Sandra Hüller in Markus Schleinzer’s Rose (2026)

Twenty of the twenty-two films lined up for this year’s Berlinale Competition are world premieres, and the one that’s likely to arouse the most curiosity is Queen at Sea, which marks the return of Lance Hammer. In the late 1990s, Hammer worked as a visual-effects artist on two Batman blockbusters directed by Joel Schumacher and on Griffin Dunne’s Practical Magic (1998). His gig as an assistant art director on Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) signaled a shift in direction.

In 2002, Hammer directed a short film, Issaquena, which few seem to have seen. His breakthrough came with his first feature, Ballast, which premiered at Sundance in 2008 and won the Directing Award and—for Lol Crawley, who would go on to shoot Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015) and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024)—the Cinematography Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. Later that year, Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times that Ballast is an “austerely elegant, emotionally unadorned riff on life and death in the Mississippi Delta.”

Juliette Binoche stars in Queen at Sea as a woman who returns to London with her teenage daughter (Florence Hunt) to care for her ailing mother (Anna Calder-Marshall) and her husband (Tom Courtenay). “This is the kind of film I love doing,” wrote Binoche when shooting wrapped nearly three years ago. “Strong script, talented director and cinematographer, loving [and hard-working] actors, small passionate crew, on location. A film of believers and makers.”

Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) has a busy year ahead of her. She’ll be appearing in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, and, if it’s ready before the year is out, Paweł Pawlikowski’s 1949. But first up is her leading turn in in Rose, directed by Markus Schleinzer, whose debut feature, Michael, premiered in competition in Cannes in 2011.

Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War, Rose is the story of a mysterious soldier who shows up in a Protestant village in Germany and claims to be the legal heir of an abandoned farm. Soldier Rose works hard to gain the villagers’ trust, but their suspicions persist.

Angela Schanelec, who won a Silver Bear for Best Director in 2019 for I Was Home, But and another Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for Music in 2023, returns with My Wife Cries. Vladimir Vulević, a filmmaker who appeared in Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh (2022), plays a crane operator who is called off a construction site to pick up his wife from the hospital. He finds her alone on a park bench, crying.

Another man with a wife in the hospital drops his nine-year-old son in an apartment he’s rented in Fernando Eimbcke’s Flies. The middle-aged woman who owns the apartment does all she can to avoid getting involved, but the kid is vulnerable. Eimbcke’s Lake Tahoe (2008) won a FIPRESCI Prize when it premiered in competition in Berlin.

Alain Gomis, whose Félicité won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize in Berlin in 2017, returns with Dao, which centers on a woman attending her daughter’s wedding in Paris while reflecting on another recent ceremony in Guinea-Bissau, the consecration of her late father as an ancestor.

In Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars, the ninth feature from Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (Dry Season, A Screaming Man), a young woman in a Chadian village befriends an outcast. Soumsoum “explores contrasts such as old cosmologies versus monotheist religions, tradition versus conformity, and the tension between men and women,” says Jean-Christophe Simon, CEO of Films Boutique, which has just picked up world sales rights. “At its heart, the film also celebrates female sorority.”

Last April, Variety’s Naman Ramachandran spoke with Kornél Mundruczó (White God, Pieces of a Woman) about the three features he was working on, including At the Sea, starring Amy Adams as a woman returning to her family’s home on the beach after a bout in rehab. “The movie’s theme is very simple,” says Mundruczó. “How can you lose connection to your family, and is there a possibility to get connected again after you have a big mistake in your life?” Up next for Mundruczó is Place to Be, starring Ellen Burstyn, and The Revolution According to Kamo, which Mundruczó calls “kind of a gangster movie” about “this unbelievable friendship between Stalin and his friend Kamo.”

İlker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge premiered in the Berlinale’s Panorama program in 2023 and was nominated for a Best International Feature Film Oscar. Yellow Letters is the story of a couple, Derya and Aziz, both artists who “have lost their employment, their social status, and their right to exist in Turkish society due to state arbitrariness,” says Çatak.

Emin Alper’s first feature, Beyond the Hill (2012), won the Berlinale’s Caligari Film Prize. His follow-up, Frenzy (2015), won the Special Jury Prize in Venice, and Burning Days (2022) premiered in the Un Certain Regard program in Cannes. Salvation is set in a remote Kurdish village in Turkey, where an exiled clan returns and reignites a feud that has been simmering for decades. Two brothers, one a fighter and the other a preacher, clash over how the village should respond.

