The complete film program for Critics’ Week 2026
The film program for Critics’ Week 2026 has been finalized. The festival will take place from February 9 to 17, 2026. The film program begins on Tuesday, February 10, at the Hackesche Höfe Kino and presents exciting, freely curated selections from the current festival season. Details about all films and events in this year’s program are now available on our website. Details on the previously announced titles in our film selection can be found in our announcement from December 18. Advance ticket sales will start shortly.
Adilkhan Yerzhanov is a master at staging genre cinema against genre conventions. In 2014, he and six of his peers declared the Partisan Cinema: they published a manifesto and vowed to break new ground with independent films. His new film Turgaud follows in the tradition of this manifesto and is carried by glances, pauses, alienation, and musical interventions. At its center is a secretive man, tasked with protecting the leader of a crime syndicate from the threat of a mysterious woman and her child who want him dead. Violence is inevitable, but it manifests in enigmatic ways. In a mythical action setting, the director develops a political allegory for the present.
In her short film Fiction Contract, multidisciplinary artist Carolyn Lazard documents a medical simulation in which a team of doctors, nurses, and midwives go into emergency mode—drawing attention in a haunting, almost surreal way to the situation of Black mothers in the US, who are significantly more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts. In Worry Time, the emergencies take place on the set of a sci-fi splatter film, where nothing goes according to plan. With a sharp wit and plenty of double meanings, Tom Brennan and Emma Paetz tell the story of an artist who’s caught between self-discovery and self-destruction in the making of her first film. The result is a mysterious work that moves between drama and gore while exploring fear, abuse, pregnancy, and hatred, but also light, color, fake blood, sex, madness, and discomfort in body and mind.
Dorian Jespers seems to hold neither courtroom dramas nor dream sequences sacred. In his short film Loynes, he chooses a timeless courtroom as the setting for a Kafkaesque farce and proceeds to break countless rules of narrative cinema with great enthusiasm. The young director has been the talk of the town since his award-winning graduation film Sun Dog, and we are eager to hear what he has to say about his films. At Critics’ Week, his work meets that of Teresa Villaverde, who has been a regular guest at international film festivals since the 1990s. In Justa, she recounts the consequences of the devastating fires in Portugal in 2017 in a poetic, enigmatic, and at times confrontational style, through five interlocking stories.
For over 20 years, Austrian artist Maria Petschnig has been testing the boundaries of humor and good taste with her self-deprecating and experimental short films. Her first feature, Beautiful and Neat Room, is a bitingly absurd comedy about cohabitation in cramped quarters in New York, which skewers artist clichés and eccentricities. Finally, musician and sampling expert Marc Richter, alias Neue Deutsche Kunst, conjures up the Hugs & Kisses absent from Petschnig’s film, using AI. Richter has set himself the goal of pushing video generators to their limits with absurd, poetic, and overly long commands. Between alienation and affection, his film allows colorful objects and bodies to flow into one another, blurring the boundaries between human creativity, artificial intelligence, and chance.
All films in the program at a glance:
Arguments in Favor of Love
D: Gabriel Abrantes, POR 2025, 9 Min.
Beautiful and Neat Room
D: Maria Petschnig, AUT/USA 2025, 118 Min. – German Premiere
Desire Lines (Linije želje)
D: Dane Komljen, SRB/BIH/NED/CRO/GER 2025, 107 Min. – German Premiere
Fiction Contract
D: Carolyn Lazard, USA 2025, 9 Min. – European Premiere
Hinterlegte Nummern
D: Farina Mietchen, GER 2025, 20 Min. – World Premiere
Hugs & Kisses
D: Neue Deutsche Kunst/Marc Richter, GER 2025, 11 Min.
If You Don’t Like It, Look Away (Au bain des dames)
D: Margaux Fournier, FRA 2025, 30 Min. – German Premiere
Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 (Israel Palestina på Svensk TV 1958-1989)
D: Göran Hugo Olsson, SWE 2024, 206 Min.
Justa
D: Teresa Villaverde, POR/FRA 2025, 108 Min. – German Premiere
Loynes
D: Dorian Jespers, BEL/FRA/MKD/GBR 2025, 25 Min.
Mag Mag (禍禍女)
D: Yuriyan Retriever, JPN 2025, 112 Min
One Minute Is an Eternity for Those Who Are Suffering (Um minuto é uma eternidade para quem está sofrendo)
D: Fábio Rogério, Wesley Pereira de Castro, BRA 2025, 62 Min. – German Premiere
Turgaud
D: Adilkhan Yerzhanov, KAZ 2025, 123 Min. – World Premiere
Worry Time
D: Tom Brennan, GBR 2025, 89 Min. – World Premiere
Critics’ Week 2026 will take place from February 9 to 17, 2026. The film programme starts on Tuesday, February 10 at Hackesche Höfe Kino.
Read the announcement on wochederkritik.de
Program announcement from December 18
Press kit: Download
Press contact: Gloria Reményi, presse@wochederkritik.de
Film still from Worry Time (R: Tom Brennan) © Penny4 and Thaddeus