How do Berlin Film Festival films differ from mainstream movies?
By comparing the stories of the 1,521 films shortlisted at the Berlin Film Festival to 17,000+ movies released in US cinemas, we can see what makes a 'festival film' different to a mainstream movie.
In a few weeks, I'll be making my annual trip to the Berlin Film Festival and European Film Market.
This year's 'In Competition' line-up was announced last week and features Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon; Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s debut feature Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s novel; and Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, a French fantasy drama starring Marion Cotillard.
I commented to a friend that this year's films feel squarely within what I think of as a 'Berlin film'. They asked me to explain what I meant, and I realised that I was just providing subjective conjecture (yuck!), and so data was needed!
I built two databases -
"Berlin Film Festival films" - 1,521 feature films which have been nominated for the Silver Bear, Berlin’s main award, between 1951 and 2023.
"All movies in cinemas" - 17,751 feature films which have grossed at least $1 at the US box office over the past century.
The aim is not to imply one set of films is better or worse than the other, but more to look for patterns among the Berlin films and also to compare them to what the average cinemagoer is offered at the multiplex.
I'm going to look at genres, stories, language, and origin.
Drama rules
Let's start with the obvious. As we see at almost all major film festivals, the vast majority of titles are dramas.
89% of all Berlin films are dramas, compared with 64% of all movies.
Berlin underindexes on the spectacle side of the big screen, as illustrated by the differences within Action (2.3% of Berlin films vs 17.8% of all movies) and Thrillers (6.7% vs 23.2%).
So if Berlin is not looking to see big physical events, where's the conflict?
I'm glad you asked as it leads us on to our next topic - the stories.
The pain is within
I gathered the plots of almost 20k movies and dug into the journeys of the characters.
What became immediately apparent is that Berlin films focus more on internal struggles. This emphasis on introspection often leads to narratives that are about personal growth, moral dilemmas, and the weight of societal expectations.
Movies in the cinema tend to tackle perhaps simpler themes, such as coming of age, revenge and just surviving.
Another way of seeing this is to look at what we could regard as the antagonist in each film. This could be something physical (such as another person) or metaphysical (such as societal norms or expectations).
Again, we see Berlin films over-index towards internal, emotional and metaphysical struggles.
Antagonists are often represented by systems or abstract forces rather than individuals, shifting the narrative focus from personal conflict to broader societal critiques.
Movies in the cinema are more likely to tell tales of people who are under threat from another person, a group of people, or the mob.
When is all this internal struggle taking place?
And when do these struggles take place? Often in the past.
I have a future piece of research coming up which looks at temporal representation in movies so I'll just be brief here. But suffice to say that Berlin films are more likely to take place in the past.
Berlin films are significantly more likely to depict earlier decades, particularly the first half of the 20th century, whereas mainstream cinema focuses more on recent and contemporary settings.
The most common non-contemporaneous time period is the 1940s. The chart below shows the decade Berlin movies have been set in, when it's mentioned in the synopsis and when it's not set in the same decade it competed at the festival.
And how are we expressing our grief?
While mainstream films in US cinemas are almost all in English, Berlin is an international festival in a country where English is not an official language. Despite this, a surprisingly large number of the films are in English.
Over the last 75 years, over a third (37.1%) of Berlin films have been in English, and in recent years it has been edging towards half.
French and German have become more commonplace, while Italian has been in decline.
And who’s behind them?
This is mirrored in the data behind which countries the movies come from. Films have increasingly come from France and Germany.
While fewer nominees have originated in Italy and Sweden.
The 1990s saw an interesting uptick in British and American entries, although that has declined in the decades since.
Note
The data for today's piece came from the Berlin site, Wikipedia, IMDb, OMDb and The-Numbers.
I don't wish to imply homogeneity is automatically a bad thing when it comes to festival selection. These patterns reflect the taste and tone of the festival, as well as their mission to champion certain stories and/or perspectives. They also provide a singular thread, linking together many years' worth of festivals and providing a guiding thread across different years' festivals.
Fascinating, as always, however, I think your first chart illustration is mismatched with the text. Keep up the good work.