Film is a collective art form: it involves creative people from all the various crafts coming together and giving their best.

The Berlinale champions the sustained promotion of talent; Perspektive Deutsches Kino and Berlinale Talents are also particularly focused on providing support and bringing visibility to all the different areas of filmmaking.Perspektive Match is a format that brings together experienced filmmakers and up-and-coming talents working in the same technical area for an artistic exchange.

For some of the films in this year’s Perspektive Deutsches Kino programme, a representative from the various crafts – a different one for each film – will be selected as a Perspektive Talent. On four afternoons in the HAU Hebbel am Ufer theatre (HAU1) and in cooperation with Berlinale Talents, the Perspektive Talents will participate in a panel discussion with a colleague from the same craft who is a member of the German Film Academy.

This is an opportunity to share experiences, open up new perspectives and celebrate the art of filmmaking with the audience. A film featuring their colleague’s work will be screened prior to each discussion.Perspektive Match is a cooperation between Perspektive Deutsches Kino, the German Film Academy and Berlinale Talents.

‘Perspective’ implies the future, opportunity, hope. It opens up new avenues, reveals unusual points of view, documents reality and delights us with escapism. Or all of the above.

The Perspektive Deutsches Kino section presents debut and second films produced in Germany but featuring universal, international stories. The selected narratives are multifaceted and courageous, their creators devise and realise them with curiosity, passion and originality.

The Perspektive Deutsches Kino section invites you to a series of panel discussions in front of an audience. During the “Talking About Film” events, high-ranking filmmakers from various disciplines will give interested parties and members of the industry insights into specific areas such as casting and music.Education and personal development are in no small part a matter of exchanges and of learning from one another.

This is why Berlinale Talents connects more than 200 filmmakers from all around the globe every year. The alumni community emerging from this is now one of the largest in the world, with almost 10,000 members hailing from a wide variety of cultural and social backgrounds and from over 130 countries.

Since 2020, the talent initiative has been awarding fellowships in the scope of Talents Footprints and the Mastercard Enablement Programme, which see mentors and coaches help the award-winning talents and alumni to further develop their film-related social initiatives, cultural platforms and self-funded networks with the aim of ensuring these projects have a sustainable effect on the local environment, quality of education and better working conditions.

And, with its Kompagnon Fellowship and the Berlin Film Residencies, Berlinale Talents is also helping to establish a new and more holistic approach to talent and career development that not only carefully evaluates a current project but also the social needs of everyone involved.

Perspektive Deutsches Kino is the section dedicated to exciting newcomers in the cinema landscape of Germany. Fiction films and essays, documentary forms and shorter formats are all welcome.

The cinematic ideas should stimulate discussion, emotionally engage audiences and open their eyes. Because filmmaking means helping to shape the world – and the future.

The most important awards at the Berlinale are the Golden Bear and the Silver Bears. They are presented by the International Jury to films in the Competition and belong to the most renowned awards in the international film industry.None of the Bears may be awarded ex aequo.

The Jury may not award more than one prize to the same film, except in the case of the acting awards, which may be awarded in addition to any other prize (Golden Bear, Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize etc.).

In recent years, internationally recognised personalities from the world of film such as Kristen Stewart, Wong Kar Wai, Mike Leigh, Isabella Rossellini, Werner Herzog, Tilda Swinton, Darren Aronofsky, Meryl Streep and Paul Verhoeven were invited to head the jury.

Jury members include directors, actresses and actors as well as producers, but also writers and artists. One of the festive highpoints of every Berlinale is the presentation of the Bears on the penultimate day of the festival.

For many years now, the Berlin International Film Festival has been committed to the diversity of documentary forms. A distinct award for the best documentary film was launched in 2017.The Berlinale Documentary Award is endowed with 40,000 Euros in prize money sponsored by public broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb).

The prize money is split between the winning film’s director and producer. Approximately 18 current documentary forms from the sections Competition, Encounters, Panorama, Forum, Generation, Berlinale Special and Perspektive Deutsches Kino are nominated for the Berlinale Documentary Award.