For thirty years, dokumentART has programmed formally restless short cinema from Neubrandenburg, a small city in the former East that most of the film world couldn't find on a map — and its 2026 call for submissions reads less like an invitation than a quiet act of institutional survival.
A festival with no venue, no programme, and no named curator claims to build an ecosystem for underground cinema in a city that invented the form — and the question of whether that gesture is radical or empty may be more interesting than any film it eventually screens.
At Babylon Berlin, a small Irish festival with no red carpet builds its sharpest arguments not in any single film but in the deliberate friction between them — queerness beside nostalgia, heroin beside soul music, partition beside partition.
A country that produced 247 films behind the most sealed borders in Cold War Europe now sends twenty of its stories to a small cinema in Mitte, where Berlin's Albanian diaspora and the merely curious can reckon with a cinematic tradition that has been structurally ignored for decades.
Eighty-three years after Maya Deren walked through a house with a knife and a mirror for a face, a queer feminist horror festival in a 218-seat Wedding cinema is drawing a line from the avant-garde's oldest investigations of gendered fear directly into the present — with a live score, a panic-attack headliner, and a programme that insists the final girl was never just surviving but directing.
Every screening a premiere, every score unrepeatable: the 23rd StummfilmKonzerte-Festival in Berlin reopens the question that synchronised sound closed, putting live musicians in conversation with century-old images in a city built on the friction between sealed rooms and what happens when you fill them with bodies and noise.
At the Babylon Cinema — a Poelzig-designed hall built the same year Chaplin collected his first statuette — the Babylonale puts a live orchestra back in the pit where one always belonged, turning silent film from archival curiosity into something no streaming platform can replicate.
An outsider's camera, smuggled behind the Wall, caught East German women in the unperformed texture of their daily lives — and the film nearly didn't survive to prove it.
While the Berlinale fills its gleaming halls a few streets away, BIFF is doing something rougher and more honest — screening films that cost less than a mid-range car inside Germany's oldest cinema, a Kreuzberg relic that nearly closed its doors for good and now hosts the kind of work the industry barely knows exists.
Every February, a small, restless gathering at the Akademie der Künste stages an insurrection against the polite applause and lanyard-logic of Europe's festival circuit. Now in its twelfth year, Berlin Critics' Week opens 9 February with a promise that disagreement isn't a bug but the whole operating system — and in a cultural moment where public friction feels increasingly risky, that's either a survival mechanism or a dare.