It’s another year around the sun for the Berlinale, just as the German capital has recorded its coldest January in over 15 years, so wrap up warm. For this 76th festival (12-22 February), the Perspectives sidebar, for first-time fiction features, marks a hard-earned second edition. The Teddy Award will celebrate a monumental 40th anniversary with a round of retrospective queer programming, later bestowing an honorary award upon Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire [+lee también:
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entrevista: Céline Sciamma
ficha de la película] and the 2011 Berlinale’s Tomboy [+lee también:
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entrevista: Céline Sciamma
ficha de la película]). However, change is also afoot: both Berlinale Talents and the Deutsche Kinemathek have new homes, and Kino International is about to sparkle again after 18 months of renovation, with an open house on the very last day of the Berlinale. Artificial intelligence has also hit – nay, been catapulted into – the festival with the intriguing Forum Special short-film programme “AI Realisms”.

Nearly one year has passed since Germany’s federal elections coincided with the last day of the 2025 Berlinale, which saw the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) taking over 20% of the national vote. In Berlin, tightened migration policy has come in parallel with increased attacks on asylum seekers, and protests in solidarity with Palestine continue in full swing, bringing tens of thousands out onto the streets. Films this year appear to be pivoting towards more ruminative ways of grappling with conflict and systemic struggle, rather than using conventional documentation and storytelling.

Per Cineuropa’s annual lead-up to the festival, we bring to you ten exciting films at the 2026 Berlinale. Grab a beer (or a currywurst), mind your step at the dizzyingly steep Stage Bluemax and catch you at Potsdamer Platz.

Rosebush Pruning [+lee también:
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(Competition)

It’s seemingly high time for auteur film remakes, with the recent news of Lisandro Alonso’s Taste of Cherry reimagining with Wagner Moura. And so, Karim Aïnouz and screenwriter Efthymis Filippou (famed for his Yorgos Lanthimos collaborations) will give Marco Bellocchio’s scorching 1965 debut, Fists in the Pocket, a glossy, present-day update, employing a high-wattage cast in Callum Turner (playing the brooding Lou Castel role), Elle Fanning, Tracy Letts and Riley Keough. Hopefully, Aïnouz can recapture the promise of The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão [+lee también:
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entrevista: Karim Aïnouz
ficha de la película], after Firebrand [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] flattered to deceive in the recent Cannes competition limelight.
Premieres 19:00, Saturday 14 February at the Berlinale Palast

Yellow Letters [+lee también:
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(Competition)

The German-Turkish filmmaker’s The Teachers’ Lounge [+lee también:
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entrevista: İlker Çatak
entrevista: Leonie Benesch
ficha de la película] was a Berlinale breakout three years ago, eventually reaching a wide global audience thanks to its suspenseful look at pressurised modern schooling. Yellow Letters shows Çatak expanding his filmmaking into wider social portraiture, following an artist couple in Ankara, whose life together suddenly crumbles after they’re targeted by state censorship. Apt for its setting in the contemporary Turkish theatre and acting professions, one of the director’s ambitious gambits is to have Berlin “playing” Ankara and have Hamburg as Istanbul, offering a provocative comment on free speech in Germany as well.
Premieres 21:30, Friday 13 February at the Berlinale Palast

Truly Naked - Muriel d’Ansembourg (Netherlands/Belgium/France)

(Perspectives)

Having previously made several short films with erotic themes, tackling different compositions of sexual encounters and experiences, the writer-director now makes her feature debut in the Perspectives section under the same topical umbrella. Her UK-set first outing follows a shy teenage boy who knows the world of the pornography business through his father. But as the film’s title suggests, we meet him as he begins to explore intimacy and sexuality beyond the bounds of what he sees through the camera lens: when he is confronted by a girl who challenges his perspectives. We expect d’Ansembourg to never shy away from her characters getting truly naked on screen, both emotionally and physically, and hope she will provide a refreshed take on emotional connection in the world of instant digital gratification.
Premieres 21:30, Monday 16 February at Bluemax Theater

Josephine - Beth de Araújo (USA)

(Competition)

A young girl is the only person to witness a violent sexual assault in a San Francisco park – how will she be affected? At Sundance, Josephine picked up the coveted Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in the US Dramatic Competition, the latter a prize that, in recent years, has often gone to a more light-hearted film – perhaps speaking to the film’s urgency. “It is not the time to empathise or to understand them; it is the time to stop them,” said the director about the systemic violence of chauvinistic men in her impassioned awards speech. The sophomore feature stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan in their parental turns, and the former’s patriarchal presence looms subtly in a way that makes the film eerily more complex. What emerges is a powerful interpersonal drama that, at times, bends into psychological horror before springing back. An unforgettably distressing electronic score by composer Miles Ross, also the director’s fiancé, constantly sounds emotional alarm bells throughout the movie.
Premieres 18:15, Friday 20 February at the Berlinale Palast.

