Berlinale: Berlin in February, and What Is Actually Open

About the Berlinale

The Berlin International Film Festival, universally known as the Berlinale, was founded in 1951 and originally ran in June. It now takes place each February, centred on the Berlinale Palast at Potsdamer Platz, and awards the Golden Bear and Silver Bears.

What separates it from Cannes and Venice is openness. A large share of screenings are sold to the public, which makes it the one A-list festival where an ordinary visitor can genuinely watch competition films rather than stand behind a barrier.

What Is Not Open

The premieres at the Palast, the European Film Market and the parties around both run on accreditation and invitation. So the honest shape of the week is this: the films are reachable, the industry around them is not, and the interesting arrangement is accreditation plus the right dinners rather than tickets.

Berlin in February is also cold and dark, which is part of why the festival feels like a working event rather than a red carpet with a festival attached.

The Sections, and Where the Interesting Films Are

The Competition is what the Golden Bear is awarded from, and it is where the premieres and the red carpet sit. But the Berlinale’s reputation among people who actually go rests on the sections around it: the Panorama, the Forum and Berlinale Special, which between them carry the films that turn up on year-end lists twelve months later.

There is also a rhythm worth knowing. The first weekend is the busiest and the most competitive for seats. By the middle of the week the queues have thinned, the industry has seen what it came for and it becomes possible to walk into screenings that were impossible on the Friday.

Where to Start

• Book the hotel first — Mitte and Potsdamer Platz fill for the festival
• Buy public screenings early — they go on sale days before and clear quickly for the competition titles
• Accreditation is the difference — it converts a week of films into a week of the industry
• Dress for a northern February — this is not the Riviera

One structural thing about the Berlinale that no other major festival offers: because the public buys most of the seats, the audience is a Berlin audience rather than an industry one. Films get watched by people who chose them, and the reaction in the room is honest in a way that a Cannes screening is not.

That also means the festival has a shape outside the cinemas. Dinners run late, the market people are reachable in the evenings rather than only at the Palast, and the whole thing behaves like a working fortnight in a working city. Arranging it well is mostly about the hotel, the accreditation and four dinners.

Berlin in February

The city is cold, grey and dark by four in the afternoon, and the festival is better for it — nobody is outside being photographed, so the whole thing happens indoors, in cinemas and at dinner. Potsdamer Platz is the centre of the operation and Mitte is where most people stay.

Practical detail matters more here than at a festival on a warm coast. The venues are spread between Potsdamer Platz, Mitte and Kreuzberg, screenings run from the morning until late and the gaps between them are short, so a car and a driver do more for the week than an upgrade anywhere else. The other thing worth settling in advance is where to eat after eleven at night, because that is when the Berlinale conversation actually happens, and February in Berlin does not reward improvisation at that hour.

How We Help

• Accreditation where it is appropriate, and seats at the screenings that matter
• A hotel in Mitte or at Potsdamer Platz during the week the city fills
• Access to the dinners and parties that run alongside the market
• Tables through the festival week, via our Fine Dining & Nightlife service
• Transport and staff across a cold, busy fortnight — ask your Business Concierge