Dreams and Nightmares: The 2025 Berlinale

A mid-February night in Berlin. The air was icily cold, as temperatures plummeted below minus 10 degrees. The red carpet sprawled out in front of the Berlinale Palast, a glass and steel structure looming over the cul of Potsdamer Platz’s sac. Under the spotlights, a throng of attendees and lookers-on were amassed in front of its main entrance, rubbing their gloved hands together to keep warm, steam billowing out of their mouths with every breath. The tension was so thick, so the saying goes, that you could cut it with a knife. The 2025 Berlin Film Festival was about to begin.

What, you may ask, could possibly have been the reason for such an agitated inauguration to the cinematic festivities that were to follow? We need only cast our minds back to the previous year’s edition of the Berlinale, which began under a cloud due to festival director Carlo Chatrian’s unceremonious dismissal by culture minister Claudia Roth, but truly exploded at the festival’s acrimonious closing ceremony. The mere presence, on the stage, of the Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking team behind the documentary No Other Land – a film which did nothing but accurately depict the processes of occupation, dispossession and apartheid meted out to Palestinians in the West Bank by the Israeli state – was enough to send Germany’s entire political and media establishment into a deranged frenzy of wild accusations of antisemitism. What has become an all too familiar sight in recent times – the morbid spectacle of white, German right-wingers cynically exploiting the issue of antisemitism in order to baselessly attack artists, intellectuals and activists for their opposition to an illegal occupation that has now turned into an unrestrained genocide – thus repeated itself in morally grotesque fashion a year ago, leading to death threats against directors Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra. Chatrian, who fired off a communiqué after the festival deploring that the “weaponisation” of antisemitism had put filmmakers lives in danger, could hardly have imagined a more invidious way to end his tenure at the festival.¹

In the meantime, the killing machine continued, and German attempts to provide cover for the totalising destruction of the Gaza Strip intensified, culminating in the juridically absurd antisemitism resolution adopted by the Bundestag in November 2024, which specifically namechecked the supposed “antisemitism scandal” at the previous edition of the Berlinale and ominously demanded that “consequences must be drawn.”²  Other institutions in the German capital have experienced what these consequences can entail: censorship, cuts to funding, the withdrawal of venues, cancelled events, police raids, unhinged campaigns of public vilification. It is little wonder, then, that many figures in the cultural sphere, particularly those from the Global South, have witnessed this conduct and decided to “strike Germany” by refusing to participate in any events in the country. Incoming director Tricia Tuttle, an American who previously headed the London Film Festival, was thus thrust into an unenviable position: somehow avoid the ire of a sadistic political class that already had its knives out for the festival, while seeking to reassure filmmakers that they would not be subject to the same attacks they have seen so many of their colleagues come under.

Within these extremely constrained conditions, Tuttle had to walk a high-wire act: she kept her own views on the conflict studiously under wraps (a stark contrast with the response to the Ukraine war, in which everyone associated with the festival rushed to vocally condemn Putin’s belligerence), but in an interview with The Guardian Tuttle was at least open about the fact that many filmmakers she was in contact with were “questioning whether they want to come” to the festival due to the climate of intimidation and reprisals in Germany.³ This was clarified further in a statement the Berlinale subsequently released on “Dialogue & Exchange” in the festival, which defended the freedom of speech of festival attendees, including wearing symbols in support of Palestine such as the Keffiyeh, and rejected the “sweeping categorisation” of the Berlinale as antisemitic in the Bundestag resolution. It even went so far as recognising that any enforcement of the resolution would “interfere with the fundamental rights of free art and speech.”⁴ At the same time, the limits of this strategy in the current context were also apparent: the festival had to concede that the mere phrase “From the River to the Sea” has effectively been made illegal in Berlin. Similarly, on the opening night’s red carpet, Tuttle made a point of posing for the camera with a photo of the actor David Cunio, abducted on October 7, accompanied by the slogan “Bring David Home”. As for the countless creative talents from Palestine murdered by the bombs raining on Gaza, or languishing in Israeli torture chambers? Not a word. Instead, it was left to festival guest Tilda Swinton – honoured this year with the Goldener Ehrenbär – to inveigh against a “state-perpetrated and internationally enabled mass murder.” In Swinton’s vision, the cinema should be “an unlimited realm, innately inclusive, immune to efforts of occupation, colonization, takeover, ownership, or…” she continued, ensuring that the meaning of her statement was lost on no one, “the development of ‘Riviera’ property.”⁵

