All guests at the 11th Berlin Critics’ Week
The guests and moderators of Berlin Critics’ Week 2025 are confirmed. In the year following the festival’s ten-year anniversary, we are emphasizing its character as workshop format and introducing several new debate formats. An overview of all festival guests can be found on our website.
New debate formats at Berlin Critics’ Week 2025
Critics’ Week is a workshop format, one in which we have been trying out various ways to discuss film since the beginning. At the festival’s core is its emphasis on a culture of debate that goes beyond the pragmatic constraints of classic film festivals and nourishes passionate discussion about cinema – contradictions and honest reactions to the films are welcome and encouraged at the event. For the 2025 edition, we are introducing a number of new discussion formats that—instead of highlighting thematic approaches—are rather based in particular constellations of conversation.
The RUDELKRITIK format (Feb 13) gathers international film critics to take a closer look at the evening’s films and respond to the viewpoints of the audience. The TUNNELBLICK format (Feb 15) brings together filmmakers who work in the same profession: 2025 begins with montage. In the STEILVORLAGE format (Feb 16-17) we will be viewing films as a source material, as an invitation, as a provocation for a debate in which people hailing from different fields, disciplines, or art forms discuss common threads, political attitudes, and curatorial positions. The REAKTIONSZEIT format (Feb 18) enables our festival guests to discuss the evening’s film program; the filmmakers in attendance are initially allowed only to listen, not respond. WUNSCHDENKEN (Feb 19) is the title of a format in which our invited filmmakers choose with whom they would like to discuss their work. During the HALBWISSEN evening (Feb 20) our moderator knows nothing about either the evening’s films or the people on the podium – but is curious about both.
All guests and debates in detail
Opening conference: Back to the Class Issue – Film Culture and Social Inequality
WED Feb 12
6 pm
One the eve of the Berlinale, we will discuss contemporary perspectives on the issue of class at our opening conference at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Details on this year’s thematic focus can be found on our website.
Panel 1: How do we talk about class? Perspectives from politics, society, and art
Guests: Nuray Demir (artist/curator), Katalin Gennburg (politician), Francis Seeck (mediator/professor/author). Moderator: Amina Aziz (journalist/editor)
Panel 2: Closed society? Class relations in film culture
Guests: Christopher Andrews (director), Heike-Melba Fendel (author / head of Barbarella Entertainmen)), Marco Müller (festival director/producer), and Biene Pilavci (director). Moderator: Dennis Vetter (Berlin Critics’ Week)
Welcome address by Peter Badel (cinematographer and member of the Akademie der Künste), keynote by Andreas Kemper (sociologist), reading by Jovana Reisinger (author/director)
Chain Reaction
THU Feb 13
7 pm
It would not be Berlin Critics’ Week if our first film evening didn’t involve inviting international film critics onto the stage. We will be discussing EAST OF NOON by the Egyptian director Hala Elkoussy together with Öykü Sofuoğlu (critic and translator, Altyazi Cinema Magazine, MUBI Notebook, Sorociné, and kortfilm.be among others), Flavia Dima (film critic, programmer, film educator with reviews published by e.g. Indiewire, Variety, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, Kinoscope), and Beatrice Loayza (criticism in the New York Times, Art Forum, Criterion Collection, The Nation, 4Columns, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Guardian, Metrograph Journal). The discussion will be moderated by the film critic and programmer Joseph Fahim, who was a member of the Berlin Critics’ Week selection committee from 2015 to 2017 and helped shape the festival from the very beginning. In the RUDELKRITIK format, we will ask the directors not to take part in the debate, allowing for as free a conversation as possible. Hala Elkoussy and her film team will therefore be giving the stage over to the critics entirely after the film program.
