The time has finally come: tonight, the 48th edition of Generation will officially open at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt!
It's a special year - the Berlin Film Festival is taking place for the 75th time - but then again, the Berlinale is always special. As every year, more and more people gather at Potsdamer Platz, film crews from all over the world arrive and trudge through Berlin's streets, people stand in endless queues outside the cinemas while others desperately try to click the “Tickets” button on their laptops in the right microsecond - and it's snowing. It's snowing!
However, with this year's anniversary edition and the new Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle, there are definitely some changes ahead, and we are excited to see how the festival will grow with it.
There is also a significant new feature in the Generation section this year: the introduction of the Generation 14plus badges, a kind of accreditation for which all young cinema enthusiasts aged 14-25 were able to apply by the beginning of December, and which will also be available in future years. With such a badge, you can attend all generation screenings, participate in networking meetings with other young people and young adults and discuss perspectives for young audiences in the Badge Lounge. It is a further step towards involving the young audience even more in the festival. After all, no other film festival is so open to its audience and takes its young visitors so seriously: the fact that there is a separate section for children's and youth films, including a children's and youth jury, is a small miracle - and in our world, which far too often does not take young people seriously enough, it is so, so important!
We at the Independent Generation Reporters have also gained new members this year, and we are excited about the many new ideas from our new reporters and the new formats that can be created - you will hear more about this in the coming days.
But before we dive right into the festival again, I would like to tell you about the Generation program presentation that took place two weeks ago and share our first impression of the 2025 program.
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Wednesday, January 29
It's a grey winter afternoon at the end of January when the Sinema Transtopia starts to fill up at around 4:30 p.m. - the program presentation is about to begin. Bagdge owners, hardcore Generation fans and new visitors have all come. We from the Independent Generation Reporters are also present and are looking forward to a first glimpse of this year's program. You can literally feel the excitement about the festival in the room - in two weeks, it's finally going to start!
We are welcomed by Melika Gothe, the section manager, who soon after invites six members of the selection committee for the feature-length films and Sebastian Markt, the section head, onto the stage. The seven of them present the feature film program together, with short first film clips being shown in between.
In the second half of the event, the four short film programs, two from Kplus and two from 14plus with five films each, are presented. This is done by Sebastian Markt, Monica Koshka-Stein and Vincent Förster as representatives of the short film committee. The three of them describe the individual short film programs as an “emotional journey made up of five films”. Even though the Kplus programs in particular are also compiled according to the age recommendations, there are still some common threads and an overall impression that connects the films with each other and enriches them reciprocally. The aim is to open up “different forms of cinema” to the audience, especially children and young people, the films could be like a “window” into a perhaps completely unfamiliar horizon of experience.
Students and teachers from the Evangelische Schule Berlin-Zentrum also attended the program presentation. Together they talk about the school's very special Berlinale project: for several years now, students have had the opportunity to attend film screenings independently during the Berlinale and create an accompanying “Berlinale booklet” in which they record their experiences and thoughts on the films to discuss them together later. It is an example of how the program of the Generation section and the Berlinale as a film festival can be involved in school lessons - projects at schools that the Generation team wants to promote even more in order to reach young people who may not be at a school that offers this opportunity.
The question of the target audience should therefore be asked more frequently: Who is being reached? Who is not being reached? In this context, the Generation team would also like to further expand the section's accessibility; barriers should first be recognized and then specifically removed, explains Melika Gothe. This year, for example, there are many performances whose audience discussions are accompanied by sign language interpreters - and during the Q&A session, it becomes clear how important it is to talk to the communities in order to really remove barriers in the long term.
The way to the program
The Generation 2025 program consists of 19 feature-length films, 20 short films and one series as a special screening. Around 900 feature-length films and 2,400 short films were submitted this year, all of which were viewed by the selection committees to form the final program! According to the curators, it was an intensive exchange with passionate discussions and many different points of view. The most exciting thing was also to be convinced by others with enthusiasm about a film that you might not have counted among your own favorites before, and then to suddenly regard the film with completely different eyes.
