When Will It Be Again Like It Never Was Before is a deeply moving and simultaneously incredibly funny film about growing up under rather unusual circumstances. Josse, the youngest son of the director of one of Germany’s largest psychiatric hospitals, spends his childhood and adolescence on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital, where their family home is located. Josse considers his father’s patients as family. They are played by non-professional neurodivergent actors, and are challenging normativity. This coming-of-age film is a celebration of life in all its absurdity and fleetingness. It is based on the autobiographical best-seller written by award winning Joachim Meyerhoff, German actor, director and author.
Katharina Pethke’s debut feature length documentary Reproduction is a personal work, as it looks at three generations of women in her family. Katharina Pethke is herself an artist. She becomes professor at Hamburg’s University of Fine Arts, where both her mother and grandmother studied. Have their ambitions as artists been suffocated by motherhood? Can art and motherhood coexist? This film poses questions about feminism, career and motherhood.
Elaha iis a young German-Kurdish woman. She is only weeks away from marrying a deeply conservative Kurdish man and she is trying to balance cultural identity and female sexuality. She finds herself at the crossroads between her unconditional love for her family and her desire for an independent life. Director Milena Aboyan refuses to provide easy answers as we observe Elaha exploring her options. Both Bayan Layla, who plays Elaha, and Milena Aboyan, who directed the film, have won awards for Elaha.
From Hilde with Love is the latest film by awarded director Andreas Dresen and his fifth Berlinale Competition entry. This moving drama is based on the lives of real members of the anti-Nazi group Red Orchestra, Hilde and Hans Coppi. While the film is set almost 80 years ago, the themes it explores remain urgent and relevant. Dresen’s award-winning works were screened at previous Berlinale Selection editions, in 2023 it was the film Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush and 2019 it was Gundermann. Our Sommerkino in 2022 was dedicated to his work as film director, where we screened a selection of his films from the last twenty years.
In The Empty Grave Anges Lisa Wegner and Cece Mlay follow Tanzanian families looking to retrieve the remains of their elders, who were killed by German colonisers, from western archives, where they are kept. Countries returning artefacts that were forcefully taken from their former colonies is not as rare as it may have been in the past. The documentary aims to highlight the work done by the living relatives of those whose remains were stolen and taken to Germany, in contrast to scholars and museum archivists, who tend to be more visible due to their origin and available funds. This is a film “balancing between historical trauma and historical responsibility” as stated by its directors.
Berlinale Selection 2025 ends with a film about the taboo subject of death, Ivo, by promising director Eva Trobisch. Ivo is a palliative carer, a physically and emotionally draining occupation. Death is a normal part of Ivo’s job. She cares for Solveigh, with whom she was friends before she became her palliative carer, complicating the dynamics between them. A thorny love triangle develops between Solveigh, her partner Franz, and Ivo. In this disarmingly honest film, Trobisch combines actors and real professionals, and explores the last stage of life without claiming to have any answers. Eva Trobisch was named one of Variety’s “Directors to Watch” in 2024 and won the Heiner Carow Prize at the Berlinale 2024, a prize awarded by DEFA for best emerging German director.
While cinephiles from all over the world will be gathering in wintery Berlin for the Berlinale 2025, in Limassol and Nicosia we will be enjoying films from 2023 and 2024 selected by the Goethe-Institut Cyprus for its Berlinale Selection 2025 programme.
