Honour the legendary late Gene Hackman with a gritty double-bill at Filmrauschpalast, dive into the creative process with musician Barbara Morgenstern at Lichtblick Kino, and experience a decadent night of silent film and performance at Babylon Kino with Salomé.
In Memoriam Gene Hackman: Mississippi Burning, The French Connection
Two films, one legend. On June 1, the Filmrauschpalast pays tribute to the great Gene Hackman, the gravel-voiced titan of American cinema who sadly died in February, with a gritty double-bill that reminds us why he was Hollywood’s most magnetic miserablist. Presented by Analogfilm, the evening showcases Hackman doing what he did best: playing men for whom moral compromise is less a dilemma than a professional reflex.
First up is Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, 1989), a scorched-earth procedural in which Hackman is at his growling, gut-driven best as a jaded FBI agent wading into the swamplands of Southern racism, with a doe-eyed Willem Dafoe in tow. It’s a film that simmers with outrage anchored by Hackman’s performance – all tension, temper and trenchcoat. Then, the main event for many: William Friedkin’s 1971 The French Connection. Hackman barrels through the screen as Popeye Doyle, a rogue cop in a porkpie hat with a nose for heroin and a talent for vehicular mayhem. That subway chase? A masterclass in sweaty-palmed suspense and street-level kineticism, with Hackman charging down the tracks like cinema’s angriest bloodhound.
- Filmrauschpalast, Kulturfabrik Moabit, Lehrter Str. 35, Moabit, Jun 1, details.
Barbara Morgenstern und die Liebe zur Sache
Over at Lichtblick Kino, there’s something for the cinephile music-heads: a special screening of Sabine Herpich’s 2024 Barbara Morgenstern und die Liebe zur Sache, presented by Soundwatch Music Film Festival and featuring a post-screening conversation with musician Barbara Morgenstern, hosted by Natalie Gravenor. Best known as a pioneer of Germany’s electro-pop scene, Morgenstern invites us behind the scenes as she crafts her latest album, In anderem Licht. What begins in the quiet of her Berlin apartment – sketching lyrics, building harmonies – soon expands into a full-blown creative journey, with band rehearsals, sessions at the iconic Hansa Studios, photo shoots, video production and the logistics of a live tour.
But behind the familiar rhythms of album-making lie deeper questions: how far to push the sound, how much to say and how best to bring it all to the stage? Directed with grace and restraint by Herpich, this is no puff piece. Instead, we’re treated to a rare, quietly revealing look at the collaborative process, where every note and decision is shaped by careful listening and mutual respect. The result is a film as intimate as it is inspiring: a celebration of music as sanctuary, statement and shared space.
- Lichtblick Kino, Kastanienallee 77, Prenzlauer Berg, Jun 2, German with English subtitles, details.
Babylon Bohème
Charles Bryant and Alla Nazimova’s silent film Salomé (1923) is a good starting point for this decadent night of cinema, music and performance on offer at Babylon Kino. Some see the film as one of America’s first great art films, and Salomé slithered onto the screen like a fever dream, an art-deco hallucination born of Oscar Wilde’s decadence and early Hollywood’s sins. Nazimova, the high priestess of silent-screen glamour, conjures a sapphic, silver-screen sorcery with a cast drawn from her queer salon.
Charles Bryant, her husband (though the marriage was never consummated), was director largely on paper. Too outré for its time, Salomé remained in the shadows until underground cinephiles resurrected it as a queer relic. Alongside this screening, the evening of oddities – traversing both the intoxication of the 1920s and the social tensions of our modern age – will include burlesque performances, theatre (Maria Jamborsky takes on two captivating productions that play with gambling and The Great Gatsby) and a medley of Marlene Dietrich songs from German film and television personality Désirée Nick, plus puppet shows, a lot of live music and life drawing. A night to make Kenneth Anger proud!
- Babylon, Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 30, Mitte, Jun 7, details.
Dokumentale
Back for its second year, Dokumentale is promising a jam-packed lineup of media. Its debut weekend (June 12-15) will take place at Berlin’s Atelier Gardens, a site steeped in cinema history and now reimagined as a space for social and artistic transformation. Across its first three days, this fresh addition to the festival calendar brings together a vibrant mix of film and conversation in one of Europe’s oldest working studios. The programme is joyously eclectic: open-air screenings under the summer sky, rooftop readings with sweeping views from Tempelhofer Feld to the TV Tower, hands-on tours of historic soundstages, live podcast tapings, and a family-friendly segment for young cinephiles.
There will also be unique new venues to watch movies, like Tresor’s Globus. At its heart, Dokumentale is about documentary as a catalyst for change and exchange; its founders, Vivian Schröder and Anna Ramskogler-Witt, both come from a background in filmmaking and the cultural sectors. This year’s full lineup features over 40 films, including more than 20 German premieres and the European premiere of The Age of Water (Alfredo Alcántara, Isabel Alcántara, 2024), a radical story of radioactive water and bureaucratic silence in Mexico. This searing documentary captures six mothers turning grief into fury – and in doing so, reminding us that justice rarely comes cleanly.
The queer cinema selection alone is worth the ticket: Sally (Cristina Costantini, 2025), Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story (Michael Mabbott, Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, 2024) and Sabbath Queen (Sandi Simcha DuBowski, 2024) are already causing a stir, even more so as the title character in the latter will be coming to Berlin for the screening. Local stories aren’t forgotten either – Death Is an Asshole (Michael Schwarz, 2025) takes an irreverent look at life from the undertaker’s side, and Little Syria (Reem Karssli, Madalina Rosca, 2025) offers a moving portrait of Syrian refugees carving out new lives in the city. And for those drawn to the intersection of image and memory, there’s a special photography installation by Donata Wenders (wife of Wim), continuing the quiet visual legacy of one of Germany’s most iconic cinematic families. A weekend for film lovers and the curious-minded – Dokumentale has it all.
- Various locations, Jun 12- 22, details.
Zebra Poetry Film Festival 2025
The Zebra Poetry Film Festival offers a diverse slate of poetry films from around the world. What is a poetry film, you might ask? In basic speech, it’s an artform in which the moving image collides with poetry. These films might be explicit in that concept or experimental, and the festival promises to delight our senses with both. There will be an international competition, alongside four programmes with around 50 animations, feature films, experimental films and documentaries.
The filmmakers and poets whose work is showcased aim to raise themes that “question history and current events, explore identities and the ever-present longing for human closeness, are haunted and guided by ghosts and travel through landscapes and memories”. Their “poetic and fearless” films range from the dreamlike to the visionary to the reality-driven. In the Berlin film landscape, this festival is something refreshing and different, and it all takes place at one of Berlin’s unique art spaces, silent green. Film is, after all, visual poetry.
- silent green, Gerichtstr. 35, Wedding, Jun 5-8, details.
