Film Festival 2026
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COUNTRY FOCUS: GERMANY
German cinema has a special relationship with Palm Springs, where the Festival regularly screens a wide range of Academy Award® Best International Feature Film submissions. Past German submissions shown here—including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Teachers’ Lounge, and The Seed of the Sacred Fig—went on to receive Oscar® nominations. This year’s Country Focus is further shaped by the presence of German filmmakers and talent, including actress Lena Urzendowsky and director Jan-Ole Gerster, and by a tribute to the late Udo Kier, a longtime Palm Springs resident and supporter of the Festival, who appears in Bad Painter. Together with German Films and the German Film Office, the Palm Springs Film Festival is honored to present and celebrate German cinema in this year’s Country Focus.
BAD PAINTER
German artist Albert Oehlen directs this iconoclastic portrait of himself—in life and at work—with Udo Kier as his alter ego, and musician Kim Gordon as interviewer and judge. Read More
Running Time: 81
A LAND WITHIN
Part family drama, part historical portrait of ethnic tensions circa 1961 in South Tyrol, a northern Italian region with a German-speaking minority is shaken by a series of separatist bomb attacks. Read More
Running Time: 113
THE LAST SPY
Former spymaster Peter Sichel provides an insider’s perspective on the CIA that illustrates the roots of conflicts plaguing today’s world and the toll espionage took on his personal life. Read More
Running Time: 106
MIROIRS NO. 3
In this haunting Hitchcockian psychodrama from German auteur Christian Petzold, a young piano student survives a car crash and is drawn into the uneasy kindness of a woman who rescues her from the accident. Read More
Running Time: 86
SILENT FRIEND
Hungarian visionary Ildikó Enyedi’s latest follows three loosely connected stories in different eras—1908, 1972, and 2020—all anchored by a majestic and mysterious ginkgo tree. Read More
Running Time: 147
SOUND OF FALLING
Four girls inhabit the same farmhouse across generations in this poetic, dreamlike exploration of their intertwined lives, offering a haunting meditation on time, connection, and the memories we leave behind. Read More
Running Time: 149
WHAT MARIELLE KNOWS
A young girl’s inexplicable newfound telepathy dumbfounds her middle-class parents in this darkly comic and often blistering portrait of the nuclear family. Read More
Running Time: 86