Berlinale 2025: Filmmakers to Keep an Eye On

The surreal flickering of the Aral desert transforms into the waves of the former Aral Sea. The sand becomes water. An old man becomes a fisherman again.

Architect Florian Yuriev faces a battle to save his masterpiece concert hall from becoming a shopping mall at the hands of a Ukrainian crony of Donald Trump​’s.

Documentary about Platz, the largest shanty town in Europe on the banks of the river Stura in Turin where more than one thousand people from different countries lived.

Young pioneers betrayed their fatherland at the age of 10, fleeing with their parents from the Soviet Union to Israel – or they did as the Manskijs who changed their names, wiped away the traces of their Jewish family history and stayed.

California Company Town, the much-anticipated essay film by Lee Anne Schmitt, casts a probing, clear-eyed gaze at the landscape of California towns abandoned by the industries that created them—onetime boom-towns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise...

The film that explores the messy truths​ embedded in all fights for environmental and social justice.

In the northern Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, there is an abundance of cenotes-underground springs that flow into caves. This film tells the story of the people, past and present, whose lives intersect with the cenotes, which are believed to be the connection between this world and the next.

One of Europe’s largest deer farms lies in Hungary and houses 1,500 strong red deer. The animals are essentially still wild. The first deer were caught in the forest only 25 years ago, and the handling of them becomes a physical conflict between man and animal...

Refugees from the Caucasian republics, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Russians, meet on the shore of the Black Sea: they work as shop keepers, life guards, karaoke singers, or just enjoy their holidays.