Retrospective with genre films: The Berlinale will be bloody

“The iconic and flashy mixes with action, thrill and drama,” says the announcement of the 2025 Berlinale retrospective. The festival, which will take place next year from February 13th to 23rd, will be presented in Section 15, which is traditionally popular with audiences Genre films from the 1970s from East and West Germany.

The title: “Wild, weird, bloody”. Rainer Rother, the director of the Kinemathek, who left in April and is organizing the retrospective again, points out that retro also addresses a long-standing prejudice according to which German film cannot do a genre. “But early German cinema laid an influential foundation for the international development of fantasy and science fiction.” Author filmmakers, as well as mass production, continued to be drawn to the genre later on.

Movements like the New German Film also played with genre forms, tested their limits and sought new paths, also with a view to the exploitation film wave at the time.

The first film titles of the retrospective announced by the Berlinale: Roland Klick’s psychedelic Western “Deadlock”, Hans W. Geißendörfer’s vampire film “Jonathan” (both FRG 1970), Horst Bonnet’s operetta film adaptation “Orpheus in the Underworld” (GDR 1974) and Günter Reisch’s satire “Carnations in Aspic” (GDR 1976). Works by Klaus Lemke, Ulli Lommel and Wolfgang Petersen will also be shown, rocker films, thrillers and a musical.

“Today’s audience is enthusiastic about genre cinema and enjoys tracing the roots of crime, science fiction, horror and other genres back to the beginning,” said the new Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle about the retrospective, which, like last year, was apparently closed for cost reasons is primarily stocked from cinema library stocks.

The full retro program is expected to be announced in December. Accompanying events will take place at E-Werk, the future location of the Deutsche Kinemathek, whose lease at the Filmhaus on Potsdamer Platz ends in December.