The first films and the selection committee of Berlin Critics’ Week 2026
The first films have been selected for the 12th edition of Berlin Critics’ Week, which will take place from February 9 to February 17, 2026. The film program will begin on Tuesday, February 10, at Hackesche Höfe Kino. It comprises an independent selection of outstanding films from the current festival season.
As in previous editions of the festival, Critics’ Week will close with a direct reference to Berlin’s film culture. Dane Komljen recently studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and continues to have close ties to the city’s cultural scene. His third feature film, Desire Lines, will premiere in Berlin on the final evening of the festival. With calmness, seriousness, and consistency, the director opens up a complex field of sexuality, identity, movement, and community—and, not least, calls the tenets of realism into question. If You Don’t Like It, Look Away: On the same evening, we will show the film debut of Margaux Fournier from Marseille, who engages with similar themes using different methods. In her documentary short film, she portrays a group of older women during an afternoon on a beach in the port city. The astute reasons for Fournier’s decisions around form initially remain hidden behind the lively conversations of the beachgoers—only to then emerge all the more impressively.
Mag Mag is the directorial debut of Japanese comedy superstar Yuriyan Retriever. Having started her career as part of an idol group and achieved nationwide solo success as a stand-up comedian in 2021, the multi-talented artist has more recently branched out into both rap and acting. She recently took on her first leading role, as wrestling icon Kaoru “Dump” Matsumoto in the Netflix series The Queen of Villains. With Mag Mag, she now translates her penchant for loud sounds, the surreal, and witty physical comedy into an unpredictable, feminist homage to the J-horror genre. Alongside Retriever’s directorial debut, we are showing the experimental short film Arguments in Favor of Love by Gabriel Abrantes. As in Mag Mag, emotional seriousness here meets ambiguous comedy. Where Retriever comments on horror film conventions, Abrantes takes both the symbolism of ghosts and the familiar tropes of romantic films to absurd extremes.
As part of this year’s theme, “Argue Against, Argue Again – The Limits and Potentials of Debate Culture,” we are dedicating one of our movie nights to the essay film Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989, the latest work by Swedish documentary filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson (The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975; Concerning Violence). Olsson and his team spent more than five years researching in the archives of his country’s public television station to create this 200-minute historical montage from journalistic reports on the Middle East conflict. With its sober, dialectical form, the film made an important contribution to a complex debate at the 2024 Venice Film Festival and provided an equally precise commentary on his country’s media history.
In her Hamburg College of Fine Arts (HFBK) graduation film Hinterlegte Nummern, Farina Mietchen manages an elegant balancing act between documentary and essayistic styles. Everyday telephone conversations between prison inmates and their friends and partners become the linchpin of a considered and sensitively observed investigation into the nature of different devices and media, in which not every signal is transmitted undisturbed, but feelings always remain unambiguous. Fábio Rogério and Wesley Pereira de Castro also take a very close and sensitive look when they stage an apartment as an entire universe in One Minute Is an Eternity for Those Who Are Suffering. Pereira de Castro, subject as well as co-director, opens up his home to the camera, but also his private life, his inner life, his demons, his fears—until the repressed and invisible has pushed itself to the complete center of the film.
The selection committee for Berlin Critics’ Week 2026
The Berlin Critics’ Week program is curated by a regularly changing international committee, composed predominantly of film critics. The 2026 committee members are Eileen Jones, Hamed Soleimanzadeh, long-standing member Lucía Salas, and Amos Borchert and Dennis Vetter from the Berlin Critics’ Week artistic directors’ collective. We would also like to thank our program coordinator Liuying Cao and our program advisors John Canciani, Joseph Fahim, Abba Makama, Giovanni Marchini Camia, Nanako Tsukidate and Sarnt Utamachote for their valuable input.
Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin magazine and co-host of the Filmsuck podcast. She’s a retired lecturer in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also earned her PhD in Film Studies. Her credits as an independent film screenwriter and producer include Suture, directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, and Conceiving Ada, directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson.
Lucía Salas is an Argentinian film critic, program curator, and filmmaker living in Spain whose work navigates cinema past and present. 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). In addition to her work as editor on the magazine La vida útil, she published 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 20 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, and International Istanbul Film Festival. 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:
Arguments in Favor of Love
D: Gabriel Abrantes, POR 2025, 9 Min.
Desire Lines (Linije želje)
D: Dane Komljen, SRB/BIH/NED/CRO/GER 2025, 107 Min. – German Premiere
Hinterlegte Nummern
D: Farina Mietchen, GER 2025, 20 Min. – World Premiere
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, 200 Min.
Mag Mag (禍禍女)
D: Yuriyan Retriever, JAP 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
Still from Mag Mag (D: Yuriyan Retriever) ©2026 K2 Pictures