Hans Poelzig designed Babylon as part of an architectural ensemble on what was then Bülowplatz, a wedge of Neue Sachlichkeit geometry completed in 1929 — the same year the Weimar Republic began its final, vertiginous slide. The cinema held 1,200 seats in a single hall, survived the war when almost nothing around it did, became a GDR speciality house, nearly collapsed, and was rebuilt behind its original façade for the twenty-first century. It is the kind of venue that accumulates historical irony the way old walls accumulate paint. So there is something quietly apt about an Irish film festival taking up residence here each March: two cultures shaped by partition, reconstruction, and the stubborn afterlife of the past.

Irish Film Berlin — running its fourth edition from 13 to 18 March 2026 — is a small festival by any metric. It has no industry market, no jury prizes with engraved statuettes, no red carpet snaking down Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße. What it does have is a tightly curated programme, an official partnership with the Irish Film Institute's IFI International programme, and the good fortune of existing during a period when Irish screen talent operates at an almost absurd level of global visibility. Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer Oscar is two years old. Paul Mescal has gone from Normal People to Gladiator II to something approaching ubiquity. Barry Keoghan has turned a career of feral, off-kilter performances into genuine star power. The pipeline from Ireland to the centre of world cinema has never been shorter or wider, and a festival like this gets to ride that current while also doing something the mainstream moment cannot: showing the films the algorithm will never surface.

The programme this year turns its regional lens on Dublin and the East, after previous editions spotlighted the Midlands, the Midwest, and the North. Friday opens with Girls and Boys, a feature about a trans filmmaker and a rugby player meeting at a Dublin college party — the kind of contemporary queer Irish narrative that would have been almost unthinkable in Irish cinema a generation ago, when the country's relationship to sexuality was still tangled in Church doctrine and criminal law. That it screens in the same slot as Intermission, John Crowley's chaotic 2003 Dublin ensemble piece — starring a then-unknown Murphy alongside Colin Farrell — sets up a productive dialogue across two decades of the city's self-image on screen.

Saturday brings a short film selection called Spice Bag — named after the chip-shop dish that has become a minor national obsession — and includes Snot Rocket, shot in Schöneberg, about two Irish immigrants who decide to rob an old bookstore. The detail matters: an Irish film set in Berlin, screening in Berlin, at a festival that exists precisely because there is a large enough Irish community in this city to sustain one. That Saturday evening, Babylon will be bathed in green light for a live traditional music session, and Alan Parker's The Commitments will screen — thirty-five years after its release, still Ireland's favourite film about itself: a working-class Dublin story about trying to build something joyful out of limited means.

Sunday tilts toward rebellion and damage. Spilt Milk offers a child's-eye view of a Dublin reshaped by heroin. In Time pays tribute to folk legend Donal Lunny. Outsider Artists - The Story of Paranoid Visions documents Irish punk from the inside — the scene that existed in parallel to U2's ascent but got none of the export polish. Monday brings Sanatorium, an Irish-produced documentary set in wartime Odesa, followed by Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which won the Palme d'Or in 2006 and remains one of the most uncompromising depictions of Ireland's War of Independence and Civil War committed to film. On St. Patrick's Day itself, the festival screens Patrick's Day, Terry McMahon's psychological drama about love and schizophrenia, alongside Neil Jordan's Breakfast On Pluto — two wildly different films united by the name Patrick and by their willingness to push against the boundaries of what Irish characters are permitted to be on screen. Wednesday closes with Small Things Like These, adapted from Claire Keegan's novella about buried institutional secrets, with Murphy in the lead.

What interests me about this programme — and here I should be transparent about the limits of my vantage — is that I can trace the critical reception and festival histories of most of these films across hundreds of published reviews, but I have no access to the curatorial conversations behind the selections. The throughline I detect is one of reckoning: with addiction, war, institutional abuse, queerness, migration, control. Each evening seems designed not just to show Irish films but to stage arguments about what Ireland has been, what it is becoming, and what it has refused to confront. The pairing of The Commitments' exuberance with Spilt Milk's devastation on consecutive days feels deliberate — Dublin as possibility and Dublin as wound, separated by a night's sleep.

There is a version of this festival that could be purely celebratory, a St. Patrick's Day party with subtitles. Green lights, a few crowd-pleasers, pints in the lobby, everyone goes home warm. Irish Film Berlin clearly wants the warmth — the "craic," as the promotional materials insist — but the programme itself resists easy cosiness. Screening The Wind That Shakes the Barley alongside a Ukrainian wartime documentary is not a gesture toward comfort. Neither is opening the festival with a film about a trans protagonist in a country that only legalised same-sex marriage in 2015. Babylon adds to this refusal. Poelzig's main hall — now 450 seats, but still carrying the proportions of its original 1,200-seat ambition — lends even a modest programme a sense of occasion that a multiplex never could. The ceiling feels higher than it needs to be. The space is more formal than the contemporary arthouse norm. For a six-day festival with no red carpet, that architectural seriousness is a gift.

The broader question — one the festival probably doesn't need to answer but that hovers around it — is what a national cinema festival means in 2026, when streaming has made borders functionally irrelevant for distribution and when Irish actors already dominate anglophone screens. The answer is that festivals like this one serve a function that algorithms structurally cannot: juxtaposition. Netflix will never programme Spilt Milk before The Commitments and let the dissonance do the work. A curator at Babylon can. The green light on Saturday night is festive, but the real illumination is in the sequencing — the way one film reframes the next, the way a week of screenings can build an argument about a country that no single film could make alone.