11/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: The newly appointed artistic director talks about her approach to the German festival as well as its programme, its politics and its future

(© BFI)

New Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle talks about her approach, the programme, politics, and the future of the festival, and tells us that, as the former director of the BFI London Film Festival, she has found ways to increase and include new audiences. Indeed, for the first time, the Berlinale opening film will also be seen in seven cinemas all across Germany.

Cineuropa: This year‘s festival is your first edition as Berlinale director. What are the most important challenges you faced and the changes you wanted to bring? 
Tricia Tuttle: I do both the creative and the business side. Some of my ambitions were really around helping the festival become as sustainable as it can be, because we’ve had a budget challenge. I want to modernise it, and that means making sure that it’s the most appealing for sponsors, because we do need to raise our own income. I also wanted to bring the same kind of audience-focused energy that I brought to the role at the London Film Festival with the British Film Institute. We are not only a major A-list industry festival; we are also a public audience festival. It really excites me to think about the way that we can continue to serve existing cinema-goers, but also bring new, particularly younger, people and turn them into film addicts and cinephiles. 

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At the Berlinale, the focus is often put on the competition films. What was your selection strategy? 
We are seven people viewing for the competition together, and of course, we don’t all agree on every film. The first instinct is to find films that you passionately want the world to discover. Within that, you also hope to find a breadth of filmmakers who approach cinema from different aesthetic, social and cultural perspectives. Finally, we were thinking about different countries being represented and making sure that the programme tells a story about international cinema. 

I like also having that mix of very established directors, like Bong Joon-ho and Richard Linklater and Radu Jude, but also having second- and third-time filmmakers who are really popping with a film that is going to help elevate them into the international spotlight. 

And then, because we have Perspectives, there aren’t as many debuts in Competition, but there is a very exciting debut in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. Rebecca is already established as a screenwriter, but this is her directorial debut. 

Is it intentional that the new section is called ‘Perspectives’, which is very similar to the former ‘Perspective German Cinema’? 
It’s a little tip of the hat, paying homage to that section and its role in helping elevate German talent on an international stage. In an international festival, I do think it is a good idea for German cinema to be integrated into the wider programme, because international buyers and press are more likely to see the film. 

But also, the name itself says something about what we want to say about the section –  it is many perspectives. We really wanted to see a snapshot of emerging filmmakers from around the world. The 14 feature debut films have very different directorial and aesthetic voices and show many approaches to storytelling in fiction cinema. 

What role does German cinema play at the Berlinale? 
Any festival always thinks about its national cinema and the ways that you can elevate exciting local talents. That was my role when I was at the London Film Festival. We have a really important national industrial function and German cinema is definitely a jumping-off point. When I saw Tom Tykwer’s The Light [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] this summer, the next day, we offered it the opening night film; this is such a Berlin story.

For the first time, the Berlinale will go further than Kiez and presents the opening film in seven independent cinemas in Germany.  Will that be continued?
It is an ambition for all of us that we make sure that national audiences and the exhibitors benefit from the Berlinale. Part of this is sharing the festival with audiences outside of Berlin. That was a little bit easier to achieve in London, because we weren’t screening world premieres. World premieres are quite often quite far away from their theatrical release date, and many of them haven’t been sold to distributors yet. It would be really wonderful to find distributors who want to work with us in this way on one or two titles every year. I think it really engages the country in the culture of the festival.

Will Potsdamer Platz remain as festival centre?
When I started, I could see that there was a problem with the way we were using Potsdamer Platz. It’s because of the cinema infrastructure with 150,000 seats disappearing out of Potsdamer Platz. When I look around Berlin, I see so many beautiful old cinemas in beautiful neighbourhoods with so much culture. But the challenge for the Berlinale is, we need major infrastructure. We need hotels, a space for the European Film Market, for press and industry screenings. With this kind of demand for space, Potsdamer Platz actually has a lot of potential. We’ve improved this year and built a new venue, the Bluemax Theatre with 500 seats, which is a home for our Perspectives competition. We have also built a pop-up venue called Hub75, which will house free talks every morning, and in the afternoon it’s open to all delegates. This will help create a sense of visibility, so that people can see each other, connect and talk – that’s a really important part of any festival. When you get your spaces right, that helps the programme. 

The Berlinale is traditionally a political festival and has a reputation for an open-minded culture of debate. How do you deal with that in these times where there is a lot of tension? 
I keep going back to this word: balance. We believe in free speech and we also believe that our films will always offer many perspectives and show our interesting difference and pluralism. But it’s been difficult that the news agenda has dominated the discourse at film festivals and other cultural events. We’re not talking enough about cinema anymore. We’re just talking about geo-politics. That’s okay if it emerges out of the films, but I would love to just get people talking about the art form, too.

The programme selection of the Berlin International Film Festival has an important impact on the European Film Market. How do you see the developments in the film market?
I think there’s going to be a very strong market. Our new director of the market and Berlinale Pro, Tanja Meissner, is a very experienced sales and distribution executive. We both share an interest in connecting the public programme and the industry. We want to help lead buyers to finding the right films in the festival. Much work that’s been done on the programme this year has been about clarifying how people can digest a complex programme of 200 films. 

What is your strategy for the Berlinale in the future? 
It’s about continuing to show the breadth of international cinema while creating windows for new audiences, maybe audiences who have never been to the festival to discover new work. On the industry side, we want the right buyers to see the right films. That’s the ambition.