Berlin’s Gentle Bears

Like the guest on his latest episode of The Last Thing I Saw—Justin Chang—Rapold was unfamiliar with Haugerud’s previous work when Dreams took him by pleasant surprise. Ella Øverbye stars as Johanne, a seventeen-year-old who is taken with Johanna (Selome Emnetu), her French teacher, in ways she struggles to comprehend. “For anyone with sharp recollections of the heady rush of first love and the obsessive fixation on one person to the exclusion of all else, Dreams will strike chords,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney.

As Johanne sorts through her feelings on paper, a book takes shape, and she shows it to her grandmother, Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen), a poet whose literary career has stalled. Jolted, Karin shows the book to her daughter and Johanne’s mother, Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp). Johanne’s experiences become catalysts for bouts of self-reflection in both Karin and Kristin. In Variety, Guy Lodge finds that “Haugerud’s writing is consistently surprising and elastic in its reach, as it picks out common insecurities and gaping ideological differences between three generations of women—but reserves its most piercing compassion for the youngest of them.”

Dreams opened in Norway last October and was intended to be the second film in a trilogy after Sex, which premiered last year in the Berlinale’s Panorama program, and before Love, which saw its premiere in competition in Venice last fall. All three explorations of complex relationships are set in present-day Oslo, and Dreams is overlaid with Johanne’s narration. “It’s (deliberately) awkward, in a very endearing way,” finds Max Borg at the Film Verdict, “with Øverbye’s performance conveying all the layers of adolescent sexual awakening while keeping the overall mood quite chaste, with the breeziness of a summertime Eric Rohmer injected into a Céline Sciamma–like character study.”

The jury headed up by Todd Haynes presented this year’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize to Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail, starring Denise Weinberg as Tereza, a seventy-seven-year-old factory worker in Brazil. Tereza is told she will be retired and sent to a senior housing colony, but she’s got other plans. “The Blue Trail is a slightly off-kilter refraction of the world as it exists,” writes Marshall Shaffer at Slant. “Perhaps as a result, it’s all the harder to shake.”

“This is Mascaro’s most humane film to date,” writes Jay Weissberg for Deadline, “which isn’t to say that August Winds [2014] and Neon Bull [2015] weren’t also grounded in the individual’s struggle for self-fulfillment outside the strictures of bourgeois circumscribed society. But in The Blue Trail the director gets deeper inside character, specifically the glow that comes from detaching oneself from presumed usefulness and living in the moment. To that end, the remarkable Miriam Socarrás arrives just in time to make Tereza—and the audience—understand the joy of independence.”

The Silver Bear Jury Prize went to Iván Fund’s The Message, which the Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer calls a “minimalist oddity of a road movie.” Anika Bootz plays Anika, a young girl with a gift for communicating with animals, and she and her guardians (Mara Bestelli and Marcelo Subiotto) tour the Argentine countryside in their RV, selling Anika’s services to anyone who wonders what their pets might be thinking.

“With its gorgeous black-and-white photography and laid-back vibes,” writes Mintzer, “The Message brings to mind Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 classic Paper Moon, which featured a little girl and a con man on the road in Depression-era America. The Argentina depicted in Fund’s movie also feels like it’s going through some tough times, although the director focuses more on the trio’s good-humored journey from place to place as they scrape by off Anika’s magical powers.”

Huo Meng won the Silver Bear for Best Director for his second feature, Living the Land, a portrait of a rural community beginning—in 1991—to feel the effects of China’s social and economic transformation. “There’s a patient, plainspoken poetry, neither overly earthy nor flowery, to Living the Land, a rolling rural drama that may be a work of pure fiction,” writes Guy Lodge, “but often feels wholly, organically observed, as if its storytelling were dictated by the rigors and challenges of seasons and soil.”

The two Silver Bears for acting were awarded for performances in films we’ve already seen win raves. Rose Byrne won Best Leading Performance for her portrayal of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Mary Bronstein’s relentless If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and Andrew Scott won Best Supporting Performance for his brief but arresting turn as composer Richard Rodgers in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon.

The controversies sparked by last year’s awards ceremony were sidestepped for the most part this year, but Radu Jude was in no mood to let his moment in the spotlight pass. Dedicating his Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for Kontinental ’25 to the memory of Luis Buñuel, he joked that “I am a weak screenwriter, so receiving this award is very funny.” He then called for “more solidarity in Europe,” encouraged the International Court to carry on holding “villainous and murderous leaders to account,” and—noting that elections were to be held in Germany the following day—expressed his hope that “next year’s festival will not open with Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Good evening!”

Set in the booming Transylvanian city of Cluj and shot on an iPhone 15 in just eleven days, Kontinental ’25 stars Eszter Tompa as a bailiff racked with guilt following the suicide of a homeless man she’s evicted from a building set to be torn down to make room for a luxury hotel. Jude’s film is “unmistakably his own,” writes Diego Semerene at Slant. “That’s evident in the film’s self-derisive humor, caustic social critique, surreal interventions in everyday situations that are taken to their ridiculous limit, and an intrepid revisiting of history so specific to Romania that it ends up gaining a universal, almost fable-like force.”

The Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution went to the entire “creative ensemble” behind Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower. Clara Pacini mesmerizes as Jeanne, a sixteen-year-old who runs away from her foster home in the mountains, takes refuge on a movie set, and becomes enchanted by Cristina (Marion Cotillard), a chillingly distant actress starring in an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. “An eerie and unwholesome spell is cast in this film,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, who calls The Ice Tower “a fairytale of death-wish yearning and erotic submission.”

The first jury for the new Perspectives strand program to debut features—filmmaker Meryam Joobeur, actor Aïssa Maïga, and producer María Zamora—gave the Best First Feature Award to Ernesto Martínez Bucio’s The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box). Abandoned by their parents, five siblings cut themselves off from the outside world. “Horror and fantasy tropes jostle anxiously against elements of psychological trauma in this unsettling brush with the uncanny,” writes Screen’s Jonathan Holland.

Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat won the Berlinale Documentary Award presented by a jury of three nonfiction filmmakers, Petra Costa, Lea Glob, and Kazuhiro Soda. Two weeks after Liat Beinin Atzili, an Israeli history teacher committed to peace, was abducted from her kibbutz on October 7, 2023, Kramer began tracking her family’s efforts to see her released. For Modern Times Review critic Nick Holdsworth, Holding Liat “stands out for the pains it takes to offer a nuanced view of a brutal conflict.”

Four juries awarded Crystal Bears and Special Mentions to eight features and eight short films premiering in the Generation strand programmed for younger audiences. Among the winners are Maya, Give Me a Title, an animated feature Michel Gondry has made with his daughter, and The Botanist, the first feature by thirty-one-year-old Jing Yi, who was mentored by Bi Gan and cites Terrence Malick, Abbas Kiarostami, and Satyajit Ray as influences.