After their first year as the director of the Berlinale, and a few days before the festival’s selection announcement on 20 January, Tricia Tuttle gives us a first glimpse of their strategy for this year’s edition (which will take place from 12 to 22 February) and discusses the festival’s different initiatives, such as their new approaches to bringing it closer to the European Film Market and attracting the next generation of cinephiles.

Cineuropa: What are the greatest results you’ve accomplished within your first year as the Berlinale’s director?
Tricia Tuttle: I think it was a great first year for me and the team. Last year, we focused on the atmosphere and infrastructure of the festival. We renewed our relationship with Marlene-Dietrich-Platz and built The Hub, which is a space for connection and networking. We also set up the Bluemax Theatre for the new Perspectives competitive section for first fiction features. The festival enjoyed a much stronger presence, and this has an impact because people become visible to one another, they can build networks and also go a little deeper into the films. We also had great audience results and our highest ever admissions, with over 340,000 festival tickets sold. There was a strong sense of togetherness and community. It’s a difficult world that we’re living in, but we also came together around cinema.

What changes you are looking to make?
We want to bring the market and the public side programme a little closer together and make sure they don’t become separate universes. We want to grow the impact of the festival in order to support the wider industry, so that films which screen in the festival don’t just have great moments in the Berlinale, but so that we also help these films on an ongoing basis. Doing this means making sure the press are able to attend and bringing new members of the press to the festival. Writing about film is so vital to the health of the industry. We also need to help the right buyers to see the right films and to navigate our public programmes so that they can find whatever’s relevant to the work they do – be it on the more commercial end or on the more cultural cinema side. There’s something there for every professional, and we need to help them find it within the festival. These are also a number of small improvements to make, which will have an impact for the filmmakers who screen with us.

How does the Berlinale attract young audiences?
We want to bring the next generation of cinephiles to the festival. Last year, we really focused on how we should reach out to younger audiences through social media. We launched a TikTok account in January last year, which had 35 million views over the festival’s campaign period. This year, we want to turn that virtual community into a more physical community and find ways to get this audience to come and see films. We’re going to launch a six-euro ticket this year for 18 to 25-year-olds and we’ll present a curated selection throughout all sections, whether Forum and Shorts, the Retrospective, Panorama or the Competition, offering this low-cost ticket price for that particular age range. And we’re also continuing with the Generation badge, which allows young audiences aged between 14 and 25 to see any film in the Generation section with that badge. It will also give access to talks and events in the programme.

An exciting new initiative is the film schools day in the European Film Market. We identified a bit of a gap between the work that Berlinale Talents are doing with emerging filmmakers, and the film schools. This new programme will help film schools and the students who come out of those schools to get the best out of the European Film Market and the festival.

Are there any venue changes?
We’re mostly using the same venues as last year. Berlinale Talents is moving to Radialsystem, which is a great cultural space, right on the river. It offers lots of opportunities for Talents to do different things in the building, including public-facing events and talks.

How can the European Film Market and the festival benefit from closer collaboration?
It’s not about collaboration. It’s about working better as the holistic, single organisation that we are. We’re always thinking about small improvements to eliminate friction for press delegates and professional delegates, especially so that buyers can see the films they need to see. Obviously, that’s a priority for the festival. We think of ourselves as one big Berlinale which is here to support the future of cinema culture and the film industry, to help it to sustain itself and to continue to champion brilliant, powerful, cultural, arthouse cinema. Every aspect of the organisation has an important part to play in applying this strategy.

In the past, the Berlinale has had to contend with budget cuts. What’s the current situation?
It’s been very well publicised that we have a long-term budget gap to resolve. Last year, we saw great results thanks to new partners and sponsors joining the festival, with a twenty percent increase in our revenue. We’ve got a balanced budget for this next year, and now we’re working on 2027 and beyond.

What is the Berlinale’s programme policy on productions from streaming platforms? Where do you draw the line?
Over the past five or six years, the Berlinale’s position has been similar to our current one. Our priority is to champion films which are trying to reach audiences in a theatrical market. That doesn’t mean we exclude great filmmakers who are making work for platforms. We’d hope that they get opportunities to show their films to cinema audiences too. But there are no hard and fast rules. None of our regulations say that you can’t have a film in competition that’s made by a streaming platform. We’ve had many strong films over the years that have been produced by streamers and we have great relationships with them, but we really value the theatrical experience.

The Retrospective section brings the 1990s back on the big screen. What is the most remarkable feature of the films from that time?
The new artistic director of the Deutsche Kinemathek, Heleen Gerritsen, who’s curating this section, is really passionate about this. It was a period of real political upheaval where there was an interesting cinematic conversation happening between East and West, and films going back and forth between Europe, particularly Central Europe, and Berlin and other Anglophone cultures too. It will be really exciting to see a programme featuring work ranging from Boyz n the Hood to Ulrike Ottinger’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia and Kutluğ Ataman’s Lola und Bilidikid.

Are there any thematic trends or different formats in the programme?
At every festival in Europe, we’ve seen a real upward trend, over the last few years, in strong, interesting European co-productions with multiple countries involved who don’t necessarily dictate the specific culture of these films. It’s interesting to see these strong creative alliances, especially in a world where production is increasingly decentralised.

What guests you are looking forward to welcoming?
Well, obviously, Wim Wenders as our jury president. He hasn’t been jury president at the Berlinale before, and we’re excited to have him in this role. We’re all really looking forward to welcoming Michelle Yeoh back to the festival and awarding her the Honorary Golden Bear. It’s been a while since she was last here, but she has a lengthy relationship with the festival too. We really value the way she can work across different cultures and formal approaches to cinema; this is one of the things we love about the Berlinale too. And it’s nice to see some new talent emerging. You’ll see more when we announce the full programme, but in the Panorama section it’s great to see Anna Roller delivering a brilliant second feature called Allegro Pastell. The film features some really exciting emerging German talent, such as Johannes Niewöhner and Luna Wedler. It’s really wonderful.