The first films and the selection committee for Berlin Critics’ Week 2025
How stagnation leads to development; how a parable reveals inequality; how images arise out of pamphlets; and how class relations might be portrayed and overcome. The first films have been selected for the 11th Berlin Critics’ Week, which will take place from February 12 to February 20. The film program will begin on Thursday, February 13, at Hackesche Höfe Kino. It will present an independent selection of outstanding films from the current festival season.
Measures for a Funeral by Sofia Bohdanowicz takes as its starting point the stagnation of a young academic by the name of Audrey Benac. Shaken by the looming death of her mother, Audrey delves into the older woman’s life story, including her unsuccessful career as a violinist. She also researches, almost obsessively, about the life and work of Kathleen Parlow, a Canadian violinist who was known as the “Lady with the Golden Bow” at the dawn of the 20th century. In her commanding, strong-willed film, Bohdanowicz interweaves her own biography with the perspectives of four women – with the life of Kathleen Parlow; with the violinist María Dueñas, who takes on a special presence in the film as an actress; with the fictional character Audrey Benac; and with the nuanced acting of her long-standing collaborator Deragh Campbell, who is central to the film – as lead actor and co-author. Campbell is playing Audrey Benac for Bohdanowicz for the fifth time, now, and has also worked with her as a co-director. This film tells of standstill, and yet it possesses an evolutionary energy – the evolution of a director, of a collaboration, of a style.
On the opening night of this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week, Haka Elkoussy explores the political potential of poetic cinema in her second feature film, East of Noon. Her film tells the story of the musician Abdo, who together with his partner Nunna dreams of a new life beyond their shared home city, where both are brutally oppressed and exploited by their environment. East of Noon functions as a satirical parable, with Elkoussy formulating an unambiguous critique of prevailing gender and power relations, both inside and outside Egyptian society. Elkoussy has long been interested in how her home country’s political present might be depicted: in 2013, she published a photo book on urban life after the Egyptian revolution. Now, in East of Noon, she uses black-and-white analogue photographs to invoke elements of film history like Fellini and Godard and to connect these with the consciousness of today. Elkoussy has the dreamlike meet with concrete violence, ultimately revealing only one way out – an outbreak, an upheaval, a revolution.
An evening dedicated to the limits and possibilities of cinematic pamphlets begins with the new short film by Daphné Hérétakis. In What We Ask of a Statue Is That It Doesn’t Move, she summons a common human “we” in relation to bodies made of stone, great words in poetry, and Greek history’s burden. Instead of becoming paralysed by the tragedies of the present – the desolate economic situation and fatiguing of revolutionary energies in her homeland – Hérétakis uses her windy, unpredictable film to explore possibilities for visual resistance against the boundaries of genre. Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco also opts for a cinema of restlessness. On the same evening, she will be proclaiming the end of her homeland in Mexico will no longer exist!, a film that draws inspiration from avant-garde and experimental film as well as the punk movement and performance art. Beginning with the instrumentalization of Indigenous history for Mexican national myth, Blanco assembles sensual and combative bodies to intertwine questions of identity, post-colonial relations, and feminist struggles while the film itself becomes an energetic stream of consciousness.
This year’s Berlin Critics’ Week presents the thematic focus “Back to the Class Issue – Film Culture and Social Inequality.” With our guests, we take a relation social debate over class politics, which has gained renewed strength in recent years. A conference on February 12 at the Akademie der Künste will be followed by a thematic film program on February 14, where we will discuss the representation of class relations through the medium of cinema with the directors of some of the films. Four works will be shown. In the first, Emergency Exit, Friedl vom Gröller interweaves the portrait of a working-class woman – plus analogue city shots – with lines from the ballad “Pirate Jenny” from The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. In Compassion and Inconvenience, Vika Kirchenbauer sharply demarcates filmic and social space by having texts from the time of history’s first art exhibitions read aloud in a gallery setting: its focus is on the question of who should originally have had access to works of art, and at what price. The incisive Colombian mockumentary The Vampires of Poverty by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo was released in 1978 and is still considered to be one of the most historically important cinematic commentaries on how poverty is depicted in film; its contrast with many current works demonstrates that cinema is not merely evolving in its eloquence. Finally, in Casablanca, Adriano Valerio addresses the tension that exists between the cinematic identification of class relations and the quest to overcome these through the medium of art.
The selection committee for Berlin Critics’ Week 2025
The film selection for Berlin Critics’ Week is made by a regularly changing international commission, which is predominantly comprised of film critics. The selection for 2025’s festival was curated by Călin Boto and Hamed Soleimanzadeh, our long-standing commission member Lucía Salas, and Petra Palmer and Dennis Vetter from the from the artistic directors’ collective of Berlin Critics’ Week. We would also like to thank our program coordinator Liuying Cao and our advisors Dunja Bialas, Abba Makama, Pedro Segura and Nanako Tsukidate for their input.
Călin Boto is a film curator, programmer, and writer based in Bucharest, working as an associate curator for Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF). Trained as a film critic, he writes for publications including Filmexplorer (Switzerland) and Films in Frame (Romania). He is a member of FIPRESCI and an alumnus of film criticism and history workshops organized by festivals in Sarajevo, Warsaw, Locano, and Pordenone. He has curated film series at the Romanian Cinematheqe and festival retrospectives on experimental film, queer cinema, and silent film, amongst other topics. In 2023, he participated in RAW, a workshop organized by Short Waves (Poznań) for emerging film programmers. In 2024, he curated the first Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour in Bucharest.
Lucía Salas is an Argentinian film critic, program curator, and filmmaker who lives in Spain. Her work navigates cinema past and present. She is one of the editors of the magazine La vida útil. She studied Image and Sound Design at the University of Buenos Aires and Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts; she is currently a PhD student in the Communications program at the CINEMA department of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. As part of the filmmaking collective LaSiberia Cine, she made the films Implantación (2016) and Los exploradores (2016). She has pubished the books Una luz revelada: El cine experimental argentino by experimental filmmaker and writer Pablo Marín (La vida útil, 2022) and Se acercan otros tiempos: El cine de Peter Nestler, together with Ricardo Matos Cabo.
Hamed Soleimanzadeh is a film critic, filmmaker, and lecturer at the University of Göttingen. He holds a PhD in Art Research (Film Studies) from the Nazar Research Center in Tehran and a PhD in Film and Philosophy from the Universität der Künste in Berlin. He has been a jury member at over twenty prestigious international film festivals and events including the Golden Globe Awards, Cannes Film Festival, the Berlinale, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Göteborg Film Festival, International Istanbul Film Festival, and more. He is also the founder and director of the Abbas Kiarostami International Short Film Festival. Soleimanzadeh has directed seven short films and published hundreds of articles and several books on cinema, theater, philosophy, and culture. He is a member of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI).
The first films at a glance
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. – German premiere
Measures for a Funeral
Dir: Sofia Bohdanowicz, CAN 2024, 142 min. – European premiere
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
The Vampires of Poverty (Agarrando Pueblo)
Dir: Luis Ospina, Carlos Mayolo, COL 1978, 28 min.
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, GRE/FRA 2023, 32 min.
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Advance sales for the opening conference at www.adk.de
Press contact: Elisabeth Mohr, presse@wochederkritik.de
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Berlin Critics’ Week is an event organized by the German Film Critics Association and funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the Rudolf Augstein Foundation. The opening conference will be held in cooperation with the Film and Media Art section of the Akademie der Künste. This year’s thematic focus was developed in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Director Hala Elkoussy’s trip to the festival is made possible by the support of the Goethe-Institut Cairo.