Eva Trobisch won the Best First Feature award in Locarno for All Is Well (2018), and her follow-up, Ivo, was one of the highlights of the Berlinale’s 2024 lineup. Now Trobisch is in the competition with Home Stories, the story of a young woman in search of her own identity and a portrait of her troubled family. More troubled family members clash in a Spanish villa in Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning, starring Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Elle Fanning, and Pamela Anderson.

Filmmaker, music-video director, and photographer Grant Gee is best known for Meeting People Is Easy (1998), the Radiohead documentary shot during the OK Computer tour. Anders Danielsen Lie, the doctor-turned actor who has appeared in most of Joachim Trier’s films, stars in Everybody Digs Bill Evans. The cast includes Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf, and the story is set in the summer of 1961, when Evans, the one-of-a-kind jazz pianist and composer, lost his musical soulmate, bass player Scott LaFaro. For the blues musician in Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s The Loneliest Man in Town, the threat of losing his home becomes a welcome wake-up call.

Anime artist Yoshitoshi Shinomiya is best known for his work on Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name (2016), and in his debut feature, A New Dawn, young Keitaro teams up with his brother and a childhood friend to find and launch a mysterious firework that his father created before he disappeared. “In developing the scenario,” Shinomiya told Variety’s Justin Kroll in 2024, “I learned that the paper, seaweed, and pigments used to make Japanese paintings had commonalities with fireworks before the Edo period.”

With We Are All Strangers, the first Singaporean film invited to the competition, Anthony Chen wraps the Growing Up trilogy, which began with Ilo Ilo (2013), the winner of the Camera d’Or in Cannes, and Wet Season (2019). Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia Ler are “actors I have collaborated with over thirteen years,” says Chen. “Through these films, we’ve grown together; our eleven-year-old young boy has grown up, and I have grown older. And in many ways, his transformation mirrors the heart of these stories: how we become strangers to who we were, and how we find our way back again.”

In a Whisper, directed by Leyla Bouzid (As I Open My Eyes), is the story of Lilia, who returns to Tunisia from Paris and decides to solve the mystery of her uncle’s death. Dust is the second feature from Anke Blondé (The Best of Dorien B.), and it’s written by Angelo Tijssens, who worked with Lukas Dhont on Girl (2018) and Close (2022). Two Belgian tech bros in the 1990s must decide what to do with their last day of freedom before charges of fraud are brought against them.

When Anna Fitch, the director of YO Love is a Rebellious Bird, began visiting her friend Yo with codirector Banker White, she was twenty-four. Yo was seventy-three, and she was “many things to many people,” says Fitch, “a great-grandmother, career weed dealer, intellectual thought partner, psychic, hostess, and—at times—a tyrant. To me, she was an inspiration, a seer of truth. I wasn’t ready to lose her.” When she did, she began building a one-third-scale version of Yo’s house, the setting of Yo’s stories brought to life in the film.

Geneviève Dulude-De Celles won a Jury Prize at Sundance for her 2014 short The Cut and the Berlinale’s Crystal Bear for her 2018 feature A Colony. In Nina Rosa, an art dealer in his sixties decides to leave Quebec for his home country, Bulgaria. A video of an eight-year-old artist has gone viral, and he needs to see for himself whether she’s a genius or a fraud. “I made this film to give life to a gallery of colorful characters from various inspirations, to talk about the fragile feeling of belonging, that of finding a home,” says Dulude-De Celles.

Warwick Thornton has brought films to Berlin in the past, but Wolfram will be his first in competition. When the film closed the Adelaide Film Festival last fall, Luke Buckmaster noted in the Guardian that Thornton “launched his feature career with the viscerally powerful, social realist drama Samson & Delilah [2009] and has since roamed freely across forms and genres.” Set on Australia’s colonial frontier in 1932, Wolfram is a sequel to Thornton’s 2017 “masterpiece,” Sweet Country, and it’s “a film of rough-hewn, harsh beauty, as if it’s been dropped in the dust and stomped on.”

Reviewing Hanna Bergholm’s first feature, the body-horror movie Hatching (2022), for Paste, Natalia Keogan found it “refreshing to encounter a film that’s rooted in traditional genre filmmaking without buckling under the weight of its influences.” In Bergholm’s Nightborn, Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint play a couple eager to start a family in their childhood home in the Finnish forest. But there’s something terribly off about their new baby.

Premiering at Sundance on Friday, Beth de Araújo’s Josephine stars Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as the parents of an eight-year-old girl traumatized by the crime she’s seen in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Two more films arriving in Berlin fresh from their Sundance premieres, Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana and Liz Sargent’s Take Me Home, will screen in Perspectives, the program of first features that Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle introduced last year. This year’s edition will run from February 12 through 22.

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