Yalla Parkour

Not one but two films in the Berlinale focused on the hostages held by Hamas: Tom Shoval, who directed Cunio in the 2013 film Youth (which premiered at that year’s Berlinale) screened Michtav Le’David (A Letter to David) in the Berlinale Special section, while the Forum selected the American filmmaker Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat, neither of which I watched. As for a Palestinian presence in the festival, the competition did feature a film, Ameer Fakher Eldin’s Yunan, which had a production credit from Palestine (along with six other countries), but its story of a suicidal Syrian writer’s exile in Germany had little to do with the country, and mainly takes place on a small, flood-prone island off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. Instead, it was in the Panorama section where a lonely light was shone on life in the Occupied Territories, with Areeb Zuaiter’s Yalla Parkour. Having left Nablus with her family at the age of two months, the director finds a group of teenage boys online who use the rooftops of the Gaza Strip for their parkours sessions, turning the urban environment of Khan Yunis into a massive training ground for their exercises. With one boy in particular, Ahmed Matar, who wields the GoPro camera as he and his friends work on their moves, Zuaiter forms a lasting bond, which continues after he migrates to Sweden. Although the film generally avoids grand political statements, Yalla Parkour cannot help but have a deeply melancholic quality: unbeknownst to the participants at the time of filming, the world that the parkours team lovingly captured on video has since been turned into a scene of apocalyptic desolation, and a title card during the closing credits lists the on- and off-camera collaborators who have been killed by the Israeli invasion since filming took place. During an audience Q&A after the film’s inaugural screening, Matar and Zuaiter dared to label Israel’s killing spree a genocide, and compared conditions in Gaza to that of a concentration camp. Likewise, Jun Li, the Chinese director of Queerpanorama took to the stage and read out a letter from Erfan Shekarriz, in which the Iranian actor, boycotting the festival, said: “I urge you, the German people, to continue fighting for freedom of speech when talking about Palestine in a clearly authoritarian, fascist and scary political climate,” and even dared to utter the innocuous yet verboten call for freedom for all Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. For his troubles, Shekarriz’s message was greeted with heckles from German audience members, and it was shocking-not-surprising that a criminal investigation into his remarks was subsequently launched by the Berlin police.⁶

Predictably, the gaggle of German pundits from outlets like Der Tagesspiegel, Die Welt and B.Z. sought to turn these statements into a scandal – in fact, it was clear that they were champing at the bit for a repeat of last year’s circus, clearly salivating at another chance to embark on a bloodthirsty witch hunt against anyone expressing even the remotest bit of sympathy for the Palestinian people at their most desperate hour. But in truth, none of these moments really landed in the same way, and this year’s closing ceremony seemed almost engineered to conclude the festival on an anticlimactic note, without the tumult of 2024. Only reliable muckraker Radu Jude, with an eye on the German federal election taking place the next day, took an incendiary path by expressing his hope that the following year’s festival would not be opened by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), while also wishing that the International Court of Justice in The Hauge would “do its job against all these murdering bastards.”⁷ 

Dreams (Sex Love)

 It was therefore perfectly appropriate that the Golden Bear went to the comparatively serene Norwegian film Drømmer (Dreams (Sex Love)) by Dag Johan Haugerud. Indeed, it was striking just how many films in the festival line-up had the word “dream” in their title: a festival-goer idly flicking through the catalogue would also come across Dreams by Michel Franco, Dreamers by Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor and Dreams in Nightmares by Shatara Michelle Ford. It was as if, confronted with the nightmare of our present political reality, the horrific images of death and destruction that emerge unbidden on our social media feeds, the Berlinale had consciously opted for the dream-world of escapism and fantasy. In the case of the Golden Bear winner, the second part of a trilogy by Haugerud on themes of human sexuality (but the third to be released), this consisted of the amorous reveries coursing through the mind of a 17-year-old Oslo schoolgirl, Johanne (Ella Øverbye), about her art teacher, a Black woman called, confusingly enough, Johanna (Selome Emnetu). In an attempt to explain her feelings to her grandmother – and herself – Johanne commits the liaison to writing, crafting in a 95-page work of autofiction. As it happens, her grandmother is herself a successful author, and pushes for this piece of literature to be published as a novella. Indeed, the text read out by Øverbye in voiceover on the film’s soundtrack is a genuine literary achievement, possessing both emotional candour and stylistic poise. At the same time, the viewer is subtly pushed in different directions by the narrative unpeeling of Johanne’s relations with her teacher: how much of this is simply in her head? Is this a one-way fixation, or is the intimacy between them being encouraged by Johanna, who allows the student to regularly visit her house for one-on-one knitting sessions? While the film explores clashes between the conceptions of sexuality held by different generations of feminists, its most remarkable scene is the late confrontation Johanne’s mother has with her schoolteacher, in order to get the latter’s permission to publish the girl’s manuscript: in a masterful inversion of culpability, Johanna ends up accusing her pupil of being the manipulative party. Dreams takes a potentially incendiary topic – a student-teacher affair – and gives it a tender, almost tranquilising treatment, with the artistic sublimation of the events having a profoundly therapeutic effect for all parties involved, including the audience. That it received the Golden Bear thus almost seemed pre-programmed.

