Berlin 2025

Starring Rose Byrne on revelatory form, Mary Bronstein’s high-energy dark comedy ‘If I Had Legs I’d Lick You’ takes a deep dive into the nightmarish pressures and surreal horrors of motherhood.

Punky Romanian auteur Radu Jude softens his usual bitingly satirical approach with his latest Berlinale prize-winner ‘Kontinental ’25’, a serious-minded but minor-key social drama about gentrification and bourgeois liberal guilt.

A Kazakh boy and a Chinese girl grow up together in China’s vast northeast, in Jing Yi’s dreamlike and meditative first film, ‘The Botanist’.

You can’t look away from nurse Floria as she races around an understaffed hospital to check on 25 seriously ill patients in Petra Volpe’s breathless, high-stress salute to the nursing profession.

Guillaume Ribot powerfully evokes the Holocaust in an astutely edited collection of outtakes from Claude Lanzmann’s 9½ hour documentary ‘Shoah’ (1985), both playing in the Berlin Film Festival at a crucial point in history.