By Jessica Herndon
While we’re still riding high over our incredible 2025 Sundance Film Festival (we can’t believe it’s over!), our excitement continues for the 2025 festival circuit as the 75th Berlin International Film Festival kicks off nearly two weeks after our Fest wrapped.
The Berlin International Film Festival — also known as the Berlinale — begins today and runs through February 23. It will see premieres and screenings across multiple venues in Berlin, and we’re enthused to see that 11 films in the lineup were supported by Sundance Institute Labs and our 2025 Festival.
Among them are Joel Alfonso Vargas’ Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo), which won the NEXT Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, starring Rose Byrne, and The Thing With Feathers, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
Below, explore the titles that will screen at Berlinale, which either premiered at our 2025 Fest or were supported by our artist programs, including the Documentary Film Program and Catalyst film financing program.
If you’re attending Berlinale, add these titles to your screening schedule. And for more about the programs mentioned in this list, click here.
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Preeminent West African curator and scholar Funmilayo Akechukwu’s magnum opus, The Resonance Field, leads her to the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, drawing a journalist into a journey that shatters her understanding of consciousness and time.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: With her life crashing down around her, Linda attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist.
Khartoum — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Forced to leave Sudan for East Africa following the outbreak of war, five citizens of Khartoum — a civil servant, a tea lady, a resistance committee volunteer, and two young bottle collectors — reenact their stories of survival and freedom through dreams, revolution, and civil war.
Lurker — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A retail employee infiltrates the inner circle of an artist on the verge of stardom. As he gets closer to the budding music star, access and proximity become a matter of life and death.
Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) — 2025 Sundance Film Festival (NEXT Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast winner)
Logline: Rico’s summer is a wild mix of chasing girls and hustling homemade cocktails out of a cooler on Orchard Beach, the Bronx. But when Destiny, his teenage girlfriend, crashes at his place with his family, it’s only a matter of time before his rowdy, carefree days come spiraling down.
Magic Farm — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A film crew working for an edgy media company travels to Argentina to profile a local musician, but their ineptitude leads them into the wrong country. As the crew collaborates with locals to fabricate a trend, unexpected connections blossom while a pervasive health crisis looms unacknowledged in the background.
My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow — Catalyst
Logline: American filmmaker Julia Loktev, born in the Soviet Union, returned to Moscow in 2021 to make a documentary on the persistence of independent media journalism in Putin’s Russia — just months, as it turned out, before the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Structured in five chapters, Loktev’s film is an extraordinary vérité document of a moment of immense change and anxiety.
Only on Earth — Documentary Film Program
Logline: Only on Earth takes us on an immersive and visually striking journey into Southern Galicia, one of Europe’s most vulnerable wildfire zones. During the hottest summer on record, both humans and animals struggle to cope as inextinguishable fires draw closer.
Peter Hujar’s Day — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: A recently discovered conversation between photographer Peter Hujar and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz in 1974 reveals a glimpse into New York City’s downtown art scene and the personal struggles and epiphanies that define an artist’s life.
The Thing With Feathers — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: Struggling to process the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, a young father loses his hold on reality as a seemingly malign presence begins to stalk him from the shadowy recesses of the apartment he shares with his two young sons.
The Ugly Stepsister — 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Logline: In a fairy-tale kingdom where beauty is a brutal business, Elvira battles to compete with her incredibly beautiful stepsister, and she will go to any length to catch the prince’s eye.
