ARTHOUSE CINEMA with BAR and BISTRO in the heart of NEUKÖLLN
THE BIRTH OF NAIKEE — Clementine Decremps 20min
My Grandmother is a Skydiver — Polina Piddubna 10min
But What a Moment — Johanna Falke 9:50min
I Might Regret This — Aurélie van Oost 10min
Careful — Camille Lagaisse 13:40min
Loneliness Doesn't Come Alone — Amanda Valle 12:05min
Not Alone — Momo Cao 3:27min
Trannies live forever: turn your eyes to the sky — Merit Thursday 10:00min
Total running time: 1:45:09
LUMINOUS MATTER — Bianca Arnold, Moss Berke 15:20min
The Ozard — Ciska Meister 20min
Field of Fog — Giulia Palombino 3min
Blossoming Wasp — Nessa Norich 13min
AFTERLIFE — Sia Rass 16:18min
Mommy — Manon Praline 8:40min
The Magic Orange — Ali Burns 8:59min
Lacy's World: Mission — Lois Talullah 14:10min
Perverse Feminine — Kalen Aradia 16:07min
Total running time: 1:39:27
Noel Alejandro is an independent filmmaker and alternative adult films director whose work explores gay pornography as a tool to question society’s old standards. His films go beyond the explicit, being set to live in a blend between cinema and erotica.
Noel’s force strives for a more sensitive way of scriptwriting, setting up each story in order to continuously push pre-settled boundaries of filmmaking.
Longing to escape from the madness of urban life, Gaspar takes the trail for a quick dip in the lake. Heading to the city park, he is just another guy entering the “woody oasis where sex is a matter of nature” – as locals would call it.
His search ends when he sees Sebastian emerging from the water. With a vagabond attitude and a provocative Danish accent, he is the one to show Gaspar how a simple thought can grow like a seed and become a desire. Starring Yann André and Vic Valentine. THE SEED was filmed and edited in Berlin. Directed by Noel Alejandro.
(Info to follow)
Based on the beloved memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch and marking the directorial debut of Kristen Stewart, The Chronology of Water is a raw and unflinching portrait of survival, sexuality, and self-invention. The film traces Lidia’s life from her earliest memories in the Pacific Northwest, as a promising swimmer, through fractured relationships, near-motherhood, addiction, and encounters with artistic heroes. Told as a fluid memory wash, the story transforms trauma into art, embodying Yuknavitch’s defiant voice that made her work a modern cult classic. It is not only a chronicle of a woman becoming a writer, but a visceral journey through the wreckage and resilience of a life lived against the grain.
Iván & Hadoum is the debut film by Ian de la Rosa, which, through an intimate, delicate, and distinctive lens, crafts a love story that resonates deeply while moving beyond the conventions of romance, offering a reflection on class, racism, and labor struggles.
Set in the south of Spain, between an arid landscape and the sea breeze, the film follows Iván, a trans man working in a vegetable warehouse with a clear goal: to become a supervisor and provide greater financial stability for his family. After his father’s death, his role within the family shifts, pushing him to take on new responsibilities and confront questions about the person he wants to become.
At the warehouse, he meets Hadoum, a Moroccan seasonal worker who, unlike Iván, embodies a free and nomadic spirit. It is within this contrast, and a shared admiration for each other’s courage, that love emerges—though it is constantly exposed to social and familial judgment. The surrounding landscape, shaped by dunes, wind, and sea, becomes a refuge where their story can unfold with a sense of freedom.
(text by Pol Merchan)
Bouchra, a Moroccan filmmaker in her mid-thirties living in the United States, is trying to develop her next film. Confronted with the terror of the blank page, a phone call with her mother sets something in motion: an emotional and creative journey unfolding between Casablanca and New York, between family bonds and a first love, between autonomy and belonging. What emerges is a tender, vulnerable film populated by unique — and rather cute — characters, all searching for connection.
As Bouchra turns intimate phone conversations into cinematic material, Bouchra fluidly blends autofiction and animation. Dialogues with her mother, as well as with other figures in her life, open up a space to explore complex emotional terrain — questions of intimacy and acceptance across oceans. The visual language allows for a world of its own, as animated anthropomorphic characters move through photorealistic cityspaces.
At once playful and deeply personal, Bouchra becomes an ongoing meditation — and negotiation — on what it means to live across borders, both geographic and emotional, and to craft a self in the spaces in between.
(Text by Merle Groneweg)
“You hide things from me, I hide things from you. Maybe this is our way of protecting each other.” This documentary portrays the relationship between a mother and her son, living in Lebanon and Belgium, through phone footage, scanned documents, and found images.
The film unfolds a complex family dynamic woven with fabrications and small lies. There is the lie of being Palestinian in Lebanon, the concealment of being gay within a family, the later process of becoming a Belgian citizen, and eventually the act of coming out. Yet these revelations are not the film’s main focus. Instead, it highlights the entanglement between the personal and the political: citizenship, gender, sexuality, and the roles of mother and son that both define and constrain them, while also showing how they gradually move beyond these limitations and across distance.
Mobile phones become instruments of connection and conversation. No matter the oceans separating them, they continue to find ways to remain present in each other’s lives.
