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The Berlin Film Festival has named the first dozen titles for its 2025 Panorama lineup, Berlin’s main sidebar, and there are a few familiar faces in the mix.

Berlinale regular Ira Sachs will return with Peter Hujar’s Day, starring Ben Wishaw and Rebecca Hall, a feature based on a 1974 conversation between photographer Hujar and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz, offering insight into the New York art scene. Canadian filmmaker and fellow Berlinale alum Denis Côté is back in Panorama with Paul, a documentary on a cleaner who uses his job cleaning homes and sharing his routines on social media to help combat depression and social anxiety.

Other Panorama titles announced Tuesday include Emilie Blichfeldt’s Danish horror feature Den stygge stesøsteren (The Ugly Stepsister), a dark twisted fairy tale, which will premiere in Sundance; Frelle Petersen’s Hjem kaere hjem, a social realist drama on the life of an elder...

Michel Gondry and Ira Sachs are among the headline filmmakers set to debut new feature works within the sidebar competitions at next year’s Berlin Film Festival.

The German festival announced the pair this afternoon as part of its first crop of confirmed titles.

Gondry will screen Maya, Give Me a Title in Berlin’s Generation sidebar. The festival’s website describes the film as Gondry’s “stop-motion love letter to his daughter Maya brings to life a poetic and amusing journey that invites you to dream and laugh.”

Also set for the Generation competition is Our Wildest Days (I Agries Meres Mas) by Greek filmmaker Vasilis Kekatos who is best known for his 2019 short film The Distance Between Us and the Sky, which won the Short Film Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. He also created the popular Greek series Milky Way.

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Fathom Events presents Betty White: A Celebration in 1,529 locations nationwide, a one-day-only special event on Monday honoring the actress who died Dec. 31 just a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday. The star-studded reflection on White’s life and career, which had already been set by filmmakers Steven Boettcher and Mike Trinklein to celebrate her centennial Jan. 17, will run three showtimes at 1 pm, 4 pm and 7 pm.

As for weekend openings, a pair of solid documentaries and two dramas — about memory loss and global apocalypse by pink gas — debut in a frame where there isn’t much new. Distributors are carefully weighing expansion for award hopefuls already out amid the ongoing surge in Omicron and ahead of Oscar nods Feb. 8.

Newcomers include Magnolia Pictures’ drama Italian Studies in seven theaters including New York and LA, and on demand. Directed by Adam Leon it stars Vanessa Kirby, Simon Brickner,...