Wilhelm Hein died on March 15^th at the age of 85 following a long illness. He was one of the most influential and radical experimental filmmakers of the generation that turned cinema inside out from the 1960s onwards. His life partner, photographer Annette Frick, with whom he published the image magazine “Jenseits der Trampelpfade” since 1992, announced the news yesterday.  

In 1970, Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo managed to outsmart the directors of the British Museum and its security system to gain access to the museum’s secret underground vaults and film valuable African artifacts stowed away there. One day was enough to shoot this short film revealing the extent of the theft of African artifacts, stashed in plastic bags and wooden crates — and to make a case for their restitution.

In addition to the Silver and Golden Bears, various independent juries award prizes at the Berlinale. Forum films received several awards this year.

The Berlinale Documentary Award 2025 goes to HOLDING LIAT by Brandon Kramer. The Forum films CANONE EFFIMERO and LA MEMORIA DE LAS MARIPOSAS (The Memory of Butterflies) received Honorary Mentions.

This year's Caligari film prize goes to FWENDS by Sophie Somerville. The jury finds the film to be “a vivid document of a tangibly pleasurable creative process, a cosmopolitan testimony to the fears and motivations of young women”.

Instead of telling the story of a shut down publishing house and its books, René Frölke's new film digs through its legacies. Each one becomes a fragment. The film drifts along these traces, in the wake of the music of its protagonist Tessa, in search of its own human history of knowledge and symbol production.

Films from five continents encounter a world and its people that are not in good shape, wounded souls. Sounding out a diverse range of cinematic forms and political positions, the Forum shows contemporary cinema beyond the cult and the commercial and asks: what next?.