Winter Jitters

As if to accentuate an overall feeling of shifting sands, a few weeks after its 2025 edition wraps, Sundance will announce whether it will relocate its main events to Salt Lake City or leave Utah altogether and head to either Boulder, Colorado, or Cincinnati, Ohio, for its 2027 edition. On Monday, in the meantime, Sundance announced a shorts program of fifty-seven films. Fully aware that the names of the directors behind them will be new to most of us, the festival has had Jessica Herndon remind us that directors such as Todd Haynes and Dee Rees launched their careers with short films at Sundance.

Many of the directors with films lined up for the three main competitions of Rotterdam’s fifty-fourth edition (January 30 through February 9) will be unfamiliar as well, but what makes the roster doubly intriguing is that it’s drawn from just about every nook and cranny on the globe. The Tiger Competition will offer fourteen world premieres “exploring personal stories and profound connections to history, identity, and place—spanning Montenegro to Malaysia and Congo to India.”

Another fourteen films slated for the Big Screen Competition will titillate with “genre-blurring stories of rebellion, tradition, and expression, covering territories from Lithuania to Japan and the Netherlands to Argentina,” while the Tiger Short Competition will include “a Slovenian climate sci-fi, a reappropriation of Myanmarese government broadcasts, and a Georgian photomontage.” Attendees seeking out faces they already know will head to the Talks program, where they’ll find Cate Blanchett, Guy Maddin, Alex Ross Perry, Cheryl Dunye, and cinematographer and Robby Müller Award recipient Lol Crawley (The Brutalist).

Speaking of attendees, no other festival in the world has more of them each year than the Berlinale. Overseeing her first edition—the seventy-fifth, running from February 13 through 23—festival director Tricia Tuttle, famed for having nearly doubled attendance when she ran the London Film Festival from 2018 to 2020, is staring down two challenges that can be boiled down to money and politics.

She’s less worried about the first than the second. The Berlin Senate is slashing its culture budget, and that includes a good chunk of its funding for the Berlinale. “It’s not a gap that makes me panic,” she tells Thomas Rogers in the New York Times. “It’s just a gap.” As previously announced, 2025 is covered, and Tuttle and her team can wait until the spring to start fretting over 2026 and beyond.

The Berlinale as a focal point in the debate over how Germany defines antisemitism, though, is another matter. When a good number of winners during this year’s awards ceremony in February called for a ceasefire in Gaza, Berlin mayor Kai Wegner let it be known that he expected “the new leadership of the Berlinale to ensure that such incidents do not happen again.” On November 7, the German Bundestag adopted a resolution that critics believe equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Tuttle tells the Guardian’s Deborah Cole that she’s now hearing from filmmakers that they’re reluctant to come to Berlin. “I’m worried about it because I hear it so often from artists outside this country; it’s a real thing,” she says. “I can’t pretend like it’s not happening. People are worried about: ‘Does it mean I won’t be allowed to speak? Does it mean that I won’t be allowed to express empathy or sympathy for the victims in Gaza?’” Tuttle says that she and her team have spent much of this year assuring filmmakers and talent that “we are the Berlinale that they’ve always known and loved—that’s pluralistic and embraces many, many different perspectives.”

Having already announced that Tom Tykwer’s The Light will open Berlinale 2025 and that Todd Haynes will preside over the main competition jury, the festival spent Tuesday unveiling a first round of titles, beginning with three slated for the Berlinale Special program. One of them is Ido Fluk’s Köln 75, starring Mala Emde as Vera Brandes, the real-life producer who, at the age of eighteen, organized a solo concert in Cologne that Keith Jarrett performed under nearly impossible conditions. The Köln Concert remains the best-selling solo album in jazz history as well as the best-selling piano album, and Colin Marshall has the remarkable full story at Open Culture.

Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, starring Ben Whishaw as the renowned photographer, will arrive straight from Sundance to screen in the Panorama program, which will also include the world premiere of Denis Côté’s Paul, the story of a young man who relieves his social anxiety by cleaning people’s homes. Generation, the section programmed for younger viewers, will present Maya, donne-moi un titre, Michel Gondry’s animated love letter to his daughter. And the lineup for this year’s Retrospective, Wild, Weird, Bloody: German Genre Films of the ’70s, is now complete.