Lurker

Infatuations of various kinds – particularly those with celebrities – marked numerous films at the festival. Both Lucio Castro’s After This Death and Alex Russell’s Lurker had obsessive relationships with music stars at their core. Mia Maestro’s Isabel seems to have it all: a successful career, a stable marriage with an impending child, and a luxurious house in upstate New York, which seems to be permanently bathed in autumnal hues. But the house itself, almost oppressively quiet and unlived-in, betokens the emptiness in Isabel’s life, which is exploded by an encounter with Lee Pace’s mysterious rocker Elliott: her befuddlement at the rapturous response the musician’s psychedelic musings instil in the audience at his concerts doesn’t prevent Isabel from embarking on a passionate affair with the musician, who proudly boasts to her of his prowess at cunnilingus. When Elliott disappears, however, his legion of obsessive fans start reading cryptic messages into his music to explain his whereabouts, and eventually focus their investigations on an increasingly terrified Isabel. The obsession at the centre of Lurker is less obviously romantic in nature, but when a young, impressionable sales assistant at a Los Angeles clothing store infiltrates the entourage of a superstar British rapper on the pretext of becoming a videographer for his concert tour, his idolisation quickly assumes a destructively unhealthy guise. It is unclear whether the burgeoning cathexis felt by Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) is with the softly spoken Oliver (Archie Madekwe) himself, or simply with the lures of fame (his association with Oliver leads to Matthew garnering his own social media following), but his single-minded determination to remain in Oliver’s orbit at all costs gives the film a deeply unsettling quality. 

The insanity that the world of celebrity can induce is also probed in Magic Farm, a film by the multimedia artist Amalia Ulman that lampoons the manufacturing of viral social media trends, with its acidic tale of a chronically oblivious Chloë Sevigny-led film crew who attempt to cover an up-and-coming musician but end up travelling to the wrong country. The most successful mining of this theme, however, came in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s La tour de glace (The Ice Tower). In provincial, 1970s France, a teenaged runaway from the town’s orphanage finds refuge in a nearby film studio engaged in an adaptation of the fairy tale The Snow Queen. It’s hard to tell what Jeanne finds more captivating: the magic behind the movie-making process in its pre-CGI era, or the cruel-yet-charismatic actress Cristina van der Berg (played with suitable pomp by Marion Cotillard), who incarnates the role of the Snow Queen both on-screen and off, but as the young girl is brought into the production as an extra, the two experience a strange, ultimately ruinous bond. The real draw of Hadžihalilović’s film, however, is its oneiric style, which together with its languid pacing can have a mesmerising effect on the viewer. With every scene lathered in a gauzy haze and accompanied by a woozy score, the visuals of La tour de glace effectively evoke the same ‘70s-era fairy tale films whose production the film pays homage to. 

What Does that Nature Say to You

Elsewhere, the highlights of the Berlinale came from familiar faces on the festival circuit. Two remarkably prolific filmmakers who have proven to be the most distinctive auteurist voices to have emerged from their respective countries’ new waves made bows in the competition with comic works of incisive social observation. Hong Sang-soo premiered a new film at the Berlinale for the 97th year in a row with Geu jayeoni nege mworago hani (What Does that Nature Say to You). All the recognisable elements of Hong’s aesthetic are there: the romantic fumblings of an immature male lead, the long, mazy dialogue scenes, an emotional climax featuring liberal amounts of alcohol, the lo-fi, occasionally blurred video work (which here brings out the greens of the surrounding shrubbery with alienating luridness), and, of course, a randomly-inserted yet consequential Zoom effect. Here the young poet Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk) feels intimidated when he arrives at the country house of his new girlfriend’s parents to meet them for the first time, and his humiliation is compounded by the father’s jibes at the age of his car. It transpires, however, that Donghwa also comes from a distinctly well-heeled background. Why he insists on the impoverished life of a struggling artist – the verse he writes turns out to be lyrically turgid – remains enigmatic, even as a soju-fuelled dinner results in a cathartic airing of grievances. Rhythmically measured but featuring a detailed portraiture of its main characters, What Does that Nature Say to You is, in the context of Hong’s recent work, a relatively accessible work, and perhaps the closest he gets to a film for the whole family. 

