German Film Festival x KinoFest 2026
1 - 18 October

One of Singapore’s longest-running foreign film festivals returns to Filmhouse and other locations this year with a selection that celebrates the diversity and vitality of contemporary German cinema. The 29th edition of the German Film Festival invites you on a cinematic odyssey that explores the nuances of shifting modernities, memory, and self-determination.

This year, we’ll meet protagonists who search for answers amidst the turmoil of their shifting modernities. Our opening film, Fatherland, the visually breathtaking and this year’s Cannes Best Director offering from Paweł Pawlikowski, centres on the writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika, as they return after sixteen years of exile to a Germany in ruins, to encounter fractures and irreparable loss not merely in notions of the homeland and belonging, but deeper still in the home, and the inalienable spaces occupied by family. While Red Stars Upon the Field follows Tine, an activist on the run, as she delves into the identity of a skeleton found in the moors of her East German village, only to uncover buried chapters and webs of secrets in their shared personal histories. And Amrum heroes Nanning, a 12-year-old boy who scours his remote North Sea Island in a struggle to feed his pregnant, Nazi-loyalist mother, to the backdrop of turning tides and roiling tensions that foreshadowed the fall of Nazi Germany.

Our programme also offers films that grapple with individual identity and memory—the stories that we tell others, and whether they cohere with the stories that we write for ourselves. Berlin Hero is about Micha, a video-store owner on the verge of bankruptcy, who, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, becomes the mastermind behind the largest mass escape from the GDR. In The Trouble with Being Born, Elli is an android programmed with memories that mean everything to her owner but nothing to her; the film tells the story of the machines and mechanisms we use, and the ghosts we carry with us.
 
We also present films that navigate polarised and often, oppressive contexts, and the essential communal struggle (and sometimes failure) to self-determination in spite of this—like in this year’s Golden Bear Winner for Best Film, Yellow Letters, The Education of Jane Cumming, Exile, and the madcap wokeness comedy starring Hape Kerkeling, Extrawurst.

Our family-friend titles this year are The Secret Floor at GESS (German European School Singapore), When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit at Our Tampines Hub, and The Last Whale Singer at our annual and lovely outdoor screening with the Singapore Botanic Gardens.
 
All manner of cinema speaks of encounter, transporting us preciously—and sometimes precariously, through the loves, worlds, and eyes of others. We invite you to have an encounter with us.