Moderator: Joseph Fahim
Back to the Class Issue
FRI Feb 14
7 pm
On February 14, following on from our opening conference, there will be a film programme accompanied by a debate on the depiction of class relations using the medium of cinema – with the classic film Vampires of Poverty by Luis Ospina and Carlos Moyolo as well as contemporary works by Vika Kirchenbauer, Friedl vom Gröller, and Adriano Valerio. In the subsequent debate, we will bring the directors into conversation with Sinthujan Varatharajah (author), who recently discussed different forms of oppression and how to overcome them together with Moshtari Hilal in the conversation-book Hierarchien der Solidarität. The debate will be moderated by Guido Kirsten, who since 2018 has been leading the research project Cinematic Discourses of Scarcity: On the Representation of Precarity and Exclusion in European Feature and Documentary Films.
Moderator: Guido Kirsten
Family Fatale
SAT Feb 15
7 pm
An evening devoted to film editing. Four years ago, with The Sleeping Negro, Skinner Myers made a subtly disturbing film about the psychological dimensions of racism. Just as implacable is his latest film, Before You Fade Away Into Nothing, a family film that brings the estrangement of two brothers into cinematic form. Meanwhile, in JJ Lin’s Hippopotami – a short film somewhere between Wong Kar Wai and Samuel Beckett – a family trip to the zoo comes to represent a critique of the Chinese education system. After the films, we will be joined by the two directors, who are also their films’ editors, to try out our new format TUNNELBLICK, which focuses on one specific cinematic technique: this year, montage. We have invited the filmmaker Ramon Zürcher, who also edited his latest film The Sparrow in the Chimney himself, and the award-winning Polish editor Agnieszka Glińska (Eo, The Girl with the Needle, Lamb). Together, they will explore the evening’s films using aesthetic film editing decisions as their jumping-off point.
Moderator: Petra Palmer
Special Screening: The End
SUN Feb 16
11.30 am
As part of this year’s cooperation with MUBI, we are presenting Joshua Oppenheimer’s extravagant political musical The End, followed by a discussion with the director as well as actors Tilda Swinton and George MacKay.
Moderator: Hannah Pilarczyk
Myth Mayhem
SUN Feb 16
7 pm
Nationalist discourses always refer to a national history – but who benefits from such references, and who gets excluded? This evening’s films deal with the instrumentalization and appropriation of national myths in various ways. For Daphné Hérétakis, Greek history tends to stand in the way of a present worth living in, which is why she launches her own visual counter-attack in the form of What We Ask of a Statue Is That It Doesn’t Move. Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco takes Mexico’s Aztec past as the starting point for reflecting on the body, the state, and religion in her intoxicating experimental film Aoquic iez in Mexico!. Mexico will no longer exist!. In our STEILVORLAGE format, the two will hold a discussion with the filmmaker Robin Vanbesien, who in his films likewise explores the relationship between collective ideas and political struggles. Completing the panel is the producer and filmmaker Rocío Mesa, who works as a programmer for numerous festivals. Her last film Tobacco Barns won the 2022 Dunia Asayo Award in San Sebastián.
Moderator: Călin Boto
Panel discussion
NO NEED FOR A LONG READ?
Film critics’ perspectives on the children’s and youth film landscape
MON Feb 17
5 pm
The digital media shift is causing the traditional ‘beacons’ of arthouse reporting to falter. Films for a young audience are particularly affected, as they were already primarily perceived and discussed in educational niches in the era of print journalism. While audience development, film education, and fan discourses are flourishing, the space for independent film criticism outside the festival bubbles is dwindling. At the same time, new media and journalistic spaces are emerging in which even outstanding children’s and youth films still have to find their place. So what is needed to sensitise established media and modern platforms such as podcasts, blogs, and fan forums to children’s and youth films? Do the films themselves need to change, or rather our attitude towards them?
A panel discussion at the invitation of the European Children’s and Youth Film Association (ECFA),
the German Film Critics‘ Association (VdFk) and Berlin Critics’ Week. Film critics and publicists from various media formats will discuss with Axel Timo Purr (VdFk) from a ‘critic’s’ point of view the diverse children’s and youth film production.