Jude’s Kontinental ’25 was also a step into more conventional terrain when compared with his more recent output, but the moral punch it delivers is no less effective. In the opening sequences, we are introduced to a homeless man who roams the streets of Cluj-Napoca, a town in northern Romania with a large Hungarian-speaking population, begging for change and scrounging for recyclable drink bottles, before he retires to the basement boiler room he has been squatting in. But a squad from the municipality is there to evict the unwanted interloper. Asking for a few minutes of privacy to pack his things, the man instead hangs himself from the room’s radiator. After this narrative feint, we follow the traumatising effects this scene has on the bailiff Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), a woman in her forties who, despite possessing the trappings of a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, is thrown into an existential crisis akin to that suffered by Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952, and a film that Jude makes overt allusions to, not least in the title). Despite her outpourings of anguish, to friends, relatives, even a local priest, there seems to be no respite for Orsolya – even a tryst with a frisky former student of hers in the town’s main park is of little lasting succour. Like Hong, Jude adopts low-rent video technology to visually make his point, here potently capturing the vacuously garish reality of post-socialist Cluj by means of shooting the film on an iPhone camera. 

Richard Linklater’s œuvre has often been marked by the same kind of scruffy low-budget filmmaking as Hong and Jude, but with Blue Moon he opts for a far more refined aesthetic. A chamber piece taking place entirely in an off-stage bar on the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway smash Oklahoma!, Blue Moon centres on Rodgers’ former partner Lorenz Hart, who was the driving force behind their earlier collaborations before his alcoholism and depression drove them apart. Ethan Hawke yuks it up as the camp, whiskey-and-cigar-toting Broadway showman, prone to loquacious, self-pitying monologues to the assembly of bar flies surrounding him, but at the core of the film is a deep pain: talent and success are only fleeting bedfellows, and while Hart self-destructively maintains his creative purity, it is the hard-nosed commercialism of Rodgers that is a more reliable formula for lasting fame in the world of musical theatre. Buried under all this, of course, is Hart’s struggles with his sexuality in a virulently homophobic environment, which can’t even be hidden by his pining entreaties to Margaret Qualley’s dazzling college co-ed. A mooted re-staging of the Rodgers-Hart hit A Connecticut Yankee with new material is obviously fated never to materialise, and aficionados of Broadway history will know that Hart drank himself to death barely six months after the evening Blue Moon depicts, a fact that gives the whole film a lugubrious pallor.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

If Linklater’s early slacker-themed films were a spiritual ancestor of 21st century mumblecore, Mary Bronstein once encapsulated the youthfulness of the movement with her 2008 directorial debut Yeast, where she also acted alongside Greta Gerwig and the Safdie brothers. For various reasons, a follow-up to this early effort did not materialise until now – a full seventeen years later, it shocks me to realise. The flaky, directionless twentysomethings of the late 2000s have now become, like the protagonist of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, geriatric millennials well into their forties. Despite saddling herself with a mortgage, a child and a career as a psychotherapist, Linda (played by Rose Byrne in the stand-out performance of the festival) is still flaky and directionless, and when she has to seek refuge in a seedy motel after the ceiling of her apartment mysteriously caves in, it is hard for the viewer not to read this as a metaphor for the state of her life, which quickly spirals out of control for both mundane and apparently supernatural reasons. With the camera hewing closely to Linda, the rest of her family is cast out of the frame: until late in the film, her husband is nothing but a voice yelling through the ether of long-distance phone calls, while her autistic daughter is assiduously confined to off-screen space, present only as a nagging, acousmatic squeal ringing constantly in Linda’s ears. While the film thrives as a character study given flesh by the twitching nerviness of Byrne’s acting, it is enlivened by the cavalcade of cameos that Bronstein was able to finagle onto the set, including rapper A$AP Rocky, erstwhile heartthrob Christian Slater and, most amusingly, late night doyen Conan O’Brien in a surprisingly subdued role as Linda’s beleaguered office mate and therapist.

