On a snowy night in February, Tilda Swinton stepped onto the main stage of the Berlin International Film Festival to collect a career achievement award. Dressed in a sparkly high-collared gown, the British actress began by talking about the weather.
“I’m so happy it’s snowing today,” she said after picking up her trophy during the opening ceremony of the 2025 Berlinale, as the festival is known. “It used to snow every year here,” she said, remembering how, as a 25-year-old attending her first Berlinale, she would walk into the festival venue in snow-covered boots.
The actress then paid tribute to “the great independent state of cinema,” and took thinly veiled swipes at President Trump’s plans on immigration and the reconstruction of Gaza.
Cinema is “innately inclusive: immune to efforts of occupation, colonization, takeover, ownership or the development of riviera property.” she said. It is “a borderless realm and with no policy of exclusion, persecution or deportation.”
Swinton’s speech could easily have been delivered at Europe’s other two major film festivals, Cannes and Venice — except for the bit about the weather. The Cannes Film Festival is held on the French Riviera in May, while the Venice Film Festival takes place on Lido island (another seaside resort) in late August and early September. The sun shines on most days at those events, temperatures range from mild to warm, and actresses walk the red carpet in strapless gowns and sandals, not winter coats and snow boots.
From a calendar and climate standpoint, in other words, Berlin is disadvantaged. It takes place in the dead of winter, about a month before the Academy Awards — when the awards season race, which has become an important launchpad for movies, is nearly over. Perhaps as a result, film industry experts say, the festival has, in recent years, been somewhat overshadowed by its sister events.
A new director — the American-born Tricia Tuttle, who took the Berlinale helm in April 2024 — is trying to change things. She would like Berlin to be not just a place to see politically engaged art house titles, but also a showcase for big-budget movies with star casts. She is also concentrating on the festival’s other strong points: audience engagement, with 340,000 public admissions to festival movie theaters last year (according to official festival figures); and the European Film Market, the business arm of the festival, which draws film buyers and sellers from about 130 different countries each year.
In a video interview, Tuttle said the Berlinale was “very comfortable in its skin” about showcasing filmmakers who “shine a light on things they see in the world that are unjust or unfair, or that they’d like to change.”
“What I don’t love, and that I’d like to see changed” is the festival “always being categorized as only that,” she said, “because we are also about the pleasure and the fun and the transformative nature of sitting in an audience and laughing with other people.”
Tuttle lamented the fact that “the chasm has been widening a little bit much” between “the very commercial end of the cinema industry and the independent end of the cinema industry,” and added: “I’d love to think we’re part of a solution in really making sure that those two things don’t feel like different conversations and different art forms.”
Peter Debruge, a chief film critic for Variety magazine who has attended the festival for many years, said that in Tuttle’s first year as director he had noticed “a transformative difference.” The film slate, which was previously solid but to some critics short on excitement, was much more compelling in 2025 — and “Dreams (Sex Love),” the film that won the Golden Bear (the festival’s highest honor), by the Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, was a critical hit.
“I think what Trish is doing is relevant: it’s making the festival essential again,” Debruge said.
The Berlinale was started six years after the end of World War II in West Berlin as part of an effort to put the divided city — former capital of the Third Reich — on the world cultural map. The city was, then, the very embodiment of the Cold War, with the Berlin Wall slicing through it, separating East from West. It became a natural showcase for films from both sides of the wall, a platform for East-West dialogue and for politically charged movies advocating democracy and denouncing tyranny.
The Berlinale also became recognized as one of the world’s “big three” film festivals, alongside Cannes and Venice. Over the years, it rewarded some of the greatest directors of all time, including Sidney Lumet (1957), Ingmar Bergman (1958), Michelangelo Antonioni (1961), Vittorio De Sica (1971), Robert Altman (1976) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1982).
Right before the collapse of the wall and the reunification of Germany, the festival launched the European Film Market, which brings together film professionals — producers, distributors and talent agents. That has now become one of its distinguishing features.
The festival is also an effective launchpad for up-and-coming talents.
The Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón, who won the Golden Bear for best feature film in 2022 for “Alcarràs” — the story of a farming family inspired by her own — remembered being invited to the Berlinale for the first time in 2015 as one of the Berlinale Talents: an annual program offering talks, workshops, networking events and project development labs. As part of the program, she joined a script workshop where she shared her screenplay and received feedback from script editors and mentors.
Simón recalled the campuslike atmosphere of the program: sharing a room with others in a hostel, and at the start of each day, picking up tickets for talks, film screenings or other events she wished to attend. She described the talents program as “a big, big push” for the project she was working on at the time. “Having the stamp of the Berlinale somehow also helped me get into other labs, and ask for funding,” she said.
She received a far bigger push with her 2022 Golden Bear victory. “You get so much attention,” she said, noting that her film was sold in many countries and selected for several other festivals. She said that winning the prize “opens the door for you to keep making films,” and gives a sense that “I could do whatever I want, and tell the story, and take risks.”
How did she find the overall experience of Berlin as a festival? “You have the feeling that it’s a festival for the city, the people of the city,” she said. Cinemas were “always full,” and there were “really interesting Q&A’s” with questions from many kinds of audiences.
She said Berlin was “a lot more relaxed” than Cannes, where black-tie is mandatory at premieres, and taking personal photos on the red carpet is not allowed. There is “this sense of ritual” in Cannes, with music playing and a red carpet that “big personalities in filmmaking” have walked on, she said.
Variety’s Debruge said Berlin’s new boss, Tuttle, was enjoying a “honeymoon period” and benefiting from the good will that comes when a major film festival changes hands.
“She’s still going to deal with all of the challenges that exist,” he said, listing the calendar advantages of Cannes, and the fact that Venice “is playing into the awards game and has become incredibly attractive to American Hollywood productions.”
Debruge added that all eyes were on Tuttle to see whether in 2026 and beyond, she could keep up “the kind of excitement and the relevance that she has demonstrated.”
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