This article appeared in the February 28, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude, 2025)

The weather was pleasant but the zeitgeist damp on the last day of the 75th Berlinale, as Germans voted in the federal election. More than 20 percent of the votes cast were for Alternative for Germany (AfD), representing the highest support here for a far-right party since World War II. The prevailing mood of gloom and resignation around the election reminded me of Italian philosopher Franco Berardi’s concept of the “psychosphere,” or the realm where society’s Unconscious—the weight of all that it represses, marginalizes, and invisibilizes—manifests itself. We can feel it now in the West’s present profound collective depression, resulting from a sense of political powerlessness in the face of global techno-fascist tendencies and the neoliberal destruction of social solidarity. 

In his 2024 book Quit Everything: Interpreting Depression, Berardi advocates for desertion as an ethical “opting out” of the mantra of endless economic growth, and sabotage and stoppage as modes of conduct to help us slow down and reset. I thought of desertion more than once during this Berlinale, not least because, despite new Artistic Director Tricia Tuttle’s declaration on the festival website that the institution respects free speech, there’s little actual space for it in Berlin. The current city leadership has stripped the local culture of funds and oxygen. In one recent example, reported by the newspaper Die Zeit, Mayor Kai Wegner pressured Free University to cancel its lecture on the Middle East by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and human-rights activist Eyal Weizmann; the event was moved to an alternative venue in what’s become a trend of stifling any criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

There were, of course, incisive films in the Berlinale’s Competition that mirrored the depressive state of societal breakdown. Disappointingly, Bong Joon Ho’s dystopian science-fiction comedy Mickey 17 wasn’t one of them, though it’s hard to think of a protagonist more hopeless than Mickey (Robert Pattinson), who, as an “expendable” on a mission to the icy planet Niflheim, is killed time and again, and replaced by a near-identical clone. Mickey 17 mashes up deadly viruses, work precarity, technological disruption, intergalactic territorial conquest, a maniacal leader (in the form of a Trumpian showman played by Mark Ruffalo), and a pathological desire for eternal life—every aspect, it seems, of our ailing world. Yet such thematic overabundance, and Bong’s tendency to treat narrative threads glibly, ultimately proved more numbing than illuminating.

More insightful was Radu Jude’s caustic satire Kontinental ’25, for which the Romanian filmmaker won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. Set in the city of Cluj in northwestern Romania, Jude’s film frames ideology as a cynical game and nationalism as a deeply divisive and reactionary force. The film’s protagonist, a bailiff named Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), decries the old communist elites–turned–nouveau-riche real-estate developers who rule her country. Orsolya should know—she evicts tenants from buildings to clear plots for these moguls’ construction projects. After one such “expendable” (to borrow a term from Bong) hangs himself, despite Orsolya securing a place for him at a shelter, she’s unable to reconcile her ethics with the job that’s paying her own mortgage in a new development. 

Tompa is brilliant as a conscientious bureaucrat whose guilt isn’t assuaged by a friend’s stark account of her own failed good Samaritanism; consulting her mother and a priest likewise prove useless. In habitual Jude fashion, Orsolya’s quest for redemption gets a jaunty (and rather raunchy) twist when she goes drinking with her former law student—yet the romp doesn’t dull the merciless precision with which Jude critiques the futility of appeasing one’s conscience while trapped in a neo-capitalist system that denies any notion of the common good. Kontinental ’25 demonstrates that in such a system, solidarity rooted in middle-class paternalism toward the poor can only go so far. Orsolya’s retreat into pleasure, on the other hand, recalls Berardi, who advocates for the reclamation of our sensual lives as a strategy against psychic exhaustion.

Mental depletion is also at the center of Sirens Call (2024), a docu/sci-fi film by Germany’s Miri Ian Gossing and Lina Sieckmann, which screened in the Berlinale Forum program. Una (Gina Rønning), a prison psychologist suffering from an autoimmune illness, travels through a futuristic America equipped with oxygen stations. But Una is also a half-mermaid, forced to take languid soaks in hotel rooms so as not to dry out. When she meets a nonbinary teenager, Moth (Moth Rønning-Bötel), and they go to a merfolk community in Portland, Oregon, the categorically fluid film hews closer to documentary. Members of the real-life group share their reasons for slipping on mermaid costumes—to express ecological grief, to escape the confines of a puritan society, and to manifest a more accepting world. Meanwhile, as Una tunes in to the radio, news of the conservative backlash against LGBTQ+ causes—such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s prohibition of school instruction on sexual identification and gender identity—illuminates some of the reasons for the community’s melancholy. As one mer-person says, “This world is my nightmare. Isn’t it yours?” Against such psycho-social weariness, Una’s rigorous self-care reads like a companion strategy to Orsolya’s sensual abandonment, with both characters retreating into private spheres.

