BERLIN — The 2025 Berlin International Film Festival’s Generation Kplus section, a vibrant showcase of cinema crafted for—and often by—young audiences, has crowned its latest champions. In a lineup brimming with poetic storytelling and imaginative daring, two films emerged as standouts: The Botanist, the haunting debut feature from Chinese director Jing Yi, and Maya, Give Me a Title, a playfully profound stop-motion experiment from French auteur Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The awards, decided by separate juries of critics and children, reflect a compelling duality: one film steeped in the quiet majesty of nature, the other a kaleidoscopic ode to the anarchic creativity of childhood.
Jing Yi’s The Botanist (Zhi Wu Xue Jia), which claimed the Generation Kplus Grand Prix for Best Film, transports viewers to the remote valleys of China’s Xinjiang province, where a young boy named Arsin navigates the fragile equilibrium of his isolated existence. Living with his grandmother, Arsin spends his days cataloging plant specimens, a ritual that becomes both a refuge and a metaphor for clinging to tradition amid encroaching change. The film’s hypnotic pacing and ethereal visuals—vast, sun-drenched landscapes contrasted with intimate, shadowed interiors—evoke a world suspended between myth and reality. Critics praised Jing Yi’s ability to distill universal themes of loss and resilience through the lens of a child’s perspective, crafting a narrative that feels both achingly specific and expansively allegorical.
Meanwhile, the Crystal Bear for Best Film, selected by the festival’s children’s jury, went to Michel Gondry’s Maya, Give Me a Title, a project as delightfully meta as its name suggests. The film began as a six-year collaboration between Gondry and his daughter Maya, who, at age four, was tasked with inventing titles for surreal adventures in which she’d star. Gondry then transformed these whimsical prompts (think “The Banana Robot’s Sparkly Heist” or “Maya vs. the Invisible Dragons”) into a series of stop-motion vignettes, stitching them into a feature-length tapestry of DIY charm. The result is a riot of handmade textures, lo-fi effects, and child-logic storytelling—a testament to Gondry’s enduring knack for merging technical ingenuity with emotional authenticity. For the kids’ jury, the film was less a movie than a shared secret, inviting them into a world where imagination dictates the rules.
The international jury awarded a special mention to Japanese director Satoko Yokohama’s Seaside Serendipity (Umibe é Iku Michi), a tender exploration of friendship set against the rugged coastline of rural Japan. The film’s delicate balance of melancholy and hope, anchored by luminous performances from its young cast, resonated deeply with jurors. In the shorts category, Sylwia Szkiłądź’s Autokar, a Polish coming-of-age tale set on a school bus, took top honors, while Colombia’s Akababuru: Expression of Astonishment—a wordless, visually hypnotic short by Irati Dojura Landa Yagarí—earned praise for its meditation on wonder.
The children’s jury also celebrated Julia Lemke and Anna Koch’s Circusboy (Zirkuskind), a documentary-style dive into the nomadic life of a circus performer’s son, with a special mention for its “real magic.” Best Short went to Khozy Rizal’s Little Rebels Cinema Club, a buoyant tribute to youthful rebellion, while Vera van Wolferen’s Down in the Dumps charmed with its hand-drawn animation and sly humor.
This year’s Generation Kplus winners underscore a growing trend in children’s cinema: films that refuse to condescend, instead embracing complexity, ambiguity, and visual daring. Whether through Jing Yi’s meditative naturalism or Gondry’s collaborative chaos, these works recognize that young audiences crave not just escapism, but art that mirrors their inner worlds—vivid, unpredictable, and alive with possibility. As the lights come up in Berlin, one leaves reminded that the future of storytelling is in imaginative hands.
