The Berlin International Film Festival has announced the winners of the 2025 Panorama Audience Awards, with Spanish drama Sorda (Deaf) by Eva Libertad taking the top prize for best feature film and German documentary Die Möllner Briefe (The Moelln Letters) by Martina Priessner winning in the Panorama Dokumente category. The awards, decided by audience votes, were presented in collaboration with radioeins and rbb television.
Libertad’s Sorda follows Ángela (Miriam Garlo) and Héctor (Álvaro Cervantes), an inter-abled couple in Spain preparing for the birth of their child. Ángela, who is deaf, is surrounded by a strong community of deaf friends but struggles with pressure from her hearing parents to wear hearing aids. After giving birth to a daughter, she begins to question whether she will be able to fully connect with her child and the world around her, a fear that places new strain on her relationship with her hearing husband Héctor. Produced by Distinto Films, Nexus CreaFilms, and A Contracorriente Films, Sorda is being sold worldwide by Madrid-based Latido Films.
The second and third-place winners in the feature film category were Lesbian Space Princess from Australian directors Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese — one of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Berlinale Hidden Gems this year — and Hjem, kære hjem (Home Sweet Home), a drama centered on a home carer, from Danish filmmaker Frelle Petersen.
In the documentary category, Priessner’s Die Möllner Briefe revisits the 1992 arson attack in the German town of Mölln, in which neo-Nazis set fire to the homes of Turkish-German families, killing three people and injuring several others. The film follows the survivors, including İbrahim Arslan, who was a child at the time, as they uncover hundreds of condolence letters sent by the public but never delivered to the victims’ families. Priessner examines the long-term impact of the attack, the bureaucratic mishandling of historical memory, and the intergenerational trauma that persists more than 30 years later.
The documentary was produced by Berlin-based inselfilm production, and is being sold worldwide by New Docs.
Second and third place in the Panorama Dokumente category went to Areeb Zuaiter’s Yalla Parkour, about the fearless parkour athletes in Gaza; and Khartoum, a look at five very different residents of the Sudanese capital, shot by Sudanese filmmakers Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy, Timeea M Ahmed, and British director Phil Cox.
