October 7th – 11th at Kino Moviemento is the 8th Annual Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin: a celebration of female and non-binary filmmakers from 24 countries, plus Q&A and networking sessions.

Get your film festival tickets here. 

An event such as this demands a curriculum many steps above traditionally male-focused film festivals. It means surreal explorations of female identity, aging, and desire, thrillers with electric feminist slants, and women-centered migration, climate activism, and resistance stories.

Prepare yourself for strange alternate realties and bizarre and electrifying tales that could only come from the creative minds of the female and non-binary people currently reshaping cinema as we know it.

Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin kicks things off on Wednesday, October 7th at 7 p.m. with Canadian director Amanda Kramer’s By Design, starring Juliette Lewis and Melanie Griffith. It’s a surreal sci-fi drama wherein a woman becomes obsessed with a chair in a home décor shop, only to eventually swap bodies with it. As a woman, I can only say: hell ya.

At 9:30 p.m. Wednesdsay is the festival’s Opening Short Film Programme, “Between You & Me,” with stories spanning from Mexico, Italy, China, the UK, Germany, Canada, and France. The programme explores complicated relationships between sisters, mothers and daughters, strangers and friends and delves into topics of loneliness, migration, and memory.

Thursday at 5:00 p.m. is the European premiere of Gloria Mercer’s queer feminist psychological thriller A Safe Distance. 

Thursday at 7:00 p.m. is Germany’s premiere of Lorena Ros Sanz’s Up & Running (Corren las liebres), accompanied by the Turkish short film ALBAS.

Get your film festival tickets here.

Thursday at 9:00 p.m. is the short film programme “The Art of Resistance,” with stories that explore patriarchal power, dictatorship, and imposed identities.

Friday at 7:00 p.m. is the German premiere of Lorena Villarreal Treviño’s Life Is (La Vida es), which was shot on 35mm and explores love, freedom, mortality, and what the point of all this is.

Friday at 9:30 p.m. is “Bodies, Beats & Other Worlds,” a celebration of music, dance, fashion, and experimental films.

Saturday at 5:00 p.m. is “No Planet B,” which moves between fiction, documentary, sci-fi, and dance to explore the climate crisis and its impact on people and landscapes.

Saturday at 7:15 p.m. is the German premier of Gabrielle Russell’s The Reckoning of Erin Morrigan, a fascinating story of a former IRA operative dying of cancer in an isolated safe house on the Northern Irish border.

Get your film festival tickets here.

Saturday at 9:30 p.m. is the bizarre and surrealist short film programme “Me, Myself & I,” a series of unsettling and playful stories about growing old and falling apart and starting all over again.

Sunday at 5:00 p.m. is the short film programme “Next Level,” a collection of dark and comedic and fantastical films with a common theme: reality is no longer as it once was.

Sunday at 7:30 p.m. is the German premier of Isola by Nora Jaenicke, which is a haunting psychological drama — and the perfect way to close out the festival.

Not Your Average Film Festival

Remember that Female Filmmaker Festival Berlin offers networking events for female and non-binary filmmakers on everything from sound to cinematography to how to collaborate and further your career within a difficult industry. There will be idea exchanges, question and answer sessions, and time and space to learn and grow.

Friday, October 9th at 6 p.m. at The Social Hub Berlin Mitte is “Through Her Lens: Women Shaping the Image – FFFB × Cinematographinnen”

Get your tickets here. 

Saturday, October 10th at 6 p.m. at Cafe Mephisto, Kreuzberg is “Speed Networking with WIFT Germany”

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Sunday, October 11th at 6 p.m. at The Social Hub Berlin Mitte is “The Power of Sound: Women Shaping Stories Through Film”

Get your tickets here.