During the actual program presentation, all the curators then find it noticeably difficult to keep it short; we can feel how long they could talk about their beloved films, which they now have to present in a very compact form.
The conversations between the films are particularly exciting, when the curators talk about more general themes and motifs that appear throughout the films - and so an increasingly clear overall picture of the program gradually emerges.
This, for sure, consists of individual, independent films, but the curators can nevertheless recognize many overlaps and accents:
Overarching topics in the Generation 2025 program
As in previous years, the theme of grief, for example, appears very clearly in this year's program. In 2022, for example, with "Comedy Queen", in 2023 with "Zeevonk" and "Sica" and in 2024 with "It’s Okay!" there have been several films in recent years alone that deal with grief in one way or another.
This year, however, very different types of grief will be highlighted, not only the grief after the loss of a person:
In Têtes Brûlées twelve-year-old Eya has to struggle with the loss of her brother and finds solace in her faith and in contact with his friends, in Paternal Leave the main character mourns a denied father-daughter relationship.
The short film Sous ma fenêtre la boue on the other hand, deals with the grief caused by the separation of the protagonist's two mothers: while one mother is far too far away, the other is now far too close. Finally, the short film Beneath Which River Flows is a film that deals with mourning for endangered nature. In this case, the close friendship between the protagonist Ibrahim and his buffalo is also an example of the fact that the program is not just focusing on human relationships.
The documentary Only on Earth for example, reports on Galician wild horses whose habitat is increasingly threatened by ever more severe forest fires. In Anngeerdardardor young Kaali searches for his stolen dog, and in the animated film Ran Bi Wa a monkey boy and his friend, a wolf, travel to the "Holy Mountain" to uncover the secret of warmth.
In all these stories, the animals and nature are never just scenery, but crucial actors and catalysts, as the curators emphasize.
The Kplus animated film Space Cadet is even based on the relationship between a young astronaut Celeste and the robot that raised her - without any dialog, but with lots of music, the film tells how the robot stays behind on Earth during Celeste's first mission, and how they remain connected by shared memories despite an infinite distance.
Community is another focus of the program. The curators report that the protagonists experience in many different ways that self-discovery is not possible alone, but much more through community, through contact with others and exchange.
Daye, a Nubian albino who, with the support of his family and his teacher, is pursuing his dream of taking part in "The Voice" (Daye), an eleven-year-old boy who wants to find his place in his nomadic family's circus (Zirkuskind), or seven-year-old Angel, who stands out as the only Black ballerina in her ballet class and finds support in a community of Black women (On a Sunday at Eleven) - they all experience the power of community. Community is also very important in I agries meres mas: here Chloe joins a group of young people who have a very unusual approach to countering the injustice and harshness of the world.
Rebellion and agency are also an important focus of the program. Not only Chloe and her friends show this - the protagonist of the short film Ne réveillez pas l’enfante qui dort spiegelt das wieder: does as well: Diamant, whose parents reject her dreams of becoming a filmmaker, who finally simply doesn't wake up as an act of rebellion.
And then there are short films like Little Rebels Cinema Club - a title that, according to the curators, would be the perfect tagline for this year's Generation program.
It is a program full of mysteries. The films open windows into strange worlds, untold stories and, above all, ask questions. Questions to which there is often no clear answer and which do not make it easy for us. The films take us into the lives of their protagonists and find very different narrative styles to portray their conflicts - the variety ranges from an animated vision of the future to a black-and-white chamber study. The program shows what cinema can be above all: a safe place of expression, of rebellion, a place for community.
As we all make our way home after the program presentation, we are also looking forward to this: Ten days of talking about films together again, finding new movie treasures, sharing our passion for this special place.
Our thoughts are still buzzing somewhere between the films, and we can hardly wait until the 75th Berlinale finally kicks off in two more weeks!
