A place like Hollywood is well aware of its mythology. Berlin doesn’t register that same relationship with itself, of course – it doesn’t insinuate seductive glamour. Perhaps that’s why it has been filmed so well, and regularly, by a whole range of filmmakers, from Hollywood studios to arthouse auteurs. Every filmmaker seems to find a different Berlin inside this city of fragments: concrete, sudden delicacy, long stretches of emptiness. The places and spaces of the city open up and bring something more than setting to the story of countless films set or filmed in Berlin. Here are some of the most iconic spots where the city has shined in film.
Gropiusstadt
In Christiane F. (1981), the cinematic depiction of the city’s heroin-fuelled underbelly show a West Berlin that’s dangerous, decadent and faintly romantic. Bahnhof Zoo remains inseparable from the film’s bleak glamour, but so too does nearby Gropiusstadt, the vast housing estate whose brutal anonymity frames Christiane’s adolescence. Standing there now, amid changing tides and new glosses of modernity, it still feels as though you know a secret others around you might not, as memories of the film’s cold palette and exhausted teenage faces still haunt you.
If you‘re interested in Christiane F, check out this photo series: Christiane F. in the 80s, our feature on Christiane’s second life or read up about actress Natja Brunckhorst and where she is now.
Karl-Marx-Allee
Few streets feel more cinematically suited to period drama than Karl-Marx-Allee, whose monumental Stalinist architecture has made it a perennial favourite for productions looking to evoke Europe at its most ideologically charged. In Atomic Blonde (2017), it provides the backdrop for sleek Cold War espionage, while The Queen’s Gambit (2020) uses its imposing facades to stand in for Soviet-era eastern Europe. Even now, the avenue’s theatrical scale feels almost too perfectly composed, as though built expressly for the camera.
Messedamm Underpass
One of Berlin’s more unexpectedly cinematic corners, the eerie orange-tiled Messedamm underpass has become a favourite for directors looking to heighten tension and unease. Both Atomic Blonde and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 use its strange geometry and uncanny emptiness to quietly disorientate, leaving the characters exposed and spatially trapped. The space itself becomes threatening, which adds to the tension in the scenes it’s used for, showing just how dystopian Berlin’s infrastructure can appear.
Alexanderplatz
Berlin’s most famous square lends itself naturally to thrillers – everything from Fassbinder’s iconic crime series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) to Babylon Berlin (2017), another crime drama series set at the end of the Weimar Republic. But few works use its scale and anonymity better than The Bourne Supremacy (2004). With its vast plazas, hard lines and perpetual movement, Alexanderplatz becomes the perfect setting for Bourne’s world of surveillance and pursuit. There is something about its cold openness that makes it ideal for paranoia: forever busy, forever exposed, with nowhere to hide.
Tempelhof Airport
Berlin’s vast former airport has long lent itself to dystopian fantasy. Will Tremper’s The Endless Night (1963) follows the story of a cast of characters trapped in the halls of the airport overnight due to heavy fog. The existential drama mimics the desperation of Sartre’s No Exit, as the space of the airport serves as a catalyst for characters to confront their own personal crises, as well as those of other passengers. Other eerie echoes come from the way the space harks back to World War II and the Nazi regime. Vincent Pérez’s Alone in Berlin (2016), following the story of a couple protesting the Nazis during World War II, was partially filmed outside of the airport, and famously, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) also used it as a backdrop in a scene when Indiana Jones is escaping Germany and the Nazis. Unsurprisingly, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015) also found a home in Tempelhof. Its cavernous interiors and endless concrete expanses offer precisely the kind of authoritarian grandeur blockbuster directors favour: austere, imposing and faintly unreal, as if designed less for travel than for propaganda.
Glienicke Bridge
Few Berlin landmarks carry as much Cold War symbolism as Glienicke Bridge, the historic crossing between Berlin and Potsdam once used for East-West spy exchanges. Unsurprisingly, Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015) uses it to full dramatic effect, drawing on its political history to amplify the film’s atmosphere of quiet tension and diplomatic theatre.
Oberbaumbrücke
Oberbaumbrücke becomes a major focal point in Run Lola Run (1998), which rendered the city newly kinetic through Franka Potente’s famous sprint through streets and squares. In the film, Potente blazes through Berlin as our heroine Lola, a young woman racing against the clock (quite literally – she just has 20 minutes) to save her desperate lover Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) after he loses a gangster’s money. In Tom Tykwer’s hands, Berlin becomes breathless, elastic, dreamlike: a city propelled urgently towards the future, and the iconic scene at Oberbaumbrücke embodies this perfectly. All red brick and gothic drama, the bridge has rarely looked more cinematic than it does in this scene.
Government District
Berlin’s governmental quarter becomes all glass, steel and quiet menace in the fifth season of political drama Homeland (2015), set in Berlin. This season shifts the plot away from conflict in the Middle East to a bleak European espionage storyline. The city is transformed into a landscape of permanent surveillance and bureaucratic paranoia. Hauptbahnhof, Friedrichstraße and the surrounding embassy district are filmed to emphasise their sleek sterility, presenting Berlin as a place where secrets are hidden in plain sight.
Westin Grand Hotel
Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015) may still offer the definitive portrait of Berlin after dark. This thriller, set over the course of one night in Berlin, follows the story of a Spanish tourist who gets pulled into several different criminal situations by some men she meets at a club. The film captures the city in all its nocturnal chaos: euphoric, messy, intimate and slightly dangerous. Few films understand quite so well the strange momentum of a Berlin night out, and the way the city can transform after midnight into something both exhilarating and faintly lawless. Other notable films that used the hotel as a backdrop thanks to its air of old European luxury were The Bourne Supremacy and scenes from the series Unorthodox (2020).
