The film programme for Berlin Critics’ Week 2025 has been finalized

What hippos have to do with the desire for style. Why words and people disappear from the screen. When killers encounter dropouts – and a tragedy. How an icon meets coincidences and images of war. The film selection for the 11th Berlin Critics’ Week has been finalized. This year, it will take place from February 12 to February 20, 2025. The film programme begins on Thursday, February 13 at Hackesche Höfe Kino and presents an independent selection of outstanding films from the current festival season.

Official selection

In JJ Lin’s short film Hippopotami, being familiar with the character and peculiarities of the hippopotamus is turned into a question of style. Right at the start, a man says hippopotami are his favourite animal; soon his conversation with a taxi driver has become the prelude to a series of encounters between three adults and one child. In dialogues that are as astute as they are absurd, the director delivers parables about Chinese society. His film will be brought together with the new film by director, author, and actor Skinner Myers, whose Before You Fade Away Into Nothing demonstrates – no less impressively than his last offering, The Sleeping Negro – his commitment to a political cinema devoid of stylistic blinkers. Myers tells the story of two brothers who, in dealing with their grief over their deceased father, are just as unpredictable as the form of the film turns out to be. This ghost film is conceived in contemplative tableaux; it combines surrealism with Bressonian sobriety, politics with poetics, and minimalism with excess.

Cinematic language – and speech more generally – are at the heart of All Quiet at Sunrise, the new film by Zhu Xin, whose feature film debut Vanishing Days premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2019. Here, again, Zhu Xin lets layers of meaning flow into one another, producing iridescent nuances. From the intense relationship between one man and his mother, this film examines the fine lines between reality, dream, and fable. Oskar Weimar, in his short film I Want to Be a House, tells a magical-realist story about a Nairobi housekeeper who decides to stop working. What she wants is to surrender her body, with all of her senses, to the colonialist building whose owners she has served for many years. Her goal – to disappear from the screen – poses a challenge to the devices of cinema.

In Bits, Lilliya Scarlett Reid sharply comments the genre of serial killer movies. Her short film depicts a woman who is obsessed with a man that may well be a murderer. Its director pushes boundaries and provokes, both in her choice of techniques and in her use of violence. Joel Potrykus is well known for his black comedies, which have – over the years – portrayed men and women on the margins of society in order to comment satirically on the present-day United States. In Vulcanizadora, he continues the story of Marty and Derek, his protagonists from Buzzard, and here again the laughter may get stuck in viewers’ throats. These two films are joined by Bernardo Zanotta’s short film Tragedy, a pseudo-home movie in which – despite the tragic title – he refuses to give up his humour and decides to make away with his own fatherin a particularly dilettantish manner.

It is surely no coincidence that Radu Jude gave his recently-released homage to Andy Warhol the title Sleep #2 – yet his found footage work allows randomness to speak all the more clearly. Using footage from the live webcam installed beside Andy Warhol’s grave, Jude has – together with Cătălin Cristuțiu – assembled a film that observes, improvises, and meditates in equal measure. Diane Severin Nguyen, too, worked in a conceptual mode for In Her Time (Iris’ Version). Nguyen addresses the cinematic representation of war in her work. Here she accompanies a young actress who is preparing very unorthodoxly for a supporting role in a historical film.

Special Screening

In the context of a Special Screening, we have invited Frédéric Jaeger – Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Berlin Critics’ Week from 2015 to 2020 – to the festival. In 2024, Jaeger brought his two decades of work as a critic and programmer to a close in favour of a career as a director. In his feature film debut All We Ever Wanted, three young people from Berlin attempt to break with their everyday lives, reinvent themselves, and rethink their love lives while on vacation in the Canary Islands. After the film, we will hold a discussion about private or professional identities and self-images, as well as role models inside and outside the film industry.

 

All programmed films at a glance

All Quiet at Sunrise
Dir: Zhu Xin, CHN 2025, 100 min. – World premiere

All We Ever Wanted
Dir: Frédéric Jaeger, GER 2024, 80 min.

Before You Fade Away into Nothing
Dir: Skinner Myers, USA 2025, 105 min. – World premiere

Bits
Dir: Lilliya Scarlett Reid, USA 2024, 21 min.

Casablanca
Dir: Adriano Valerio, FRA/ITA 2023, 61 min.

Compassion and Inconvenience
Dir: Vika Kirchenbauer, GER 2024, 30 min.

East of Noon
Dir: Hala Elkoussy, NED/EGY/QAT 2024, 109 min. – German premiere

Emergency Exit (Uscita di Sicurezza)
Dir: Friedl vom Gröller, AUT 2024, 5 min. – International premiere

Hippopotami
Dir: JJ Lin, CHN/HKG 2025, 13 min. – European Premiere

I Want to Be a House (Nataka Kua Nyumba)
Dir: Oskar Weimar, KEN 2024, 31 min. – World premiere

In Her Time (Iris’ Version)
Dir: Diane Severin Nguyen, USA 2024, 67 min. – World premiere

Measures for a Funeral
Dir: Sofia Bohdanowicz, CAN 2024, 142 min. – German premiere

Aoquic iez in Mexico! Mexico will no longer exist! (¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! ¡Ya México no existirá más!)
Dir: Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco, MEX 2024, 80 min. – German premiere

Sleep #2
Dir: Radu Jude, ROU 2024, 62 min. – German premiere

Tragedy (Tragédia)
Dir: Bernardo Zanotta, NLD/FRA/BRA 2025, 15 min. – International premiere

The Vampires of Poverty (Agarrando Pueblo)
Dir: Luis Ospina, Carlos Mayolo, COL 1978, 28 min.

Vulcanizadora
Dir: Joel Potrykus, USA 2024, 85 min. – German premiere

What We Ask of a Statue Is That It Doesn’t Move (Afto pou zitame apo ena agalma ine na min kinite)
Dir: Daphné Hérétakis, GRC/FRA 2023, 32 min.