Nightborn by Hanna Bergholmin to Berlinale Main Competition

Finnish minority co-production Árru is in Panorama, and the media art installation Industries of Denial, Stage 10: From Musa Dagh to Port Saïd is in Forum Expanded.

Image: Nightborn, Pietari Peltola / Komeetta

Nightborn (orig. Yön lapsi), the second feature film by Hanna Bergholm, has been selected to Competition at Berlinale. The film is written by Bergholm and Ilja Rautsi and produced by Daniel Kuitunen for Komeetta. The international sales are handled by Goodfellas.

The film follows Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint), a couple eager to start a family, who move to her childhood home in the Finnish forest. But after their baby’s birth, the couple’s dream of a perfect child spirals into a nightmare and only she senses the unsettling truth.

This is the third time a Finnish film has been selected to the main competition at Berlinale in the 2000s: Aki Kaurismäki won the Silver Bear for Directing for The Other Side of Hope in 2017. Black Ice, by Petri Kotwica, was in competition in 2008. Bergholm’s previous film Hatching premiered at Sundance in 2022.

Árru

Árru, a Norwegian drama by Elle Sofe Sara, has been selected to the Panorama section. Set in Sápmi, the film follows reindeer herder Maia who tries to protect the land from a mining company. The film is supported by the Finnish Film Foundation and the Finnish co-producers are Jani Pösö, Anita Hyppönen and Sanna Kultanen from It’s Alive Films.

Industries of Denial, Stage 10: From Musa Dagh to Port Saïd

Industries of Denial, Stage 10: From Musa Dagh to Port Saïd, by Angela Melitopoulos and Kerstin Schroedinger, is part of the Forum Expanded exhibition. Industries of Denial is an ongoing audiovisual research on the historic infrastructure project “The Baghdad Railway” at the beginning of the 20th century. The Finnish-German-Greek production addresses the 100-year long denial politics and the structural erasure of minority histories.

Finnish Film Foundation takes part in the European Film Market together with the other Nordic Countries. The Five Nordics has a stand at Gropius Bau (Niederkirchnerstraße 7), and we organize a Spotlight event showcasing upcoming films to buyers, distributors and festival programmers.

Berlinale takes place February12–22, 2026.