Guests:
Welcome by Gudrun Sommer (ECFA/DOXS RUHR DE) &
Pantelis Panteloglou (ECFA/Olympia International Film Festival for Children and Young People GR), Panel discussion with Savina Petkova (film critic, editor for Talking Shorts GB), Yun-hua Chen (film scholar, curator/VdFk DE), Sebastian Markt (Berlinale Generation/VdFk DE)
Moderator: Axel Timo Purr (VdFk/artechock.de DE)
Caught in the Act
MON Feb 17
7 pm
A short film about a woman who won’t give up a date, even as her crush turns out to be a potential serial killer, a supposedly harmless camping trip that ends up in a deadly plot, and a filmmaker who re-edits old home videos to stage the murder of his own father – this evening offers enough material for a STEILVORLAGE, our format that puts our program’s curatorial decisions up for discussion with the directors and various guests. For a debate on the films Bits, Vulcanizadora, and Tragedy, we have invited the filmmaker and actress Uisenma Borchu, who with her most recent film Black Milk was a guest in the Panorama section of 2020’s Berlinale. She will be joined on stage by filmmakers Lilliya Scarlett Reid (Bits) and Bernardo Zanotta (Tragedy) as well as actor Joshua Burge, who plays the lead role in Joel Potrykus’s Vulcanizadora.
Moderator: Lucía Salas
Unsigned
TUE Feb 18
7 pm
In our debate format REAKTIONSZEIT, our guests will speak after the screening. Narges Kalhor, whose film Shahid showed successfully at the Berlinale Forum last year, will be joined by the artist and curator Julian Warner, who has been director of Augsburg’s BrechtFestival since 2023. The two will be discussing the film All Quiet at Sunrise by Zhu Xin (Vanishing Days) – which sees a doctoral student set off on the trail of the origins of human language while also coming to terms with the relationships in his life – as well Oskar Weimar’s short film I Want to Be a House, in which a Nairobi domestic worker decides to quit her job and become the house where she has toiled with her entire body for so long. Zhu Xin and Oskar Weimar will have to exercise patience on the night: only after a while will they be allowed to enter the debate stage themselves and respond to the viewpoints of our guests.
Moderator: Dennis Vetter
Pastime
WED Feb 19
7 pm
Waiting and rehearsing, two different recourses to the past, and a desire for conversation are what lead this evening on. Andy Warhol’s grave is at the heart of Radu Jude’s film Sleep #2, whose title explicitly refers to Warhol’s own film Sleep. Using recordings from a live webcam installed in the cemetery, Jude’s found-footage film observes, improvises, and meditates in equal measure. The US artist Diane Severin Nguyen’s film In Her Time (Iris’s Version) – which has already been exhibited as a video installation at the Whitney Museum in New York – follows an actress who is rehearsing war for a historical film. On this evening, we will ourselves be rehearsing our debate format WUNSCHDENKEN, in which the filmmakers themselves are able to invite a guest and then engage them in an intensive unmoderated exchange about cinema and the world. Shortly before the event we will announce the guest Diane Severin Nugyen wished for. Radu Jude will greet the audience at the beginning of the event.
Private Eyes
THU Feb 20
7 pm
This year, Berlin Critics’ Week concludes with the question of how we remember the things we have experienced – and how we tell each other about them. Starting out with the biographical-musical search for traces in Measures for a Funeral by the director Sofia Bohdanowicz (MS Slavic 7), we will be conducting a detective experiment with the film critic, editor, and cinematographer Nino Klingler. As the moderator, he has not seen the aforementioned film, which will be the focus of today’s debate. So he will have to make do with being guided by eyewitness accounts from the electro-pop icon Barbara Morgenstern, who most recently appeared in Sabine Herpich’s documentary Barbara Morgenstern und die Liebe zur Sache, as well as critics Sonya Vseliubska (Ukrainska Pravda, Vogue Ukraine) and Valerie Dirk (Der Standard) as he attempts to reconstruct what has been missed, understand the indescribable, and explore different perspectives on Bohdanowicz’s work in a joint discussion that uses dangerous half-knowledge. It will all take place in the spirit of the most important question in cinema: What did you see?
Moderator: Nino Klingler
Please direct interview questions to our press contact Elisabeth Mohr (presse@wochederkritik.de)