It was a dream-like, surreal ten days of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival which came to a successful conclusion with the Audience Day last Sunday on February 23. After the ceremonial awards ceremony on Saturday evening, at which Drømmer ( Dreams (Sex Love) ) by Dag Johan Haugerud was awarded the Golden Bear, thousands of viewers flocked to the cinemas on Audience Day to attend repeat screenings of selected festival films from the anniversary edition.
According to festival’s statistics around 19,000 trade visitors including the press came to the festival. Around 336,000 tickets were sold to the public, slightly more than last year. Speaking at the closing ceremony at the Berlinale Palast, Tricia Tuttle, the Berlinale festival director said, “We are very pleased with the results of the 75th anniversary edition. We have received a positive response to the decisions of our juries and great feedback on the improvements to our infrastructure and also to the film and industry offerings. We are also pleased to see an increase in audience numbers and that the atmosphere was excellent. With this enthusiasm, we are now starting to plan for 2026,”
The invitation
Group Photo The team at the Photo Call.
If I had legs I’d kick you Competition
The invitation to the 75th Berlin International Film Festival came as a delightful surprise! I received an unexpected message on Facebook from Meenakshi Sheddi, a renowned Indian film critic and South Asian film programmer for Berlinale for the past 27 years. She inquired if I could attend the festival, contingent on the Berlinale team approving her recommendation among others. Without any hesitation, I responded with a big ‘YES.’
I met Meenakshi a decade ago at the Colombo International Film Festival, which was a fabulous event for Sri Lanka but sadly lasted only two years. She is a curious, talkative, and energetic woman, brimming with enthusiasm for discovering young film talents across South Asia. Since then, we’ve connected through social media, and she has been following my passion for film criticism and my involvement in the international film festival scene, introducing and interviewing festival programmers and directors, as well as reviewing award-winning films. As a journalist, it has been my sheer passion to share knowledge with Sri Lankan filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts about available opportunities and to help expand the potential of filmmaking beyond our island.
Festival experience
Being invited guest and an accredited press representative for the Sunday Observer to attend the 75th Berlin International Film Festival is a tremendous privilege. Witnessing the opening night in person, participating in a movie marathon each day, and enjoying the best cinema of the year at the Berlinale Palace, the festival’s heart, is truly remarkable.
Hot Milk – Vicky Krieps, Emma Mackey, Rebecca Lenkiewicz The actors and the director at the premiere in the Berlinale Palast
This amazing musical theatre, transformed into the main venue of the Berlinale film festival, boasts a seating capacity of 1,600. Other fantastic venues such as Cubix, Zoo Palast, Colosseum, Stage Bluemax, Delphi Filmpalast, and more provide beautiful settings for the event.
Attending exclusive press conferences immediately following the screenings of competition section films, with participation from the cast and crew in the designated press area at the Grand Hyatt, has made these ten days of festival experience truly unforgettable. Indeed, the unlimited free coffee was a significant perk at the Grand Hyatt, available for hundreds of accredited press members. In the frigid Berlin temperatures of minus 10 degrees, the films and coffee were likely the only ways to stay warm.
Every day, it followed the same viewing routine that almost every accredited press member, including me, adhered to: three or four films in the Competition section, one or two in other sections and press conferences with filmmakers in attendance. It was truly a film heaven.
Each morning by 9 a.m., I would walk one kilometre from the hotel to Berlinale Palast after enjoying a German breakfast, bundled up in three layers, consciously walking through the snow. Along the way, I passed the remnants of the Berlin Wall and the Berlin Story Bunker, an abundant fleet of Trabant cars blanketed in snow, and leafless trees adorned with snow, a very foreign experience I couldn’t quite get used to until my last day in Berlin. The tall red bear statue at every corner signaled that I had entered the festival area, and with my festival ID, there were plenty of staffers available to assist and digitally punch the film tickets I had booked two days in advance for each screening. As the lights dimmed in the theatre and the screening began, I was fascinated by the magic of the movies I watched every day. It was the best crash course in film aesthetics I could recommend, allowing me to see how film techniques work and how the dialogue with life unfolds in the dark, paraphrasing Scorsese’s 2013 essay, “Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema.”
It never fails that the films soon begin a conversation with one another, engaging with genres, auteurs, national cinemas, and, best of all, film history. When studying the festival program prior to the event, I observed that half of the 19 titles in the Competition section focused on the nature and function of womanhood as it relates to the protagonists their duties and desires, as well as their roles as wives and mothers. In some cases, it was literally a matter of paging Sigmund Freud.
Based on my observations at international film festivals, stories that delve deeply into female or human subjectivity and explore the complexities of contemporary life for both men and women are more commonly found in European cinema. In contrast, Asian and African cinema tends to focus more on cultural themes and grand narratives, where human subjectivity is often revealed from an anthropological perspective. However, as discovering feminine subjectivity is my key interest in cinema, here are the gems I found at the 75th Berlinale Film Festival.
Hot Milk: A journey of self-discovery
Group Picture The film team at the
Photo Call Mother’s Baby Competition
Based on a novel, the British film Hot Milk, tells the story of a domineering mother, afflicted by a mysterious illness (Fiona Shaw), and her caregiver daughter (Emma Mackey). Written and directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the film traces the process of self-awareness for the daughter through a trip from Ireland to Spain. This journey is triggered by a lesbian attraction to a bisexual beauty (Vicky Krieps).
