated but, here, layering is a political gesture.

As Two Times switches between a film-within-a-film and a making-of, the grainy 16mm lights up and tones down in colour; in other instances, texts appear over the screen, presumably the only records of Liberada in existence. Jorge Jácome is tasked with editing this sleek 70-minute film, and he does well, preserving its experimental streak without taking it all the way into Forum territory. A film-palimpsest with a bite: the cinephile’s dream.

– Savina Petkova