From Timothée Chalamet to TV's latest epic series: Six reasons the 2025 Berlin Film Festival is set to make waves

Today, the annual Berlinale begins, as the German city hosts 10 days of film and TV premieres from around the globe, complete with appearances from big-time directors and A-list stars. Here's what to look out for.

It may be freezing in Berlin right now, but culturally, the temperature is about to rise as its annual film festival kicks off today. Alongside those in Cannes and Venice, the Berlinale is one of Europe's great trio of film festivals – and is known for mixing bold provocative programming with big names, as well as being a place where future awards winners can be first spotted. Here's six ways this year's event is likely to make a big impression.

Could Chalamet becomes the youngest ever winner of the best actor Academy Award for his skilled impersonation of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown? It's certainly looking increasingly likely, as in recent weeks he has narrowed the gap with long-standing category favourite Adrien Brody (incidentally, the current holder of the youngest winner accolade, for 2002's The Pianist) to the point where they are almost neck-and-neck in the odds. And that may in part be to his especially endearing campaigning, which has included everything from Saturday Night Live appearances to turning up at the film's London premiere on one of the city's distinctively neon green rental Lime bikes. Now he's set to land in Berlin for A Complete Unknown's Berlinale special gala, which will mark its German debut, and the question is: which quirky and headline-grabbing gesture might he deploy next? Eating a currywurst on the red carpet, perhaps?

Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke have collaborated on some of US cinema's most stunningly insightful and humane films – the Before trilogy and Boyhood included – so the director and actor should make beautiful music together again in Blue Moon, which premieres at the festival next Tuesday. Like Before Sunset, it's a real-time film, unfolding over 100 minutes in 1943, on the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein's first Broadway smash, Oklahoma!. At the party after the show, its composer, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), soaks up the acclaim alongside friends and admirers. But where does that leave Lorenz Hart (Hawke), who was Rodgers' lyricist and creative partner for 20 years before Oscar Hammerstein took over? The one-time toast of Broadway is now ground down by alcoholism and depression, with only the company of a protégée (Margaret Qualley) and a bartender (Bobby Cannavale) to keep him going. Is it too early to start talking about 2026's Oscars? Probably, but considering the level of talent involved, and considering that the Academy loves true stories of American entertainment legends, Blue Moon could well be in the mix.

It's been five years this month since the South Korean director changed the face of cinema history, when his scabrous class satire Parasite became the first ever film not in the English language to win the top prize at the Oscars. And now, finally, his much-anticipated follow-up Mickey 17 is getting its world premiere at Berlin this weekend, following delays; it was originally scheduled to be released in March 2024. What that may say about the quality of the film or not, we will have to see, but the trailer certainly suggests it will be a sci-fi like few others: starring the ever-creatively risk-taking Robert Pattinson, and adapted from a 2022 novel by relatively little known author Edward Ashton, it will tell the story of a man who repeatedly dies, and is then cloned again, as he works as an "expendable" on a space mission – only for the regeneration process to go wrong and send things haywire. The excellent supporting cast includes Toni Collette, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun and Mark Ruffalo, while the whole tone of the trailer suggests a particularly wacky treatise on some of Bong's favoured themes, namely capitalism and exploitation.

Increasingly, the top film festivals have made space for premieres of splashy TV shows too – this year's Berlinale will be screening the first two episodes of one of the year's most anticipated drama miniseries, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Adapted from the Booker prize-winning novel by Australian author Richard Flanagan, it stars Saltburn and Euphoria heartthrob Jacob Elordi as Dorrigo Evans, an Australian World War Two soldier who becomes interred in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Tracing his traumatic experiences there being forced to help build Burma's notorious "Death" Railway, as well as his subsequent return to his home country, it will undoubtedly be an intense viewing experience. Promisingly, too, it's directed by Justin Kurzel, who with films like True History of the Kelly Gang and The Order, has established himself as a superb deconstructor of masculinity and male violence. The show is set to premiere on the BBC in the UK soon, and Amazon Prime Video in Australia, New Zealand and Canada on 18 April, with a US release date yet to be confirmed. But with the talent involved, you can rest assured it will find its way there soon enough too.

Beware: when If I Had Legs I'd Kick You premiered at the Sundance Festival in January, it was hailed as the most stressful viewing experience since Uncut Gems. Rose Byrne stars as an overworked therapist who is looking after her sick daughter while her husband is away – and as she is faced with problem after problem, viewers may reach the panic levels usually associated with a slasher movie. Mary Bronstein's frantic comedy drama isn't the only film in Berlin to be propelled by the crushing pressures of ill health and motherhood, either. In Mother's Baby, a German drama written and directed by Johanna Moder, a new mother (Marie Leuenberger) feels so alienated from her poorly infant that she suspects that a doctor (Claes Bang) has given her someone else's offspring instead. And in Rebecca Lenkiewicz's Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy's Booker prize-nominated novel, the relationship between a controlling mother (Fiona Shaw) and her grown-up daughter (Emma Mackey) fractures when they travel to Spain to find a cure for the mother's debilitating illness.

Berlin is a festival that specialises in powerfully political dramas and documentaries. Last year, two of the big winners were Dahomey, a non-fiction work about the repatriation of colonial artefacts, which picked up the Golden Bear for best film, and No Other Land, a documentary exploring the situation in the West Bank, which earned an audience award in the Panorama section for edgier, more experimental material. This year, that tradition looks set to continue right from the opening night film The Light, written and directed by Tom Tykwer, in which a German family is shaken by the arrival of a Syrian refugee. Elsewhere Gabriel Mascaro's The Blue Trail imagines a near-future in which the Brazilian government forces citizens in their mid-70s to move away to their own remote communities. And most intriguingly of all, Michel Franco's Dreams stars Jessica Chastain as a wealthy San Francisco socialite having a passionate romance with a ballet dancer (Isaac Hernández) who has crossed the border illegally from Mexico. This torrid older-woman-younger-man drama could be this year's Babygirl, but it's not just the differences in age and status that cause trouble in Dreams, but the imbalance in the lovers' rights to live and work in the US. If you've seen Franco's 2020 thriller, New Order, you'll know that when the underprivileged meet the overprivileged in his films, the results can be shocking.

The Berlin Film Festival runs from 13 to 23 February.

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