The cinemas of the Berlinale

The Berlinale has never had a single building. Its 2026 screening list runs from a 1957 heritage-listed premiere house in Charlottenburg to a prison gym in Plötzensee, taking in an academy, a pumping station, a crematorium quarter and five neighbourhood cinemas that get their own small red carpet. These are the rooms the films actually land in, with the addresses as the festival prints them and the step counts as the access desk records them.

Places in this collection

  • Kino International — Josef Kaiser built it on Karl-Marx-Allee between 1961 and 1963 as the GDR's premiere house, with a foyer, meeting rooms, club and library w…
  • Zoo Palast — The festival's first venue in 1951; the building standing on Hardenbergstraße now is Gerhard Fritsche's 1957 house, heritage-listed and res…
  • Uber Eats Music Hall — The Anschutz-run hall on Uber Platz, called the Verti Music Hall until March 2024, is one of the three premiere addresses and the reason th…
  • silent green Kulturquartier — The Gerichtstraße quarter in Wedding joined the screening roster along with the Gropius Bau and the reopened Deutsche Kinemathek, giving th…
  • Radialsystem V — The Holzmarktstraße arts house on the Spree is where Berlinale Talents sets up, so its festival traffic is participants rather than premier…
  • Haus der Kulturen der Welt — Bus 100 stops at the door and a tactile floor guidance system runs from the stop to the main entrance, where a touch model of the building…
  • Haus der Berliner Festspiele — Fritz Bornemann's theatre complex off Schaperstraße, built for the Freie Volksbühne and now the Berliner Festspiele house, doubles as one o…
  • Gropius Bau — During the festival the exhibition house becomes the European Film Market: stands, the Innovation and Producers Hub, a business lounge and…
  • Filmtheater am Friedrichshain — Five screens in the Bötzowviertel, run by the Yorck group, with the large hall carrying the festival slots. Wheelchair users enter by the s…
  • Cubix — Five levels and thirty metres of multiplex dropped onto Alexanderplatz in 2001, and the festival's east-side workhorse alongside the Potsda…
  • Colosseum — The Schönhauser Allee filmtheater sat empty long enough that photo tours were sold through the abandoned auditorium, and it now works as an…
  • Akademie der Künste — The Hanseatenweg house, not the Pariser Platz one, is the address the festival uses, and it works as a screening room rather than a cinema…
  • SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA — A Wedding cinema in the rear block of a Lindower Straße courtyard, Haus C, and the Berlinale Goes Kiez venue furthest from the Potsdamer Pl…
  • BALI Kino — The Zehlendorf house on Teltower Damm is one of five neighbourhood cinemas on the 2026 Berlinale Goes Kiez route, the strand running since…

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