Dao - Alain Gomis (France/Senegal/Guinea-Bissau)

(Competition)

The third feature by Franco-Senegalese director Alain Gomis to vie for the Golden Bear, Dao will surely be one of the competition’s most experimental offerings, a type of filmmaking given a large platform at the Berlinale. Patiently intercutting between a Parisian wedding and an earlier commemoration ceremony in Guinea-Bissau, Gomis depicts each in poetic and anthropological detail; lead character Gloria (non-professional actress Katy Correa) looks on with ambivalence at her daughter’s nuptials in the former and at the legacy of her late father (who was the first of his family’s generation to emigrate) in the latter.
Premieres 14:45, Saturday 14 February at the Berlinale Palast

Queen at Sea - Lance Hammer (UK/USA)

(Competition)

Returning to the Berlinale’s competition almost 20 years after his debut, Ballast, LA-based director Lance Hammer has had one of modern film’s more idiosyncratic careers, with his expertise in early digital architecture granting him effects work on Joel Schumacher’s Batman films (which are now fondly remembered, after being critically lambasted at the time). Ballast, following a troubled African-American family in the Mississippi Delta with sensitivity and grace, couldn’t have contrasted more, and now he collaborates with acting luminaries Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay for another tale of domestic disharmony. They respectively play a daughter and stepfather in leafy North London, who clash severely on how to handle the former’s dementia-stricken mother.
Premieres 18:15, Tuesday 17 February at the Berlinale Palast

Heysel 85 - Teodora Ana Mihai (Belgium/Netherlands/Germany)

(Berlinale Special Gala)

With her fourth feature, Romanian director Teodora Ana Mihai boldly depicts one of the most tragic events in modern sport: the Heysel Stadium disaster during the 1985 European Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool, in which 39 spectators (who were mostly fans of the former) were killed after a wall collapsed. The screenplay views the event from two perspectives: the daughter and press attaché of Brussels’ mayor, who’s forced to step in for her father as the crisis hits, and a young Italian broadcast journalist, whose family also happen to be present at the game. We expect Mihai to provide a respectful and scrupulous view of the events, which do indeed still haunt European football today.
Premieres 18:30, Saturday 14 February at Zoo Palast 1

The Blood Countess – Ulrike Ottinger (Austria/Luxembourg/Germany)

(Berlinale Special Gala)

Isabelle Huppert and Ulrike Ottinger – now there’s a match made in heaven or, by this movie’s example, some glamorous underworld. In the screenplay co-written with Nobel Prize-winning Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek (The Piano Teacher [+lee también:
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Premieres 21:15, Monday 16 February at Zoo Palast 1

My Wife Cries - Angela Schanelec (Germany/France)

(Competition)

After Music [+lee también:
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ficha de la película]’s idiosyncratic rendering of the tragedy Oedipus Rex, My Wife Cries appears to be a more conventional, if very taut, marital drama – but we can expect all of the formal gamesmanship this director specialises in. Thomas (Vladimir Vulević) is a 40-year-old crane operator who is stunned when his wife Carla (Agathe Bonitzer), who’s recovering from a serious car accident, openly reveals that she’s having an affair with her dance partner David. With influential French producer Saïd Ben Saïd behind it and its more forceful logline, this could multiply the “Berlin School” director’s audience further, while the first-person title and its working title of Thomas le fort suggests it will be a piercing look at male fragility.
Premieres 21:45, Tuesday 17 February at the Berlinale Palast

Prosecution - Faraz Shariat (Germany)

(Panorama)

After breaking out through his Teddy Award-winning debut feature, No Hard Feelings [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] (Panorama 2020), one of Germany’s most interesting young directors returns six years later with a decidedly different film that we expect to come with equivalent bite. Cutting his teeth further by directing several episodic works in the meantime, Shariat emerges now with this legal-cum-sociopolitical thriller that’s simultaneously a rage against both the machine and what the machine has allowed to flourish unabated: right-wing extremist violence in Germany. He pairs newcomer Chen Emilie Yan with Silver Bear winner Julia Jentsch, the former playing a German-Korean state prosecutor attacked by neo-Nazis and the latter her lawyer. The work is produced by Jünglinge Film, a Berlin-based collective and production outfit also co-founded by Shariat.
Premieres 21:30, Sunday 15 February at Zoo Palast 1.