The social abyss couldn’t be more profound than it is in Oleksiy Radynski’s Special Operation, which screened in the Forum Expanded program. The documentary was culled from a thousand hours of footage taken by surveillance cameras in 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine and its army occupied the defunct Chernobyl nuclear-power plant—the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. At the film’s premiere, Radynski and editor Taras Spivak stressed that they wanted to emphasize the chilling and incongruous banality of the plant’s occupation, during which the facility’s Ukrainian staff were held hostage within the contaminated zone for weeks. Most of the actions captured on camera, such as soldiers patrolling, unloading supplies, or posing for cameras, are creepily casual, belying the gravity of the nuclear threat. 

The film’s sound designer, Vladimir Golovnitski, layers audio to create a continuously claustrophobic atmosphere, only occasionally pierced by Ukrainians reporting Russian atrocities on the radio. The surveillance cameras remain static and remote throughout, so that even dramatic events—such as when a small crowd of Ukrainian volunteers gathers at the plant’s entrance to relieve their exhausted colleagues—are never highlighted or emphasized visually. But at times, a camera zooms in and out of the image, as if a ghost inside the machine were trying to determine the gravity of its surroundings. Unlike the spectacular frenzy of Bong’s intergalactic conflict, humanity’s endgame could instead very well play out like this, with robotic eyes coolly observing our self-orchestrated extinction.

Peter Wollen’s political science-fiction film Friendship’s Death (1987) countered this vision of techno-dystopia with a dream of interplanetary solidarity. The film screened in the Berlinale Special section, and was chosen by Tilda Swinton, who received this year’s Honorary Golden Bear. Played by Swinton, Friendship is an android on a mission to MIT and the United Nations, crash-landing en route in civil-war-torn Amman, Jordan. The film was also screened as part of “On Strike Berlin,” a parallel program hosted by a group of film workers and activists in response to a call by Strike Germany and Film Workers for Palestine to boycott this year’s Berlinale. The “Strike Berlinale” campaign cites, among other factors, the complicity of the German state (the primary funder of the Berlinale) with Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the censoring of pro-Palestinian voices in Germany, and the events of last year’s Berlinale, where the filmmakers behind No Other Land were condemned by German politicians and press (and even received death threats) for calling on Israel to end “the situation of apartheid” in Palestine while receiving their Berlinale Documentary Award. 

At the On Strike screening, Egyptian filmmaker Philip Rizk, British film scholar Nicolas Helm-Grovas (presently writing a book titled Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-Cinema), and Palestinian editor and educator Hazem Jamjoum contextualized the film, which is set during the “Black September” of 1970, when Jordan’s army attacked Palestinian resistance fighters, ending the hope for a revolutionary pan-Arab struggle. Stuck in a hotel without papers, Friendship spars with Sullivan (Bill Paterson), a jaded British journalist, and marvels at her newfound human shell—in one scene, she is captivated by the blood spilling from a fighter’s wound. In the end, Friendship abandons her mission, realizing that the information she’s gathered and her technological capabilities are likely to be weaponized to serve the military-industrial complex, rather than to rid the Earth of wars. (She is no pacifist, though; she is seen wearing a fighter’s uniform at the end, driven by her desire to give meaning to her existence.)

Watching the film in today’s times, when artificial intelligence is a looming, threatening reality rather than a fiction, I found Friendship’s profound humanism to be somewhat eerie. But she struck me as precisely the kind of deserter figure championed by Berardi. Based on her perception of other people as bodily extensions of herself, she renounces her designated purpose—not because doing so is logical, and certainly not because it’s life-preserving, but because she sees no other way of extracting herself from a system that perpetuates murder. Friendship’s sabotage of her mission reminded me of the phrase by one of the merfolk in Sirens Call: “Just because it’s an ending doesn’t mean it’s over.”

Ela Bittencourt is a writer who contributes essays on film and art to such international publications as Artforum and Frieze magazine. She’s currently living in Berlin.