(text by Sarnt Utamachote)
This pairing of two films traces intimate processes of becoming, where personal change reverberates through family ties and ideas of home. In Flowering Man, a surreal metamorphosis, a plant growing from a person’s mouth, becomes the starting point for a fragile reconnection between parent and child. What begins as estrangement, shifts into a tentative acceptance, as the unfamiliar body opens up new ways of seeing and relating. A Song Without Home follows Adelina, a young trans woman, as she leaves her village in Georgia for Vienna after years of confinement. Yet distance does not easily sever the past and different kinds of violence challenge the imagination of home and safety. Through an attentive, intimate lens, the film explores what it means to claim freedom while affected by various structures of oppression.
(Text by David Bakum)
What does it mean to build a life across places, relationships, and identities that resist external definitions? Familiar Places follows Akosua over three years as she moves between Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Accra, navigating love, family, and her desire to have a child within a polyamorous constellation of relationships. Accompanied by her close friend and filmmaker Mala Reinhardt, conversations with partners, family, and collaborators open up a nuanced reflection on identity and self-determination. As Mala increasingly steps in front of the camera, their friendship becomes part of the film’s emotional core, a shared space of questioning, intimacy, and growth. Intimate and attentive, Familiar Places traces the shifting terrain of care and belonging, asking how we locate ourselves in the world, and how we imagine a future together.
(Text by David Bakum)
When Anand returns to his ancestral village following his father’s death, he is drawn into the rituals of grief. Expected to observe a ten-day mourning period, he initially feels estranged from village life, yet gradually reconnects with his mother, extended family, and his childhood friend Balya. As the days pass, however, questions begin to surface — from his family, from Balya, and ultimately from within himself: who is he, and with whom does he want to build a life?
Celebrated as the first Marathi film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema, Cactus Pears is a quiet, fragile story of intimacy set against the rhythms and landscapes of rural Maharashtra. Rohan Parashuram Kanawade approaches queerness with nuance, allowing space for ambivalence and contradiction rather than reducing it to familiar binaries of acceptance and rejection. What unfolds is a relationship that grows in the margins, shaped by what remains unsaid, but nonetheless is seen.
(Text by Merle Groneweg)
Between 1965 and 1971, the OHO group emerged in Yugoslavia as one of Eastern Europe’s most groundbreaking avant-garde movements. Fusing art, philosophy, and nature, they challenged dominant ideas about human-centered thinking, ecological relationships, and the commodification of art. Using previously unpublished archival material, the film brings their radical vision vividly back to life—raising questions that feel more urgent and relevant today than ever.
In the remote Liangshan Mountains of China, 14-year-old Qihuo sets out with her friends in search of a traditional skirt that marks her transition into adulthood. This simple, common journey unfolds into a poetic coming-of-age story about friendship, cultural expectations, and the tension between childhood and growing up. In a world shaped by poverty, where many are forced to take on responsibility too early, Qihuo clings to the freedom of youth, trying to delay the inevitable just a little longer.
Trying to escape from the patriarchy in the Italian post-war society, Delia plots an act of rebellion against her violent husband. Trying to escape from the patriarchy in the Italian post-war society, Delia plots an act of rebellion against her violent husband.
Carmen, 16, lives on the outskirts of Berlin with her mother Ruth and her brother Tito. Her father, a Puerto Rican soldier, is long gone, leaving behind only music records and postcards. Within her monotonous daily routine amid gray housing blocks, she dreams of becoming a dancer. In bold makeup and flowing robes, she stages her fantasies for the camera, conjuring fleeting moments of love and escape. The film observes her with quiet intimacy, where reality and imagination merge into a vivid counterworld—one in which desire briefly transcends the limits of her everyday life.
A striking portrait of an extraordinary woman: Diane Jobson, Rastafari icon, former lawyer to Bob Marley, and Jamaica’s enduring lawyer of the poor. In her 80s, she fearlessly fights for justice, challenges a corrupt system, smokes ganja, and wittily reflects on life, love, and mortality. Traversing courtrooms, nature, and deep bonds of friendship, the film offers a vibrant, moving celebration of resistance, spirituality, and a life lived unapologetically.
In Morocco, sex outside of Marriage is a criminal offense. Branded immoral as a single mother, Karima Nadir has dedicated her life to fighting against Article 490, a law that stigmatizes women, strips them of their rights, and leaves them to fend for themselves. Alongside defending her son and caring for her own mother, she supports women who, like her, are persecuted for public indecency, as well as rape survivors who face punishment themselves. As the country stands on the brink of a historic reform of the Family Code, Karima takes her battle to parliament. This film is a powerful portrait of resistance, courage, compassion, and the violence of the law.
After a controversial classroom exercise in 1968, Iowa teacher Jane Elliott became one of America’s most uncompromising voices against racism. Now, nearly 90, she continues to speak out with unwavering courage. In this compelling portrait, Elliott emerges as a force of nature—sharp-tongued, fearless, and relentless in challenging privilege and discrimination. At a time of renewed debates over race, history, and power, the film captures a woman whose voice remains as urgent and unyielding as ever.
After 40 years of exile in Argentina, Roberto, a blind novelist, comes back to his native city, Naples, for his mother’s death. Along with his brother Lorenzo, a former guitarist, he starts a journey of memory through the city of his youth he can’t see anymore but only feel through the other senses and his imagination, looking for the tragic reason of his departure.
