What actually makes a family? Perhaps one that you enjoy growing up in? In "Broker - Family wanted", a young mother and two friendly but undoubtedly illegal baby brokers try to reconcile their ideas of a good family. After all, it's all about finding a happy future for the newborn Woo-sung. The fact that there are also a few tears of laughter mixed in with the emotion is mainly thanks to South Korean star Song Kang-ho, who was honoured as best actor in Cannes in 2022.

Hirokazu Kore-eda
Born in Tokyo in 1962, director and author Hirokazu Kore-eda likes to expand the concept of the patchwork family in his films. In "Shoplifters", he turns the shelter of a handful of street thieves into a warm nest for a little girl and wins the Palme d'Or in Cannes. In 2013, he explored the topic of adoption in "Like Father, Like Son" and in 2015, the mixed feelings of half-siblings in "Our Little Sister". He made a detour to Europe in 2019, where he filmed "La Vérité - Live and Let Lie" with Catherine Deneuve.

"Red Sky" could easily have been a horror film. At least in the first few minutes, when two young men's car breaks down in the forest and one of them says, "I know a shortcut", the genre is in the air. It's a game that Christian Petzold plays with the audience: using the script to wriggle past genres and still tell an exciting story. But perhaps that's precisely why, because the 102-minute course includes a romance, disaster film, summer comedy and psychological thriller.

Christian Petzold
Writer and director Christian Petzold wins the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Berlinale for "Red Sky". The Hilden native, born in 1960, had already won the Silver Bear 11 years earlier for directing "Barbara", a GDR escape drama starring Nina Hoss. Since 2002, Hoss has usually played the female lead in his films, for example in "Jerichow" (2008) and "Phoenix" (2014), but since 2018 it has been Paula Beer. In "Transit", Petzold has her waiting for an exit visa; in 2020, he turns her into a mermaid in a reservoir in "Undine".

Yes, it's all true: the sexism, the racism, the megalomania of some, the genius of others. The beautiful, the rich, the criminals, the creative and the desperate - they all turned a few acres of Californian farmland into Hollywood more than 100 years ago. This is not the first time that director Damien Chazelle has created a cinematic monument to this magical place. The romantic musical "La La Land" was nominated for 14 Oscars in 2017 and won six. With "Babylon", he has now staged the immorally funny flipside of Tinseltown and recreated particularly nefarious events from Kenneth Anger's scandal bible "Hollywood Babylon".