For formal invigoration at the Berlinale, however, the title had to go to the Belgium-based duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s starburst of a film Reflet dans un diamant mort (Reflection in a Dead Diamond), a pastiche of ‘60s spy thrillers, ‘70s Italian giallo films and pulpy comic book capers. The dialogue is sparse, the acting hammy, and the plot is almost indecipherable – all deliberate effects, of course. The story has something to do with a diamond heist amidst the faded glitz of the French Riviera, but I couldn’t really tell you any more about it. And yet from start to finish the film is an unrelenting assault on the senses, with blood and other fluids liberally oozing from the screen and a soundtrack that is designed to trigger a gut-level response from the viewer – I can’t have been the only one who needed to take an urgent toilet break during the screening (too much information, dear reader?).

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

Otherwise, similar levels of audiovisual invention at the Berlinale were largely found outside of the competition. Tuttle marked her new tutelage of the festival by junking the Encounters section (an initiative of Chatrian’s) and replacing it with Perspectives, a competition for first-time features. While Ernesto Martinez Bucio’s El diablo fuma (y guarda las cabezas de los cerillos quemados en la misma caja) (The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box)) garnered the jury prize, the most exciting work on view in this section came from Indian-American artist Khalil Joseph, who uses W.E.B Du Bois’ Encyclopedia Africana and a fictitious cable news network as premises for a symphonic exploration of Black liberation struggles on both sides of the Atlantic, as archival footage is spliced into fictional vignettes depicting an elderly Du Bois’ visit to Ghana and an Afro-Futurist space mission. As vast in its scope as Du Bois’ original encyclopaedia project was, the formal structure of Joseph’s film, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, borrows as much from the video-essays of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard as it does from the Detroit house music that pulsates on its soundtrack.

Other sidebars of the Berlinale – such as Panorama and the Forum – were notably populated by late works from grand masters of the form, which could be seen in a retrospective light as career swansongs. A luminary of the so-called “black wave” in Yugoslavian cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s whose career was stymied by censorship on both sides of the Iron Curtain, now-octogenarian Želimir Žilnik came to Berlin with a far gentler work possessing distinct autobiographical overtones, Restitucija, ili, San i java stare garde (Eighty Plus). Returning to Serbia after decades in his adopted Germany in order to regain ownership of his family’s ramshackle country estate, aging jazz musician Stevan refamilarises himself with the land, its people, and multiple generations of his own relatives, bathing in memories of the past while wading through the bureaucratic minutiae of the property transfer. Like Žilnik, a former Teddy Award winner, Rosa von Praunheim has been a consistent presence in German cinema for nearly 60 years due to his pioneering affirmation of gay life in the Bundesrepublik, from the taboo-busting of the 1970s, to the more mournful era of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. With Satanische Sau (The Satanic Sow) he tackles a more enduring social invisibility, the sexual desires of the elderly, with Austrian actor Armin Dallapiccola playing a fictionalised version of the director recounting his history of erotic encounters in monologues to the camera that are sprinkled with archival footage of von Praunheim’s own media interventions, giving us a taste of the untold hours he spent rebutting the homophobic remarks of boorish talk show hosts. James Benning’s evocations of the past in little boy, billed as a companion piece to his 1984 work American Dreams (lost and found), consist of alternating audio extracts of hit pop songs from the post-war era and historical political speeches, stretching from Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” to Helen Caldicott’s rambling denunciation of the War on Terror in the mid-2000s. The image track, meanwhile, shows a pair of adult hands patiently assembling and painting model train sets. More overtly political in content than any other entry in Benning’s voluminous œuvre, the connections between all these elements are loose enough that the viewer is still, in the end, more taken with the sensorial effect of these individual episodes than with any putative message we might try to divine from the whole.

Fwends

Alongside Žilnik and Benning, the Forum had a strong slate of films by emerging filmmakers this year. Bit by bit, section head Barbara Wurm has managed to instil her vision of the cinema into the Forum, even with the occasional curatorial misstep, such as this year’s programming of the AI-generated film What’s Next? from Cao Yiwen. That the cinema’s magic comes from its encounter with reality, rather than the regurgitated visual emissions of large language models, was shown with disarming simplicity in the charmingly modest film Fwends by the Australian newcomer Sophie Somerville, a model of micro-budget cinema. If its rhotacised title and the cupcake-shop aesthetics of its key art might be off-putting, the film itself is a tender look at two women in their 20s who find themselves at an existential crossroads. A young Sydney-based lawyer dealing with sexual harassment in her office, Em (Emmanuelle Mattana) spontaneously visits the markedly less career-oriented Jessie (Melissa Gan) for a weekend getaway in Melbourne. The two meander through the streets of the inner city as they grapple with what’s left of their friendship as their lives steadily drag them apart from each other, in scenes that will have former residents of the Victorian capital (me, as it happens) longingly yearn for the place.

