Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud has won the 2025 Berlinale Golden Bear for Dreams, a queer love story that completes his verbally explicit, but visually chaste Sex, Love, Dreams trilogy.
The deceptively ambitious drama follows a teenage girl’s infatuation with her female teacher, told mostly in retrospect, as the teen recounts her memories through a novel she has written about the events. In his review, The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney called the film “tender, captivating and often very funny,” noting the fact that Haugerud has made “three thematically related but narratively distinct features in a year is remarkable enough; that they are all terrific, even more so.”
The Berlin jury, headed by Carol director Todd Haynes, picked Dreams from the 19 titles in competition at the 75th Berlinale.
Rose Bryne and Andrew Scott won top acting honors at this year’s Berlinale film festival, with Bryne winning the best leading performance honor for her barnstorming performance in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, and Scott taking the best supporting performance honor for playing Broadway composer Richard Rogers in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon.
Bryne has been earning rave reviews for her harrowing, and hilarious performance in If I had Legs, where she plays a therapist on the edge of her own nervous breakdown. A24 is bowing the film stateside. Sony Pictures Classics is releasing Blue Moon.
The Silver Bear Grand Jury prize, Berlin’s runner-up honor, went to Gabriel Mascaro’s dystopian fantasy The Blue Trail from Brazil. Denise Weinberg stars a spirited septuagenarian who refuses to bow to ageist authoritarian dictates and be removed to a “seniors’ colony,” instead deciding to pursue her dreams and desires.
Chinese director Huo Meng won the Silver Bear for best director for his richly detailed, novelistic drama Living the Land, which follows an extended family of poor farmers scraping by as China gradually transforms into a global economic powerhouse.
The Silver Bear Jury prize went to director Ivan Fund for The Message, a black-and-white road movie that follows a little girl who claims she can read the minds of animals.
Boundry-pushing Romanian director Radu Jude, who took Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2021 for his feature Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn, took the best screenplay honor for his latest feature Kontinental ’25, a caustic morality tale set in modern-day Romanian.
“I’m a bad screenwriter, so this is a very funny award to get,” said Jude, who thanked his film team, before adding a political barb, referencing Sunday’s national elections, and the rise of the far-right in Germany: “I just hope that next year’s festival doesn’t open with Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will!”
The ensemble of Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s The Ice Tower, a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable The Snow Queen, won the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution. Oscar-winning French star Marion Cottilard plays a dual role in the feature, as both a 1970s film star and the winter monarch herself.
“I don’t think films change the world,” said Hadzihalilovic, accepting the prize, “but I think films help us to dream especially in this difficult moment. Vive le cinéma!”
Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat, a harrowing look at an Israeli-American family whose lives were upended when two of them were taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, won the best documentary prize. Accepting the honor, Kramer said his film offered “no easy answers” but tried to capture the “nuances of one family” in crisis.
Mexican filmmaker Ernesto Martínez Bucio won the best feature debut honor in the festival’s new Perspectives section, winning for the wonderfully-titled The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box), a family dramas set in Mexico City in the 1990s that follows fives siblings abandoned by their parents with their schizophrenic grandmother who find the barrier between the real and the imaginary begin to dissolve.
2025 Berlin Film Festival Winners
Golden Bear for Best Film
Dreams, director Dag Johan Haugerud
Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize
The Blue Trail, director Gabriel Mascaro
Silver Bear Jury Prize
The Message, director Ivan Fund
Silver Bear for Best Director
Huo Meng for Living the Land
Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance
Rose Byrne for If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You
Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance
Andrew Scott for Blue Moon
Silver Bear for Best Screenplay
Radu Jude for Kontinental ’25
Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution
For the ensemble of The Ice Tower, director Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Best Directorial Debut in Perspectives
The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box), director Ernesto Martínez Bucio
Best Documentary
Holding Liat, director Brandon Kramer
Golden Bear for Best Short Film
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished, director Lesley Loksi Chan
Silver Bear Jury Prize for Short Film
Ordinary Life, director Yoriko Mizushiri
Berlinale Short Cupra Filmmaker Award
Quenton Miller for Koki, Ciao
Berlin Short Film Candidate for the European Film Awards
How Are You?, directors Caroline Poggi, Jonathan Vinel
