Every day on the way to the Martin-Gropius-Bau’s European Film Market (EFM) – the frenzied beehive hub of business machinations bursting out of the bounds of the Berlinale each year – a slightly baffling sign for a German kids’ film gives a moment of pause.

A two-metre poster of a live-action monkey flying a plane over an assortment of other animals both large and small greets delegates, movers and shakers of the market. Akiko, the Flying Monkey promises a zoo-set adventure, but somehow unintentionally yet inevitably sets a tone of circus for the goings-on nearby: the wheelings and dealings of the EFM, held amid both the hopes and volatilities of our movie-going times. It also offers a moment of ridiculousness to counterweigh some of the arch European onscreen grimness creeping in across the program, suiting Berlin’s shifting February gloom.

The poster is a fleeting and pleasingly silly reminder on the periphery that film, even within its most serious and prestigious destinations, still contains layering multitudes of audience, aesthetic, business and, presumably, flying animals (it should be said, Akiko, the Flying Monkey also landed a slot in the most recent Locarno Film Festival!) – and that there are, indeed, many diverging paths into one of the biggest destinations for film as a centre for industry, which also happens to be the world’s largest publicly accessible film festival.

Notably, 2025 marked the first edition from new Berlinale Festival Director Tricia Tuttle, delivering a red-carpet degree of star wattage (festival attendances from the likes of Ethan Hawke, Robert Pattinson and a pink hoodie-adorned Timothée Chalamet) and a main competition line-up overseen by Todd Haynes’s jury, punctuated by interesting genre inflections (with world premiere launches from the subjects of two recent MIFF retrospectives, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower and Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Reflection in a Dead Diamond) alongside a continuation of recurring festival favourites (Hong Sang-soo, Michel Franco, Radu Jude) and big-name gets (Richard Linklater’s Lorenz Hart film Blue Moon). The Golden Bear’s eventual winner was Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams (Sex Love), the elegant concluding note of an epic thematic film trilogy delivered incrementally over the last twelve months (Sex in the last Berlinale’s Panorama section; and Love within the 2024 Venice Film Festival competition).

All Images: Berlinale 2025

Australian cinema was also in effect throughout the festival’s feature and episodic program. It was wonderful to attend the world premiere of MIFF Ambassador Justin Kurzel’s Richard Flanagan adaptation The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Richard was also a recent guest of MIFF in 2022 with a special screening of his directorial work The Sound of One Hand Clapping). Before the film team entered, it felt like half the cinema made a pilgrimage to one of the seats in front of us, where a reserved-seating sign featuring two words of promise – Jacob Elordi – was in the process of overloading the entirety of social media. Kurzel’s work, as well as that of his ensemble, is rigorous, affecting; the two episodes screened contained brutal depths, but were also filled with tenderness. Elsewhere, MIFF Accelerator Lab alum Sophie Somerville’s spritely, winning Fwends was the recipient of the Forum section’s Caligari Film Prize, an extraordinary achievement from one of the most ‘Melbourne’ movies of recent times – the film an experience of the ebbs and flows, soft sides and sharp corners of a friendship singularly filtered through our city. It was wonderful, too, to see Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese’s hilarious and endearingly interstellar Lesbian Space Princess win the Berlinale’s Best Feature Teddy Award, as well as MIFF Ambassador Rose Byrne’s Silver Bear win for Best Leading Performance in the sublimely volatile If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, one of the most extraordinary films of the festival.

For me, the festival screening highlight was Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow, presented in its five-and-a-half-hour entirety (the session time ticked over six hours with its post-screening Q&A). This expansive character-driven account, following the young journalists of Russia’s last independent television station as they are branded foreign agents both in the lead-up to and following the Ukraine invasion, crescendoes with an unfurling real-world tension rarely captured in documentary.

A wonderful opportunity to connect with the pleasures of cinema and the purpose of its industry, the Berlinale 2025 both turned a page and suggested highlights for the year ahead. We look forward to revealing what may land in the MIFF program this year!

Al Cossar
Artistic Director