At the opposite end of the economic spectrum from the parsimoniously produced Fwends, the Berlinale also featured the big-budget braggadocio of films such as Das Licht (The Light, Tom Tykwer), Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-ho) and A Complete Unknown (James Mangold). All three were screened in the Berlinale Special section, but their presence felt tokenistic given that they were already assured of receiving wide releases within weeks of the festival wrapping up. It was evidently red carpet pull – an element the Berlinale has struggled with in recent years – that was a decisive factor in their inclusion in the program, with drop-ins by super hunks Robert Pattinson and Timothée Chalamet guaranteed to garner column inches in the press and chatter on social media timelines. Five years after Parasite won an unprecedented Best Picture Oscar, Bong Joon-ho made a return to the screen with Mickey 17, but he did so under less than triumphant circumstances. The bloated, $100 million+ budget and protracted production history have yielded a lumpy end-result, which is replete with droll touches but not quite camp enough to truly subvert the sci-fi genre à la The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997) or Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997). Bong’s preoccupation with exclusionary class systems, already evident in Snowpiercer (2013) and Parasite, here re-emerges with the category of “expendables”: social malcontents like Pattinson’s Mickey, who sign a deal to join a space mission to the colonised ice planet of Niflheim, where they are given dangerous duties and cloned whenever deadly misadventure befalls them. A spanner is thrown in the works, however, when the 17th Mickey is mistakenly assumed dead, an 18th is 3D-printed, and the two must coexist without alerting authorities who are on strict instruction to eliminate “multiples”. The political satire of Mickey 17 is blunt, particularly with Mark Ruffalo’s turn as the despotic billionaire Kenneth Marshall, whose role puts the lie to Bong’s claims that the film was not inspired by any real-life political figures. Its commentary on the rapacity of Western colonialism comes into sharper focus, however, when it is revealed that the native inhabitants of Niflheim, derisively dubbed “creepers”, are highly intelligent beings who can communicate through telepathy, and are in fact shown to be far more humane than their barbarous conquistadors, even as they hatch plans for a violent mass uprising to stop the dispossession of their planet. The film ends on an improbably utopian note, but strangely enough, any parallels with present-day resistance movements against supremacist settler-colonial projects escaped the German press almost entirely.

Mickey 17

A Complete Unknown, meanwhile, was yet another instalment in the blandest micro-genre that the cinema presently has to offer: the musical biopic. The recipe for these films is now crushingly formulaic: take a beloved musician, acquire the rights to their back catalogue, and then craft a storyline that allows you to smother the film with as many of their hits as possible, so the audience can contentedly toe-tap at the familiarity of it all. So it is with this tale of Bob Dylan’s early years on the folk scene, which follows on from similar vehicles charting the lives of Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Elvis Presley, et al. It is noticeable that it’s always boomer acts that are the focus of these films, and even with the involvement of the dreamy Chalamet and his pitch-perfect imitation of Dylan, the target audience for James Mangold’s film skews distinctly old. Are the studios not inclined to tempt the Gen Z demographic into movie-theatres with Bitch, I’m a Cow: The Doja Cat Story? Predictably plodding through its first two-and-half acts, A Complete Unknown provides an unexpected jolt when it crescendos with Dylan’s electric turn at the 1965 Newport folk festival. Between the acoustic purists and those open to a new direction for folk music, all hell breaks loose, in riotous scenes reminiscent of the Hernani brawls in 19th century Parisian theatres. From the perspective of art in the jaded 21st century, where everything is permitted but nothing is of any real consequence, it is striking to witness a moment in history when form mattered, and people were willing to come to blows over their duelling definitions of an art form. As others have pointed out, however, while Mangold includes the seminal influence that Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had on Dylan’s early development, he completely skirts over their communist affiliations, and presents a largely de-politicised vision of American folk music palatable to the liberal sensibilities of the presumed audience.⁸ But if passions were so aroused in the electric vs acoustic dispute, then it is because art – all art – is political at its core. Form and content are inseparable: debates on style are a manifestation of political antagonisms, and vice versa. As much as the German authorities and their lickspittles in the cultural world seek to quash all expressions of dissent against the country’s complicity in genocide, the cinema will only live if it confronts the major injustices of our time. Perhaps the Berlinale should take note.

Berlinale
13 – 23 February 2025
https://www.berlinale.de

Endnotes