However, throughout the 93-minute film, the director fails to communicate what Sofia is really searching for. Is it independence from her chronically unhappy mother? Does the erotic dynamic between her and Ingrid—a source of both pleasure and jealousy—represent a genuine desire or merely another obsession for her to focus on in order to heal? While the film leaves many questions unanswered, I found it resonates deeply with my experience as a woman. The life of a woman is a continuous struggle filled with inner conflict, memories, and desires—some expressed, and others left untold—due to various limitations we build within ourselves.
This unresolved puzzle is somewhat radically expressed in the film’s climax—a showdown between mother and daughter that ultimately leaves the audience literally in the dark, as the final image of a black screen raises questions about the success or failure of their separation.
Mother’s Baby: Postpartum horror
In the Swiss-German film Mother’s Baby by Johanna Moder, the story explores the increasing hysteria of Julia (Marie Leuenberger), a 40-year-old orchestra conductor who conceives a child through IVF. However, complications arise during delivery, and the baby is taken away without informing Julia. When she finally meets her child, she feels an unexpected sense of detachment and begins to question whether the baby is truly hers. She struggles to care for the baby, forgetting to feed him and accidentally dropping him on the floor, alarming her caring husband (Hans Löw).
At the Red Carpet Festival Impressions
Mother’s Baby reminds me of the Spanish film Salve Maria (2024), which I watched at last year’s Locarno Film Festival. Both films deal with female subjectivity and the complicated love-hate relationship that develops between a mother and her child. Mother’s Baby effectively turns the relatable fears of any new mother into a horror story from the perspective of Julia, who becomes increasingly paranoid.
The turning point in her descent into madness is her belief that the baby has been switched at birth. The climax reveals her fantasy that the baby died at birth and is being stored in a refrigerator, needing rescue. The last disturbing image that kept me awake that premiere night was Julia carrying the dead baby in her arms. Although she is an unreliable narrator, this does not lessen the emotional impact of the film’s unflinching portrayal of postpartum depression taken to the extreme. Mother’s Baby is a beautifully terrifying psychothriller that examines the complex psychological relationship between a woman, her body, and the child, which is an unbreakable and intricately complex extension of herself.
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You: Anxiety and Isolation
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, a U.S. drama written and directed by Mary Bronstein, effectively blends horror conventions with melodrama. It is a psychological thrill ride about a therapist (Rose Byrne) whose husband is away on business. She is caring for their young daughter, who is heard but never seen on screen, except for the constant, very disturbing, and distressing beeping of a medical device. The child suffers from a mysterious illness that may be life-threatening.
The daughter’s voice often rises, asking histrionic questions from the back seat or a nearby room, until the very end of the film, when the child’s face is finally revealed. That face is an exact manifestation of Linda’s feelings that the audience has experienced throughout the film. The director’s choice to reveal the child at the end serves as a climax that illustrates Linda’s agony with a sick child and the absence of her husband.
The choice not to visualise the child’s struggle is significant, as the film primarily focuses on the mother’s journey rather than the child’s. The decision to make the child invisible and reduce her presence to a constant beeping is a clever directorial move, representing an alarm that perpetually rings in the mother’s psyche. This choice highlights her ongoing mental struggle and pain, keeping her on edge with every passing minute.
Iván Fund Proud pose: The director
firmly holds his Silver Bear. The Message
Competition Silver Bear Jury Prize
As a therapist trained to give the kind of advice she needs, she has the vocabulary to understand what she’s going through. However, she faces a dizzying series of complications, including tense confrontations with a fellow therapist played with flair by Conan O’Brien. The film beautifully captures the complexity of the feminine mind, motherhood, subjectivity, and the feelings that extend beyond rational thinking and language.
It is a movie that you cannot watch without breaks. The close-ups create a claustrophobic atmosphere, making the audience feel the mother’s experience of living with no way out, making it hard to breathe. Undergirding it all are profound reflections on the expectations society places on women, how men are often perceived as the stable ones, and where the line lies between extreme stress and mental illness.
Interestingly, two small scale family dramas – the German Was Marielle weiss/ What Marielle Knows, written and directed by Frédéric Hambalek, and the Argentine El mensaje / The Message, co-written and directed by Iván Fund, are stories about young girls whose mysterious spiritual powers impact their families in unforeseen ways.
What Marielle Knows and The Message
What Marielle Knows uses an intriguing concept: after receiving a punch, the daughter (newcomer Laeni Geiseler) of sophisticated bourgeois parents can “see” and “hear” everything her parents are doing (played by the talented Julia Jentsch and Felix Kramer). The film is briskly plotted and edited, raising the question of whether complete honesty in a marriage is truly desirable or if there should be room for a “noble lie.”
It functions partially as a morality tale with an uplifting ending, while also portraying a couple navigating life in a sterile environment, effectively conveyed through the sets and locations.
In the Argentine The Message (El mensaje), directed by Iván Fund, the conceit is that 12-year-old Anika (Anika Bootz, also a newcomer) can speak to animals and her two guardians (veteran actors Mara Bestelli and Marcelo Subiotto), travelling in a modest motor home through provincial towns, set up a business delivering messages to owners about their dead or missing pets. Shot in exquisite black and white, with a lovely jazz score, the film provides no context, avoids social commentary and eschews an ethnographic approach.
It slowly reveals who these people are, keeping the question, “Are they con artists?”, unsolved until the revealing last line. This road movie is in conversation with Fellini’s La Strada (1954), not only in the trope of the journey – geographical and symbolic – but also for the role played by love and grace in the road of life.
In a playful daydream, I can imagine Sigmund Freud at the Berlinale Palast this festival, scratching his head and wondering, ‘Was will das Weib?’ (‘What does a woman really want?’) Thank you, Berlinale, for the wonderful cinema!
Pix by: Berlinale-2025
